Moving Forward When You’re Skeptical of Others, Afraid of What God Will Allow, and Doubtful of Your Own Discernment
by Lysa TerKeurst Adams, 2024
Lysa is the president of Proverbs 31 Ministries. She was hurt deeply by her first husband, and by other ministry organizations. This book is about how she got through the pain and learned to trust again. She is now married to a wonderful, trustworthy, godly man named Chaz. Her writing is personal. She is a gift to the world. She is beautiful, inside and out, and so courageous. She is willing to lay bare all the deep, dark places inside of her, and show them to all who want to know. Her purposes are to show that people are not alone in their pain, and that Jesus is there with them, through it all, and they can emerge victorious; stronger and wiser and seeing the beauty of the world, with more joy and peace.
I love one of the stories she tells. It’s about a fallen oak tree she came across on a gentle hike, with a sign posted in front of it: “The Resilient Oak Tree: The storm that felled this tree didn’t stop it from protecting both the forest and island community with its thriving canopy.” The tree had fallen but it didn’t die; it grew new roots and is still living, providing shelter and beauty. She said it was the most beautiful tree in that forest; broken but re-created into a beautiful, living tree, providing shelter and life.
This book would be very, very helpful for those whose trust has been broken by others. For me, the most helpful chapters were Chapters 6, 7, and 8: How Can I Trust God When I don’t Understand What He Allows?, How Can I Trust God When the Person Who Hurt Me Got Away with It?, What We Don’t Trust We Will Try to Control.
The first 5 chapters are all about the hurt and betrayal when someone you love turns out to be untrustworthy. Quietly Quitting on Hope, What Is This Feeling . . . Discernment or a Trigger?, Red Flags and the Roots of Distrust, Rips and Repairs, And I Didn’t Want to Be Alone.
Chapter 6: How Can I Trust God When I Don’t Understand What He Allows? Lots of helpful words about how we want God to do what we think is right and to fix things now and to not allow bad to happen and when things happen and people do things to us that are hurtful and wrong, we wonder about God – is He good, what are His plans, can I really trust Him?
“Sometimes I can have more faith in my fears coming true than in God coming through for me.” In those times, bring those fears and doubts to God. Don’t let them turn into your way of living – ruled and consumed by fears and doubts. She recommends filling in the blanks, writing down what exactly your fears are in trusting God: because He has allowed such and such to happen in your past; if He doesn’t come through in this way, you will suffer such and such; if such and such happens, you may never such-and-such. “What if expressing my true feeling to God is a beautiful act of trusting God?”
She advises a new way of reading Scripture – to see in part how God sees things. Some Scriptures: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my loving eye on you.” “The LORD does not look at the things people look at…” “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” “May the God of hope fill you with all Joy and peace as you trust in Him…” “For My thoughts are not your thoughts…” “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind…”
Realize that suffering is more than the pain and look to God in the midst of the suffering. “…suffering produces perseverance.” “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.”
Remember all the small stuff in your life that is evidence of God’s goodness. Can you really do this life without God? Can you control everything and make everything come out right? Can you fix everything and everyone? Can you find safety and peace and joy in this life? “Do I really have the ability to find stability and safety and peace and joy by going my own way?”
And she delves into 1 Peter 5:7, Cast all of your cares on Him, for He cares for you. The instruction before that is: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s might hand, that He may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” Bow your head instead of straining your neck until it becomes stiff. “But if we bow our heads in humility, we are in the right position for God to lift us up and point us in the direction He knows is best.” Quit striving and straining and stressing for the future we think is best and humbly bow our heads and let God lift us to the future He knows is best.
“Bowing instead of running.
Bowing instead of fixing.
Bowing instead of trying to make sense of stuff that may never make sense in our limited human minds.
Bowing instead of resisting Him.
Bowing instead of distrusting Him.
Bowing when things seem to be turning around.
Bowing when things fall apart again.
And bowing when the suffering makes us wonder about the goodness of God.”
Wayne said when he read the above: “The feeling that we know what’s best is us playing God. That’s what Adam and Eve wanted in the garden. Because we can’t possibly know best, compared to Him. And maybe that is the beginning of humility. And it makes us unpopular when we think we know what is best. People resist God, don’t you think they will resist a human with that message? It harms our relationship with God and it harms our relationship with others.” Wayne likes her words: When we “become fixated on the idea that our vision for our future is the only good one, our necks will become stiff from all that straining.” He says when we come fixated on the idea that our vision is the only one, we step off of the dry land and into the turbulent waters.
Wayne’s visual and words: “Pushing Him off His throne and me sitting myself on it. What are the spiritual results of that for me? What are the spiritual results for the world? When we’re usurping His throne it makes it impossible for us to have the relationship with Him that we yearn for.”
