How to Trust God When Bad Things Happen

I hope 2020 has been good to you. If I'm honest, January 2020 has been difficult. As I've navigated this challenging month with God, I was lead to create a video on how to trust God when bad things happen. I didn't want this to be my first video of the year, but with the recent tragic losses that we've seen in the news along with personal losses, it was important to encourage those who may be grieving.

 I hope this video is an encouragement to you as you hold on to hope in difficult times. 💜

READ TODAY'S VIDEO

I have been gone for a few weeks now. I took a little break in December, but I am back and I have to be honest with you, I had every intention of coming back with more videos in January 2020 I was going to come in 2020 hot and January 2020 was like, nah. It ain't happening.

January 2020 was a pretty challenging month for us, actually. We this month alone have been to two funerals already. And then just with all the losses that we've been hearing in the news, as you think about Kobe Bryant and his daughter and all the people in the helicopter with him in that fatal crash. And Lois Evans, who's Dr. Tony Evans's wife, passed away late in December. I've had a lot of time to just really be in prayer about loss and death and mourning and navigating these seasons and things like that. And so I kind of wanted to share some of what God was teaching me in this season in hopes that, that it could help you to trust him more. Even when we're in seasons where it seems completely difficult to trust him because it just doesn't make sense. It just does not make sense at all.

And death is, it just doesn't make sense and it shouldn't because that was never God's original intent. And it is just a symptom of the fallen world that we live in and our souls that lasts for eternity. Know that death. This is, this is wrong. This isn't how things are supposed to be, but yet here we are living, surviving in this fallen world and sometimes it feels like in these times like, God, where are you? What is going on? I'm having a really hard time grasping your promises, trusting you. We just can't get the pieces together to make sense of any of it, but God is with us through the Valley. We'll talk about that a little bit today and I just had four ways that I want to share with you that we can trust God and our grieving seasons. We can trust him when we're mourning.

We can trust him when bad things happen. The first thing that we can trust God with in these seasons are trusting God with your feelings. And Psalm 23 David says, though, I walk through the Valley of the shadow of death, and I think it's interesting to know that he didn't run through the Valley. He didn't sprint through the Valley. He walked through it and it really points to the importance of not rushing through these seasons, not rushing through our feelings. If we have a feeling of sadness, to actually feel it, to actually sit in it, you know, because it's real because this really happening to us. We really feel this way. This is our, the truth of what we're feeling right now. And to be in alignment with that as opposed to trying to just ignore how we feel because we feel like this is a negative emotion.

I don't want to feel this emotion. I just want to rush past it. It doesn't help us. And so just trusting God even as we're feeling those waves of what we would consider negative emotions sadness, despair, hopelessness. But just being real in those moments and saying, this is how I feel. This is how I feel right now. My great aunt passed earlier, just a few weeks ago and it hit me harder than I expected it to and I just really had to sit before God and just be like, God, right now in this moment. I'm sad. I don't have anything else to pray to you about. I don't have anything else to say about it, but just in this moment I feel really sad and just trusting God with those negative feelings. My husband and I, we used to live in Maryland and I worked in DC and I would commute from Maryland to DC and I would ride these commuter buses that would just drive us into the city.

And one day I was on my way home and I was sitting next to a lady and I, she just busts out crying just randomly. She just started crying and I was like, what is going on? I don't know what is going on. I didn't know what happened because nothing happened that I knew about. And so I just asked her, I said, are you, are you okay? And she said, yes. Yes. She was trying to get herself together and she was like, my father passed away last year. And I, I don't know, I just had a random thought about him and it just made me really sad. I just start crying and she was like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. And I was like, no, you don't have to be sorry. You don't have to be sorry. You know? I understand. And I was sharing with her that the previous year my mother-in-law had passed away too, and we understood how those waves of grief can just kind of come out of nowhere, you know?

But when they come, it's okay to feel them, to cry, to be in it, to not try to it, to not try to run from it, to not try to run to other unhealthy co coping mechanisms to cover it up. No. Feel it, be there, sit there because it's real and it's true. And to not associate any kind of judgment with those feelings. You know, like not, Oh, I'm so sorry. I should have been over this by now. Or, Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't believe I'm crying. Oh, I'm so sorry. I can't believe I'm feeling this way. No, you're feeling this way. This is true. This is where you're at and that is, Oh K. We have to trust God with our feelings that it's okay to go into those places and to feel those feelings and to trust that he'll get us out of it to trust that we won't feel that way forever.

