As many of you know, and as I shared in my previous post, Christina and I are excitedly taking our next step in ministry. However, this next step requires me to raise my full time salary for a year. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried. Then I am reminded of passages like this.

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. -Philippians 4:4-6

This passage tells us to pray about everything, and to be anxious about nothing.

Well if I’m being honest, that isn’t really happening.

Right now for me it looks more like this right now “pray, and be anxious, about everything.”

Being faithful is hard. We all like to talk about it, but putting ourselves in positions to have to do it is another thing. But it is so necessary. It is necessary for us now, and for our future. Why?

Because when we have seen how God has been faithful in the past, it helps us rely on him in the present.

If we wait until a big crisis before we turn to Jesus, we will have nothing to look back on to help us in those times. Now don’t get me wrong, God is faithful to us even when we are not faithful to him, but once we have experienced his faithfulness for ourselves, it makes living out Philippians 4 more possible.

So if I were to continue to be honest, I would have to say my anxiousness about raising enough financial support shows how fickle the human heart is (particularly mine). I have seen God’s faithfulness mightily in my life, especially in the time after my father died.

But here I am again. Facing something that seems improbable and praying about it constantly, yet being anxious about it (especially lately) just as much.

In the words of the father who approached Jesus begging him to heal his son in Mark 9, “I believe; help my unbelief!”