God is with You in the Storm.

The other day, I saw a tweet from Tony Evans:

God is with you in the storm. You are not alone.

— Tony Evans (@drtonyevans) April 26, 2022

“God is with you in the storm. You are not alone.”

We are in the middle of planning and preparing for our move. Life has felt like a sad little storm lately. It isn’t a hurricane. It feels more like when it rains for days and days on end. You know those times? And everyday is gray, and you keep hoping to see the sun again?

All of these problems keep popping up. Everyday, more little problems.

It feels like sadness. I want to be positive, but I’m weighed down.

Do you get tired of those self-help articles that say “Just do this,” or “Just do that?” Then your life will be better. Sometimes life is not better. No, some times life is hard. We all have hard phases we have to walk through.

Anytime you are faced with a year where you have to move, just go ahead and know up front that this will be a challenging year. This is less of a lounging poolside type year. Instead, it is more of a triathlon through the Pacific Ocean kind of year.

Well, at least it won’t be a boring year.

Knowing God is on our side is so encouraging to me. Sure, I have people here with me. We have each other.

But God is bigger than all of this. God is here, and I am not in this triathlon alone.

I find that so comforting. Everyday I need to be reminded of that.

This week a few good things happened.

After months and years of waiting for answers to prayers, we had some answers. Answered prayers feel like warm sunshine on your back.

There were no new moving developments, but cracks in the ice formed in other areas of our lives. There were small victories for us and for the kids, and we needed those. I cannot tell you how much we needed those.

I’ve been spending extra time in prayer this week. I often rush through my prayers. Or I just utter little prayers all day long. This week I have been more purposeful to pray.

You know why I’ve been more intentional about praying?

It’s that age-old thing about hard times driving us to our knees. I feel like King Hezekiah in ancient Judah, laying out the threatening letter he received, and saying, “God, look what’s going on here. Lord, help! I can’t fix it. Please, you fix it!”

Isn’t it annoying that it takes hard times to pull us closer to God?

Is this one of those lessons I have to keep learning over and over again? If I would just draw closer to him with this same intensity in the easy times, perhaps I would not need to go through as many hard ones.

So this morning I knelt on my knees and prayed intentionally about the problems we are facing. I hope, if you are going through challenges like we are, that you will let God help you out too.

I went hunting for some good Bible verses about not being alone, about God being with us in the storms of life to share with you.

These are a few of my favorites that I have included in this post. Faith and hope are my sanity. Knowing that it is not me versus the world, or me versus evil. It never is. Even when we feel alone, or like we are living amongst strangers. We are not alone. God is always with us.

Whatever storm we weather in life, God is with us. That’s one of the reassuring, relaxing things about faith. You don’t have to struggle through life alone. Even when we are alone, God is with us. He does care, and when you reach for him, you will find him.

He is always found by those who truly seek him.