YIKES! I did my final exam on friday :O I was really nervous, but I hope it went ok. This time of year is horrible so many tests and exams and lots of school work.
So I just wanted to encourage you to give those things to God :) Nothing is too big or too small for him. He cares about everything in your life, nothing is too small. So I just want to encourage you to put away your books, turn of the TV and shut your laptop for ten minutes. Get your bible out and just spend ten minutes (or more) with God. It doesn't take long time and it is the best anti-stress cure there is. Pray that he will help you be calm and remember what you studied. So here is a little "exam-biblvers-list" I put together for my exams and sent it to my classmates :) Maybe you can send it to yours too and we can start a chain of encouragement and anti-stess. ha ha ha :D
Sunshine's exam bible verse list :
Philippians 4:5
1 peter 5:7
John 16:33
Nahum 1:7
Isaiah 41:10
Matthew 18:14
1 Thessalonians 5:16
and my favourite : Psalm 23
Of course Jesus is our very best friend and nobody can replace him. I also think it's really important to have good christian friends. It's hard to be the only christian around with nobody that shares your beliefs. It's good to have someone you can talk to about christian topics and that doesn't pressure you to do stuff that you know is wrong.
And don't be sad if you don't have a friend like that, just pray! Prayer always helps! Start going to a youth group in your church if you don't already go to one. But even in church it can be hard. But just hang in there, God relly loves you and wants you to have amazig friends that support you.
So I want to tell some of my own story. About 5 years ago I started praying for good friends. I was having a really tough time at school. I felt really rejected and tried all sorts of things to fit in, because I wasn't being myself I continued to have tough time. (I talk more about being yourself in my Dare to be different post)
I kept on praying for years and when I was 13 years old I started going to youth meetings and got some new friends. But I sort of fell between two clicks, and I remember a specific incident where my friends planed to set me up and ditch me in a park while they ran of to a friend's house. This episode is of course forgiven and we joke about it now :). But this incident and many other things really broke down my already low confidence. I thought I was a really weird and that nobody really wanted my friend. I thought people just was my friend because they felt they had to or out of sympathy. I was a hurt person and I felt so rejected. I felt like a freak! I seriously thought there was something wrong with me. It has taken years to build up confidence in my personality again.
And if you have any of those thoughts; that you are a freak, and that nobody wants to be your friend, or that something is wrong with you, I just want to say IT IS NOT TRUE. Do not let the negative seeds that other people and The Enemy plant into your heart grow! Ask God to uproot those weeds and sow positive flowers instead. YOU ARE WANTED AND NOT A FREAK. Don't question who you are! It is important to forgive the people that hurt you (you can read my how to deal with mean people post, haha lots of linking in this post but I didn't want to make it a billion words long :) ), but don't believe the words they say. Sometime they don't even need to say bad words, just body language or whispers or the way they look at you can make you feel stupid. Have you ever experienced that?
Anyway back to the story, things got better between me and the girls in my class/church, but I never felt I was a part of their group. I continued praying for years, but started to get frustrated nothing happened. But this school year things seemed to get better and for 6 months thing were fine, but suddenly we had almost like a conflict in my church youth group. Out of respect to them I will not post any details, I know also I made mistakes. I think we have sorted things out and I have forgiven them and hope they have forgiven me to. Anyways, so I ended up changing churches and suddenly I realized that after only weeks I had gotten some great friends! Friends I really can trust! :D GOD ANSWERED MY PRAYERS!
And he will defiantly answer yours too! So keep praying for new friends, and don't doubt yourself! YOU ARE AN AWSOME PERSON!
"be with people that celebrate you" - Darlene Cunningham
I want to kind of continue the last post's topic a bit. I mentioned yesterday that we need to trust God with our hearts as well as our heads. I think it's like that with many things. For example how great God is, that he loves us, that he is in control, that he is faithful and so on. In every church service, at every youth meeting, in every christinan book it always says God loves us. Our heads knows he loves us, but we need to realize it with our heart. I know I already have posted this quote on this blog (in this post), but I feel like it is more relevant here. So this is a quote by worship artist Kim Walker, towards the end of her live version of the song "How he loves", she says:
"There are some of you here that have not encountered the love of God, and tonight God wants to encounter you and wants you to feel his love, his amazing love... The love of God changes us and we're never the same, we're never the same after we encounter the love of God. We're never the same after we encounter the love of God."
I think that there are some truths that need to sink into our heart. I can tell you a million times that God loves you, that you are beautiful, that you are wanted, that you are special, that God has control, that you are talented, that God is faithful and that he never fails. But it won't help, if you don't believe it with your heart. I can tell those things to myself a million times, and I know they are true, but sometimes I struggle trusting them.
