devotional - day 10

Joshua 21:45 (TLB) Every good thing the Lord had promised them came true.

There are so many promises I feel God has made me and some have indeed come true and some I’m still waiting on. This verse is so great because it reminds me of when God did indeed show up and it gives me hope that he will do so again. 

I got interrupted while writing this day’s devotional by my adult daughter discussing with me how she gets anxious when things are going well and starts to wonder when they won’t. I so very much understand this feeling of being hesitant to believe in the “good things” and that they can really happen. Brené Brown calls this “foreboding joy”. It is easy to succumb to foreboding joy when you are still new to experiencing God’s goodness. Or that perhaps it has been awhile since you have experienced God’s goodness because God does indeed let us go through the wilderness time and again so we can learn how to be ever increasingly obedient and faithful. 

What I have learned (and am still learning! It’s a daily, sometimes moment by moment choice) is to truly live in the present. Who knows what tomorrow will bring. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for acknowledging reality and I understand it can be hard to retrain the brain to think more optimistically that perhaps the better case scenario will play out versus the worst. It’s all a matter of looking for the good in the littlest of things throughout your day. That way as you are seeing God show up in the little things and your faith that he will show up in the bigger things grows. 

This practice takes time. Give yourself grace (just as my daughter did) when anxiety and fear rear their ugly, unkind heads and start again at flipping the worry into finding the good.