We won't feel that way with that level of intensity. Forever will be marked by these experiences. Don't get me wrong, I believe that our souls can heal, but I do believe that we will have scars, but they will be evidence that we survived. Also, as we think about trusting God with our feelings when someone else's morning, it's important to trust God with their feelings as well. Sometimes in our own insecurity when we see someone that said, our first instinct is to try to hurry up and make them happy. Hurry up and get them to snap out of it and they might not be there yet. And to some, the best thing that you can do sometimes is to just sit with someone in their grief job who you know, we know about in the Bible, who suffered the loss of his children, who suffered the loss of his wealth, who was afflicted with physical illness.

And his friends came to see him. And this is what it says in Job chapter 2 verse 13. It says, “and they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights and no one spoke a word to him for they saw that his suffering was very great.” (ESV) When we experienced grief for we are sharing life with someone that is experiencing grief sometimes. And many times we've heard people say this, I, I don't know, I don't have anything to say. There are no words for this. And that's okay too. It is okay to just sit with someone as they cry and just hold them, let them feel their feelings. Don't rush them. Don't pressure them like, hurry up and snap out of it. Nobody needs that as they face the freshness of grief and mourning. And even if it isn't necessarily fresh, you know, maybe it's been a long time, but if they're in that moment in their sad, let them, you know, I'm not, and we'll talk about, you know, getting back up and move forward.

But I'm talking about a season of grief. You're in this season right now and it's real. As we navigate seasons of grief and mourning, and when bad things happen, the next thing that we need to trust God with is trusting him enough to be real with him. So we talked about dealing with sadness and mourning and things like that. But a lot of times in situations and seasons like this, I'm sure many of you can attest to, there comes anger, there comes fear. There comes resentment towards God, towards God and being real with him and being like, God, I'm mad at you. And listen, God is not like your mama. He's not like your boss. He's not like your kid. He is not offended or surprised by your quote unquote negative emotions of him. I put negative emotions in quotation marks because emotions in and of themselves aren't bad.

They're just indicators of what is going on in our lives and they just let us know, okay, maybe I need to change something or do something or respond to something in a certain type of way. But what we consider as a negative emotion, anger like, Oh, I can't be mad at God. How can I be mad at God? But if you are, you're not going to be able to process that and move forward in it and see what that anger is indicating in your life. Unless you admit that you are in fact mad, even at God, trust me, he can handle it. But nowhere in the Bible does it say that it is a sin to be angry. It says, be angry, but do not sin in your anchor. So there is an understanding that we will experience anger, we will experience frustration, we will experience disappointment even towards God.

But the poor purpose is not to stay there to say, okay, how can I move forward? How can I move past these feelings? And the first part in doing that is to be honest with God that you feel that way in the first part. And so I've definitely been there even this month to be like, God, I'm kinda mad at you cause you got us living up in this fallen world. Everybody gone die. The whole, you know, I was just really in my feelings and I just had to just pour it out to God and just be real with him. And he's so patient, he's so gracious. And even in me telling God how frustrated I was with him, he just so graciously and kindly showed me how more soulful he was even in my morning. You know, and I shared with you that my great aunt [inaudible] passed away and I had moved from sadness to kind of frustration with God.

And God reminded me that last month my dad came up for a trip just to see us in the kids and he said, you know, when he got here, he was like, you know what? I need to go see aunt [inaudible] really quick. Her furnace wasn't working or something. I need to go check on it, you know, and she wasn't sick or anything and so we just went to go see her and we had a great time and we talked and we laughed and God reminded me after she passed a few weeks later that he gave me that moment. He gave me that time with her. At the time we had no idea what was ahead and so even in the grief when I was able to go to God and be real with him about my feelings, he was able to really just kind of open up my heart and see that yes, bad things do happen, but good things happen too.

