Faith and fear collide

The 21 Day iPod Shuffle Challenge
If you come to the TinyChat meetings on The Endtime Tribune, you know that my dad talks a lot about the 21-day "prayer fast," where you pray about one thing and one thing only for 21 days. Well, I'm taking that challenge myself. But to add to that, I have a hard time having faith that God will even answer my prayers--ya know, cuz God does whatever He wants to. So I have to work on my faith the same time I'm praying for 21 days, so that I have the determination to keep that covenant. The way I'm going to do it is the 21-day iPod Shuffle Challenge--something I came up with myself.

A lot of the time, I'm praying for an answer and I ask God to give me that answer through a song. I just grab my mp3 player and put it on shuffle, and whatever song that comes up--be it a love song or a praise song--is supposed to answer my question somehow. Does it work? Well, sometimes. A few times I think God's sense of humor has kicked in and He gives me a song that has nothing to do with what I'm asking about. Well, for the next 21 days, once a day I'll put my mp3 player on Shuffle and think of a Christian lesson that goes with that song!

Today's Challenge: Collide by Skillet

So far, this challenge is definitely working--because God really IS telling me something with every song! My interpretation of this song is that it's about Christians, and how the world tries to "tearing down our lives."

Let's face it. Christians just flat out aren't welcome here. They laugh and point the finger and us because we're "too good" to go to parties and waste our lives away. And here's another cold, hard fact: sometimes we want to join them. It's not easy being a Christian, and we really don't get to do whatever we want. It's hard. The devil will always try to find some way to break our faith. As humans, we have a fear that things won't turn out all right, even if we're doing what God's telling us to. And there's those moments when we just don't know what God wants us to do. We stumble and we fall sometimes. Jesus never said it would be easy.

As Christians, though, we have faith inside us as well. I've mentioned on the past couple of shows that Christians have an assurance in their hearts that God is there for them, and that everything will turn out OK in the end. Even in the darkest of nights, that faith shines bright, like a candle burning in a window. It encourages us to keep going, to hold on, to take just one more step, to fight our way back to the top of that cliff.

Faith and fear collide in our hearts. Like it says in Ephesians, the battles we fight are not of flesh, blood, and bone--it's of the spirit. The spirit is willing--the spirit has that faith--but the flesh, the part where fear comes from, is weak. Think of the spirit and the flesh as oil and water. They just plain don't mix.

We have to hold onto God's hand and commit our lives totally to him. Don't feel bad if you stumble and let go of his hand for a moment--remember that he's always standing there waiting for you to accept his hand again so he can pull you back on your feet. Just hold on.