Jeremiah 31:3: "I have loved you with an everlasting love"
I think that it's not about what we hear, it's about who we hear them from. I think that God is the only one that can help you understand. It's is much more powerful when he says "I love you" than when I say "he loves you". Do you know what I'm saying. God has many ways to say "I love you", sometimes you feel the holy spirit, sometimes you just know in your heart he loves you, sometimes he speaks through others, sometimes he gives us experiences of his love and sometimes you hear it, dream it or see it. God speaks to us in many ways, just make sure you are listening in many ways :) And remember that the bible is The Word Of God. All the words in the bible is God talking to you.
Sometimes it's a revelation sometimes it is a slow process. If you want these truths in your heart pray to God and ask him to show you his love or faithfulness or whatever you feel you haven't understood with your heart. Read in the bible, and remember that it is God's words. A very practical tip is keeping a diary where you write down all the times you experience God's presents, miracles, faithfulness, love and so on.
Sometimes we can get really frustrated with God, we have know idea what he is doing and we start questioning him. "Why doesn't he answer my prayers RIGHT NOW?" "Why does bad things happen to me?" "WHAT ARE YOU DOING GOD? ", "Why aren't you healing me? Do you want me to be sick?" "Why is this happening, why is that happening? URGH!"
There is no reason to be mad at God, because we are just humans, we don't have the same understanding as him. We never will! Imagine a HUGE cruise ship. Really really big! The biggest in the world! Imagine that the cruise ship is the universe. Our understanding would only be as big as a drop of water on the deck. Gods understanding would be bigger than the oceans the ship sailed on.
God can see past, present and future. He truly KNOW and WANTS what is BEST for YOU! There is no reason to be stressed out or mad or scared. Because god has control. He knows what he is doing, he understands everything! The only thing we need to understand about the situation is that God is in control. We don't need to try to understand, we need to trust him!
TRUST that God knows what he is doing and will help you through the hard times. Trust that God does want to help you out and does help you out! Maybe in a different way that you had expected. Maybe he is doing something beyond our understanding.
Nahum 1:7: The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him.
If you feel like this is something you struggle with, you are not alone! Even Jesus disciples struggled with this. Let's take a look at a story from the bible. I have posted this story before, so if you want to read more about it, click here. This is from Luke 8:22-25:
One day he and his disciples got in a boat. "Let's cross the lake," he said. And off they went. It was smooth sailing, and he fell asleep. A terrific storm came up suddenly on the lake. Water poured in, and they were about to capsize. They woke Jesus: "Master, Master, we're going to drown!"
Getting to his feet, he told the wind, "Silence!" and the waves, "Quiet down!" They did it. The lake became smooth as glass.
Then he said to his disciples, "Why can't you trust me?" (the Message)
So here we can see that disciples did not understand what was going on. They we're really scared and thought Jesus didn't know what was going on. In the book of Mark, Mark also writes about this particular situation, and in Mark 4:28 it says the disciples actually question Jesus and asked him "Teacher, don't you care that we are going to drown?". And as you can read above they had no reason to question him at all, because he had control all along.
I find this story really comforting, because I have really struggled lately with trusting God and trusting he is in control. These last weeks I have really learned to trust God. Everything will turn out all right. I don't need to be angry at him for not healing me, I think I even blamed him for not stopping me get ill. I questioned him! I'm being treated now, and I will get better. Even though I didn't understand what God was doing, it didn't mean he was doing nothing! I have no idea what would of happened if I hadn't prayed for help. We will never know how many disasters God has saved us from, if you think about it that way. I know that God is in control over my situation and illness. It turned out that is wasn't something serious, even is emotionally though being ill, I trust God to get me through it. I trust that God hears all the prayers. I have always known that God has control, but this week I realized that even though it was clear in my head, my heart still didn't know God was in control. I will be healed, i trust that. It is important to apologize when we are mad at God or question him.
If you are in a though situation like that, please don't give up on God. He is helping you, he truly wants what is best for you. Trust him! I have know that it is easier said than done. So if you feel it's hard to trust God is in control or hard to trust he will get you through it, pray that he will help your heart realize that you can trust him and he is in control! There is nothing you can't pray about. I pray all the time that i will trust even more in the Lord. And say thanks that we can trust him. If you genially want to trust the Lord, he sees that. He is never mad at us for not trusting him. So pray, pray, pray! And I will gladly pray for you too if you want, just post below or send an e-mail :)
Here is on of my favourite songs to listen to when I feel down. Lately I have also listen alot to the Norwegian song "Du er den" by Impuls, but the song is so new I couldn't find it.