There is good, there is light even in the midst of darkness and that is God's presence with us. That is his grace and his mercy and the mercy and grace that he's given us with this little bit of time that we have here on earth. Okay. The next thing that we can trust God with as we are mourning and grieving as we're in this season is to trust God to keep moving forward. Now this is hard. This is a hard one because my natural instinct when bad thing like S like tragic, bad things happen is like, Oh my gosh, we just got to give everything up. This is the end. This is the worst thing that could possibly happen. And it very well might be. But, but we just can't move on, you know, and God has to remind me like we're going to talk about Joshua and a little bit that seasons of mourning and grief, they feel so deep.

They, they, the death, the sting of death is so sharp and so harsh and so real that it feels like for like it will never lift. But we have to realize that like any season, it's a season I shared with you that Lois Evans, dr Tony Evans wife passed away a few weeks ago and she was big on encouraging women to understand the season that you are in and that those seasons change and that it's important to understand that and to be able to pivot when that happens. And just like any other season, a season of mourning, a season of grief, a season of dealing with the bad things that happen in this world. It's just a season. It will pass. Now, I'm not saying that you won't be marked by what has happened, but it doesn't mean that we can't get up from this grief. It doesn't mean that we have to be paralyzed in grief forever.

Ecclesiastes three through one tells us for everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven. Specifically verse four, it tells us there is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance. King David knew all about heartache and loss and pain. We can read all about it in the songs, but in Psalm 35 he said this weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning when my mother-in-law unexpectedly passed away six months after my husband and I got married. And it was, it was a devastating loss for us. And I just remember navigating that season and particularly seeing my husband walk through that Valley of mourning, the loss of his mom, that, that, I mean, you could never be prepared for in any kind of way. But I remember one day, I don't know what we were listening to or what we were watching, something happened that was funny and he laughed and we were both laughing.

But I remember just noting in my head like, that's the first time he laughed since his mom passed. And just thinking like, wow, I felt like we would never laugh again. You know? And just that moment just lit a little spark of a light of hope in my soul during that dark time that it's going to be okay, we're going to get past this. We're going to be able to move on now. Sometimes it feels like betrayal to our lost loved one to move on. Like we feel like we need to, to, to be in mourning forever. You know? And that's, that's not how God wants us to move forward. Even in the face of loss. And that's probably not how our loved one wants us to move forward or to stay paralyzed because we're still here and if we're still here, God is not finished with us.

All of our days are numbered. Every last one of us, all of our days are numbered and we should make each one count and that means that we mourn, but there's also a season where we get back up. There's also a season where we laugh again. There's also a season where we dance again. There's also a season where we move forward and that's okay. I want to give you permission to let you know that that is okay, that is healthy. When Moses passed, Joshua was so, he was upset about it and he was mourning and God came to Joshua and Joshua two and said, Moses, my servant is dead. Now, therefore, arise. Go over this Jordan, you and all this people into the land that I'm giving them to the people of Israel. Now, God had to tell Joshua to arise because he was downcast. He was down in a season of mourning.

Now. I don't believe that God was like snapped by, but we got work to do. No, no, no, no, no, no. God does not take any of our pain or tears or heartache in vain. He does not. He cares about every single hurt that we feel, but God was not finished with Joshua. Joshua was called to lead the Israelites into the promised land and to move forward with this people because this was the people that his son, Jesus Christ would come through who would inevitably overcome the very thing that Joshua was grieving. Death and Jesus does the same for us. We can get up, we can move forward because Jesus has overcome death and given us the power to do so when we place our faith in him. Now, here's the thing. We talked about being in your season of mourning and being there, but we've also talked about moving forward and so I know the question arises, well, when, when do I do that?

When is it necessary? I can't answer that question for you, but sometimes, and I want to make this clear that you might need help doing it. Sometimes the deep grief and despair and the depression and anxiety that comes along with that morning can be so heavy, you might not be able to lift it on your own. And so maybe you need to go to therapy. Maybe you need a counselor. Maybe you need to talk to a trusted friend or your PA or your pastor. If you trust him, hopefully, you do. You need to do that to help you move forward because some things are so heavy you can't lift them on your own. When we had the first-ever beloved women's conference, we had Dr. Lorraine graves' come and speak to us and we were talking about mental health and one of the questions that we asked her was, how do you know when you need help?

