Well, like I left off saying last time, you would think things would have gotten easier from there, but they didn’t. In fact they got worse, they got hard. Really really really hard.

When you’re eyes are opened to that kind of truth, everything is different. You see everything in a different way, a different angle. All the things that I ‘knew’ for years about God, the Bible, etc suddenly came true. Suddenly it was all very alive and real to me and that’s something you can’t ignore.

There’s a lot of stuff that happened in between these paragraphs. A lot. So much struggle and effort and confusion and trying and failing and tears and heartache and hopelessness and then striving again and then more struggle and then more trying and then hope and peace and then more struggle. I’ll spare you all the details, but eventually, through an act of God (a super cool story I’ll hopefully share in the future), I got back into ‘church’. God put some very wise, very loving, very ‘real’ people in my life who loved me for me, accepted all my doubts and questions, genuinely cared about how I was doing, and didn’t require me to have everything figured out beforehand. I had a place to go, where I was encouraged to search the Word, talk to God through worship, and wrestle, a LOT, with things I couldn’t understand, things about the Bible I didn’t like, things that I was mad at God for, things that still hurt.

I wanted to go back to life as normal, just with a little more peace of mind. But that wasn’t happening. I wanted to believe that there was still hope in ‘church’, I wanted to believe that there were honest people with genuine motives who really got ‘it’. i wanted to find something that I could pour into, something that I believed was worth my effort. And above all of this I wanted my life to count. I can’t even express how overwhelming of a fear it was for me at the time- that my life wouldn’t count, that I had nothing to offer, that my existence was unnecessary. I had this desire to make my life count, there was this constant tugging that said ‘Rebecca, there is more than this.’ But the fear….the fear that it wasn’t true kept me from trying. The fear of trying and failing kept me from trying at all.

Don’t we all deal with this? This ‘does my life matter? Am I going to count?’ In our world that constantly bombards us with the message that we are one of billions, that we are just part of the system, that only a few of us are worth anyone’s time and the rest are average. Isn’t this a fear that we all have to face? Daring to listen to that tugging that we were made for more, that our lives count, that we can change things.

That was a fear of mine. And every time I would feel that tugging that said there was more for me I would get angry. How could God be so cruel as to poke at the one thing I was most afraid of? Knowing that I couldn’t change things, knowing that I was just one girl on a planet of billions with no hope of ever making a mark…How could He continually get my hopes up with these feelings and thoughts and dreams? So many prayers went like this ‘God I want to, but I cant. God I want to count, but I don’t know how. God I want to change things, but you know I don’t have what it takes.’

I’ve been wrestling with how to some up this post, because this is still a struggle of mine. This is an on-going continuous daily struggle. And I think it’s one that a lot of us face. And I think most of us stay right there, at the end of that last paragraph, wanting desperately to count but knowing ourselves and knowing that we never will. We want to hope for more, we want to believe in greater things but we know that’s not realistic, we know it will never happen, we know we cant do it.

That’s not where my story stops though. Praise God, He doesn’t leave us when we stop, but He stands right there and He cheers us on with love and encouragement and instruction. And if we don’t get it the first time He yells it louder. And if we still don’t get it He yells it louder. And He continues to shout it out until we get it. Until we GET IT. ‘I love you! You count! You’re life has so much meaning that is waiting to unfold. Let’s go! Come on..I’ve got so much planned for you. Let me show you! You! I Want YOU.” And we can yell back all we want ‘I tried! I can’t do it. I don’t have what it takes. I can’t. Look at me…I’ll never count.” But He is still going to stand right there and keep saying ‘ I love you. You count in my story.’

We count in His story.

I’ll never forget the day I stopped shouting back ‘I cant’ and finally just surrendered to the fact that He could. I realized I was making the mistake that many of us do. God was calling me out of complacency, out of an average life where I was an average person among millions whose life would never count for much of anything. He was calling me a life following Him, a life in His story, a life that had a very specific purpose filled with huge things that I could never even conceive as possible. But I had to trust Him, and I had to jump in with both feet. My mistake was that I wanted to put one foot in and test everything out before I fully committed. I was comfortable with my life, with my friends, with the way I was living. I knew I could handle that life. So before I was going to leave all that comfort and confidence, I needed to slowly ease into this trusting God thing. I needed to give Him a little bit of me and see how he handled it and if all went well then I would trust Him with a little more. I was afraid to trust Him. I was afraid to believe. I wanted to ease into it. I didn’t want to risk. I didn’t want to dare.

But if there is no risk is it really trusting? Trusting means that you aren’t quite sure and you know you could be wrong, but you have confidence in the person that you are trusting- that they wont let you down, that they will come through for you. You believe in them, and so you are willing to risk being wrong. You have to choose if that risk is worth taking.  And every time there is a risk, there is a dare, and every time there is a dare, there is a huge fear that you have to face.

For me it all came down to trust. God hit me in the face with the question ‘Do you trust me?’ And that led to ‘If you do, then dare to give me everything. Stop straddling the fence, stop trying to ease into things, stop trying to test it out and see if I come through for you. Dare to jump in with both feet.’ You can’t trust halfway. That defies the very meaning of the word. Either we trust God or we don’t. Either we follow or we don’t. Realizing that changed everything.

I decided to jump, with both feet. I decided to trust even though it hurt. It hurt. I decided to dare, to face that fear and to put everything I had into following Him. It was a huge risk. What if He let me down? What if I was crazy? What if people were right and I would never amount to anything? What if I tried and failed? What if? All of our ‘what-ifs’ can be summed up in one word- ‘FEAR’. Fear is an enslaving, life extinguishing force that so many of us are caught up in. It sucks every glimmer of hope and confidence and meaning and joy out of our lives and leaves us weak and alone and unable to move. The biggest, most important lesson I’ve learned in life so far, and I’ll leave you with this…

The only way to extinguish fear is to dare.

~ by Rebecca Wattier on January 22, 2010.