I’ve been wanting to write a blog about what I’ve been learning here in Ukraine for quite some time now, but I have hesitated because I feel like I have so many things that the Lord has been teaching me and revealing to me simultaneously that I feel like it would be a jumbled mess trying to explain it all.
So I have decided to write about the most vulnerable topic for me and something I have been trying to learn how to do for years, but it always seems elusive somehow: rest.
I will be totally transparent and share something that I wouldn’t have openly shared with people 5 months ago…partially due to embarrassment but also partially because I hadn’t fully even accepted it for myself—I’ve struggled a lot with anxiety.
Looking back, I think the struggle began to surface around freshman year of college (approximately 7 years ago…wow I feel super old). I was given a whole lot of responsibility, high expectations, placed in a new environment and ultimately chose stress and anxiety rather than trust.
Anxiety and worry is something I have known is not something of the Lord, but it is something that I never really knew how to battle. I’ve always cared a lot about my performance, doing things well and pleasing people…and it took me a while to realize that I was often putting these things above the Lord’s opinion or His will and trying to trust in myself and my performance instead of trusting in the Lord.
It’s pretty cool, because the words the Lord gave me before I left for the race at launch were “trust and rest” (I wrote a blog about this before I left). These were things the Lord knew I needed but I didn’t realize how much they are paired together until recently. The cool part is that I didn’t get the word ‘trust’ and the word ‘rest’ separately, they came together…with trust coming before rest.
In a sermon I was listening to lately on rest the speaker said, “You can’t live in trust and be consumed with anxiety and worry.” I believe trusting leads to resting and rest battles anxiety. “Rest is power, rest can be a sword. We can fight the enemy with rest.” (Caroline Crawford, The Gathering)
Looking back, my struggles with anxiety would come in seasons…typically in difficult seasons where it was hard to trust the Lord and I ended up trying to control things and trust in the things I could do. I don’t want my trust in the Lord to be conditional– I want to be able to trust at all times and therefore be at rest no matter what my circumstances are in life.
“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.” Galatians 5:1
Anxiety was my yoke of slavery. I would fight it, claim a false victory in it and then let it consume me again. I went back to the yoke of slavery I was familiar with instead of increasing my depth of trust in the Lord.
I know He desires for me to be free of this stronghold in my life. I know there is freedom and victory in Christ. I am choosing to trust and rest…choosing to remember that HE is always in control and works all things for my good. I am choosing to be released from the bonds of fear and anxiety. This time I am choosing freedom, real freedom, and choosing to stand firm and resist returning to the yoke of anxiety.
The enemy uses strongholds in our life to keep us from experiencing the fullness of Christ. We have the option to fight our strongholds or continue to submit to them. I choose to fight, knowing that in Christ strongholds can be defeated. I choose to submit to Christ alone and trust Him for the victory.
“The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought and make it obedient to Christ.” 2 Corinthians 10:4-5
I don’t know what your stronghold or yoke of slavery is, but it’s time to choose victory.