The end of Chapter 6, Remember, Receive, and Reflect are really good. All about letting our fears control us, “There will always be a gap between what we see and the full story God knows.” Isaiah 43:2 – “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you…” Psalm 27:13-14 – “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.” In the Reflect part, her bullet points are to identify reasons you might resist trusting God, be honest – do you see God as trustworthy? In this chapter, she told a story about a different giant oak tree that fell over in a storm. It turned out it had shallow roots and ants. It was in a yard with a sprinkler system – it’s roots never had to go deep, so it wasn’t strong. And ants attacked places where injuries had happened and water was allowed to get inside and soften the wood. The tree was hollow. “Each time I have doubts and fears about God’s goodness, I need to bring these to God. I need to create a sacred space with God and His Word to wrestle and cry and trust Him with my doubts. …Left unattended, these doubts and questions start to frame the way I look at things….Please hear me: it’s not wrong to have these thoughts, but it is dangerous to get consumed by them. To get hollowed out by them…Each doubt we have will cause us to either press into God or pull away from Him.”
To press into Him, “get into His Word, pray, listen to Him, look for evidence of His goodness, and remember times when He was faithful in the past.”
Sometimes the hurts are so deep, we don’t feel that God is “coming through for me today.” We’re scared to trust. We “hold on to my fears and doubts, and I build safety nets in case He doesn’t come through.” Safety nets include keeping silent on what you really want, trying to force things to happen, trying to please God to convince Him to do what you want, denying what you’re feeling, and blaming others. Then this: “If we want to change our reality, then we have to start by admitting our reality. And I think I’m exhausted enough to finally want to learn to live the reality of truly trusting God.”
AWESOME- I think I am exhausted enough to finally want to live letting God be in control.
In Chapter 7, How Can I Trust God When… she talks about our anguish and the danger of that turning into bitterness. “If you get nothing else out of this chapter, I want you to get this: we may never see the justice we long for on this side of eternity.” She tells the story of Esther and of Jesus. In both cases, evil had a plan. A hero came and fulfilled God’s plan and destroyed evil. Haman was destroyed in Esther’s day. Jesus destroyed our enemies: darkness, sin, hopelessness. “We may not be able to see victory right now, but because of Jesus, evil is in the process of being ultimately defeated.” “There is a Savior of the world who will right all the wrongs…Victorious Jesus will have victory in the wrongs done to you and the evil committed against you. This doesn’t mean I give up. It means I’m giving over to God what was never mine to carry.”
Chapter 8, What We Don’t Trust, We Will Try to Control, was written especially for me. It’s all about trying to control everything so that all your people experience only good. Trying to control the uncontrollable so no one gets hurt. It’s an exhausting task and is full of pride, it’s a “delusion.” “But if you and I are holding on so tightly that our stress levels and anxiety are making it challenging for others to be around us, or we are constantly on edge with burnout nipping at our emotions, we need to recognize this isn’t a sustainable way to live.” She talks about trying to control everything by “knowing every detail, obsessively trying to figure out how to prevent bad things from happening,… treating small annoyances as epic offenses…”
“…the chaos of controlling might be stealing our peace.” “The illusion of control makes big promises but will never deliver. It won’t make us safer. It won’t prevent heartbreak from happening.” “If we think we are the stabilizing force keeping everything together and everyone else in line, we will be exhausted and disillusioned by people’s imperfections.” “…and even if we are absolutely correct that if we don’t hold things together, they will fall apart, our human efforts aren’t sustainable.”
“Trying to carry the weight of holding everything and everybody together is a role God never called us to carry. And it’s taking a great toll on our peace.”
“This is what I can control: making wise choices right now, knowing God is in full control. This is what I can’t control: all that happens in the tomorrows to come.”
“The more I get impatient with God’s timetable, the more I’ll walk right by the beauty God has for me today. With a sullen look and a heavy heart, I could miss it all.”
She talks a lot about surrendering; an ongoing process, every day. “Trying to control the uncontrollable breeds chaos. Surrendering to the only One in control produces peace.”
“Control is our way of trying to perfect that which will never be perfected.”
“Control is our way of trying to reduce the risk of getting hurt, but it actually increases relational tensions.”
“Control is our way of trying to keep things the way we want them to be, not realizing how that stress is making us fall apart in the process…
“Like I said before, that which we don’t trust, we will try to control. And what an exhausting way to live. Anxious. Annoyed. Angry. Irritable. Discontented. And acting like we have power that we won’t ever have. I am realizing that when I live this way, I am succumbing to self-centered and fear-based living. It’s not God-centered and freedom-based living.
“I’m not saying you and I are blatantly self-centered people. I’m saying when we remove rusting God from the center of our perspective, that vacuum will be filled with an elevated sense that everything depends on us.
“Remember the two crucial sentences? Control breeds chaos. Surrender produces peace.”
As soon as she realizes she is getting controlling, she stops and surrenders to God anything beyond her ability to change. Once on a mission trip in Guatemala, their car got locked with the keys inside of it and them outside of it. She was frustrated, annoyed, hot, anxious, angry, impatient. She went for a little walk to find a bathroom and saw flowers moving. It was a bunch of ants caring flowers. She realized when we surrender what we can’t carry, God carries it for us. She had prayed for protection on this trip, and maybe the keys getting locking inside of the car was God’s protection. Because His answers don’t look like we think they should look, a lot of grumbling and complaining happens. This whole paragraph is me:
“How many times in my life has God answered my prayers, but because His answers don’t look like I expect them to look, I grumble and complain? How many times have these kinds of incidents happened that could have served to deepen my trust in the Lord, but I was too focused on my frustration to make the connection? How many times have I created chaos with people I love because I would rather control them than trust them? How many times have I feared being disappointed by God so much that I treated praying to Him like a last resort rather than my first priority?”