How do you know when you need to seek outside help? And she talked about Jesus and how before he went to the cross, he knew he was about to die and he was in great despair. So much so that the Bible tells us that he, he cried blood and how he was. He was praying and he was very stressed in the garden of Gethsemane but eventually, he got himself together and he left the garden and he went on to carry his purpose to provide a life for all of us who believe in him. And her point was that he got out of the garden. If you're in the garden and you can't get out, that's when you need to get help. That is when you need to ask someone to help you get out. And that is completely okay. I feel like it's becoming more acceptable in Christian circles, but specifically as Christians, I feel like there is the thought that, Oh, I got to pray my, I could pray my way out and I'm not praying hard enough.

I'm not trusting hard enough. And it's like, no, you are, but sometimes you need help. And the Bible talks about us being unified and needing each other and being a body. And I believe that God called certain people to be therapists and counselors and doctors to help us. And I think that we should utilize those resources when we can't get out of the garden, when we need a little bit of help, when it's too heavy to lift by ourselves and we need someone to help us lift it. The last thing that I want to hopefully encourage you to trust God and if you're in a season of mourning and loss, and that is to trust God to keep his promises. Death reminds us that God has not promised us a perfect life, that there's no such thing as a perfect life. I think a lot of people feel like, Oh well once I get saved, Jesus go take all my life.

Everything's to be cool. And that is not what God said. And if someone is preaching you a gospel that tells you that when you put your faith in Jesus, everything is going to be perfect in your life. They are a liar and that is not the true gospel and you need to go find you a Bible believing church that is preaching the truth because this is what Jesus said in John 1633 in this world, you will have trouble. Now, you might not, maybe not some people, not this group of people. No, no, no, no. He's talking about everybody. You will have trouble, but take heart. I have overcome the world. This is what Jesus says. Our hope is not in this world. Our hope is in Jesus Christ who promises us in John. I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me though he died, yet he shall live.

First Corinthians 1555 to 57 says, death is swallowed up in victory. Oh, death. Where is your victory? Oh, death. Where is your sting? The sting of death is sin and the power of sin is the law, but thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Revelation 21 four it gives us this promise. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes and death shall be no more. Neither shall there be mourning nor crying, nor pain anymore for the former. Things have passed away. So Tripoli is one of my favorite hip hop artists and he wrote a song on his album, the waiting room called ready and it talks about death and he talks about the loss of his father and the song just really resonated with me and he wrote these lyrics that I want to share with you. Now I'm not a rapper but you just get the message.

“But Hey death, please know we don't have much degree foe when all your wins are repoed and the Reaper reaps. When he sowed, I ain't gone run from you. What? I got a flea foe. Did it hurt when you did it hurt your self-esteem when you hurt your sting was no mo.”

Death always feels like it has the final say. It's just it just feels so, so just permanent, you know? But God has the final say and Jesus has overcome death and that is his promise to those that place their faith in him. If you want to take hold of that promise, you will need a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and I want to invite you to enter that relationship by praying this simple prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, I am so sorry for the things I have done wrong in my life. I asked her forgiveness and now turn from everything which I know is wrong.

Thank you for dying on the cross for me to set me free from my sins. Please come into my life and fill me with your Holy spirit and be with me forever. Thank you Lord Jesus. Amen. If you prayed this prayer, please send us an email at beloved women and be sure to connect with a good Bible believing teaching church so that you can learn and continue to grow in your new relationship with Jesus Christ. I hope that this video was somehow helpful to you. I hope that you heard something or were inspired in some sort of way in this season because I don't know what you're facing. If you clicked on a video like this, there's, there's no telling what you might be facing, how deep in despair that you might be, but it's my prayer that you would trust God even in this situation and that he will show himself loving, caring, comforting, gracious to you even now, let me pray for you.

Dear heavenly Father. Thank you so much for every person, every soul that is watching this video. I don't know what they're going through, but you know what they're going through because you are right there walking with them in the Valley. David says, “yea, though I walk through the Valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” Your presence makes the difference. God, whatever we're going through, be with us. God, let your presence be known. God, help us to see you even in the darkest of seasons. We love you God, and we thank you for everything that you do for us. In Jesus’ Name we pray. Amen.