Surrendering is an ongoing process, every day, hour, minute. Choose to hand over to God everything I want to control. “My job is to stay self-controlled and be obedient to God. God’s job is everything else.”
“…the very minute I feel anxiety or feelings of wanting to grab control or feelings of distrust rising, I pause and ask myself, How can I practice surrendering–this very minute?“
One of the things she recommends is setting a timer and letting your mind whirl and spin and worry for 10 minutes. Then changing her environment and saying, “I’ve done my part for today. Now let God do His part for today.”
Scientifically, if you sing or even hum, because the voice box is connected to the vagus nerve, “it will help to slow our heart rate and calm us down.”
“Doing these simple practices helps me stay in the process of surrendering my desire for control; my attachment to outcomes; my never-ending questions, doubts, and fears. . . all into the hands of the God who is always faithful. The God who personally goes before me. The God who never leaves us to figure it all out on our own.
“The more I trust Him to do what only He can do, the less I will resist Him. The less I resist Him, the less I will suffer with anxiety about the unknown.”
In the section “One More Thing I Want You to Know” for Chapter 8, she talks about the Israelites. First of all, when Moses told them about God’s plan to deliver them, they couldn’t hear him because of their harsh realities. When we are experiencing harsh realities, it is difficult to see past them. “When circumstances don’t look like we imagined answered prayers should look like, it’s easy to miss God all together…
“…Instead of letting faith fill in the gaps of the unknowns of my life, I am much more prone to get discouraged, doubtful, and to whisper under my breath, “This is just the way things go for my. Why do I even bother to pray?”
Then, when the Israelites were in the desert, God gave them manna. Manna means “what is this?” “…How many times has God given me His perfect provision based on His precise knowledge of what I needed, and I looked at it with eyes of confusion at best–or, at worst, I never noticed it at all? Manna falling all around me while I’m crying out to God, asking, Why are these annoying white flakes falling all over me? What is this? God, make it go away? I trusted You to provide food and got this?!”
“The very thing I want to brush off, rush through, and get so disappointed and discouraged by…once again…might be the exact answer, for today, to the prayers I’ve been praying.”
“…I want to release my fears and replace them with a beautiful sense of wonder.”
In Ice Makers and Oceans, the ice maker in the vacation home by the beach broke. She was so upset. There was no one available to fix it. Suddenly, she thinks, What if I can fix it? And she does! She fixes the ice maker. Her two friends come and one of them thinks going into the ocean is a fun thing to do. Lysa never goes into the ocean. She sits by it and reads, but never goes in the water. Well, her friend lays a boogie board by her feet, and Lysa decides to do this – she goes into the water, her bathing suit bottoms fall down, get full of and, and she ends up having so much fun. This is all about preventing your I can’ts and I don’ts from becoming I won’ts. To heal, you have to change your I can’t and I don’t statements into I am willing to try, maybe I can, this is an opportunity, “I can do this.”
In the bonus chapter, she talks about how an organization she had been involved with turned on her and spread lies about her and her broken marriage. It was so ugly and painful, she started hating them. Then she had become as hateful and cruel as them. Satan loves this sort of thing. The best way to move one from this kind of hurt is to realize that “there are supernatural laws at play that are certainties we can count on…God’s law of showing and reaping. What we decide to sow into our lives yields a harvest we will reap.” Galatians 6:7-10 “Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. Whoever sows to please their flesh, from the flesh will reap destruction; whoever sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially to those who belong to the family of believers.”
“Whatever they tried to sow into your life is not what you will reap unless you decide to take the bad seeds and plant them into your own heart and mind.
“I had to repeat that to myself over and over.
“If we don’t want to reap a future filled with relational distrust, bitter perspectives, slander that feels justified and black clouds of negativity, then we must make the choice not to plant the seeds of unresolved hurt.”
The chapter called Bonus Resource, consists of 10 beautiful Scriptures about the Truth of God, and 10 beautiful prayers around those truths. The scriptures are Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 4:16, Philippians 4:6-7, Psalm 116:5, Isaiah 42:16, Psalm 18:16-19, Isaiah 12:2, Proverbs 16:1-3, Hebrews 13:8, 2 Chronicles 16:9. The prayers are heartfelt and honest prayers admitting how we fail to trust in these truths and asking God to work in us to fully trust Him and to find our safety and security in Him, to lead us when our paths are dark, to realize that God will not hurt us, and to cast all our anxieties on Him. Beautiful prayers to God to make these Scriptural truths live in our hearts.
Lastly, she talks about how important it is to get help if you are in an abusive relationships (emotional and/or physical) and mentions there are Christian counselors in all 50 states – they are listed on the American Association of Christian Counselors website.
Thank you, Lysa, for another Spirit-led book!