Keeping Our Heads Above Water - Chapter 25

April 18, 2016

It's 1:48 a.m.

It's raining.....again.....and I have placed earbuds in my ears to drown out the sound of falling water outside...a sound I used to love hearing and that would lull me into a blissful sleep.

I now find myself checking the Water District website in the middle of the night to see the level of the lake and how fast its rising.  I see from this site that our county is under yet another Flood Warning right now and just above that, I see where just a little less than a month ago, FEMA denied the appeal for assistance from our struggling county yet again.

Rain has not been our friend this year....and I desperately wish I didn't fear it.....


But I do.

A few months ago, a friend said she felt I probably had PTSD.....Post Traumatic Stress Disorder....on nights like these when the tears are falling on the keyboard and I'm forced to face my fears.  I don't think so.  I don't need a title to justify my lack of faith....I just need more faith.

Period.

I need more faith that God will take care of us.  I need more faith He will be with us in the floods of life....and that it's still His plans to prosper us and that He hasn't forgotten about us.  I need to feel less like the boys on the boat that said, "Teacher, don't you care if we drown?" and more like Jesus who said to the waves, 'Quiet! Be still!' Then the wind died down and it was completely calm" with a quick word to the baffled boys, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have NO faith?"

He might as well have put my name at the end of that question, "Why are you so afraid, Liz?  Do you still have no faith, girlfriend?"

"I tell you the truth, if you had faith even as small as a mustard seed, 

you could say to this mountain, 

'Move from here to there' and it would move. 

Nothing would be impossible." 

 (Matthew 17:20)

I pray for the rain to stop, but it doesn't.  I pray His will to be done and to instill more armor and faith into my soul....yet I'm still scared.  Does this mean I don't have enough faith?  What words do I need to say to have the kind of faith that would move a mountain?  That would stop the rain?  That would quiet the evil one that keeps telling me the rains won't stop and where is my God when I ask for Him to stop the rains and they don't?

I turn up the music in my ears 

so I can't hear the water pouring 

outside the window.

And I start counting my blessings....thank You for Chuck, thank You for this safe temporary home, thank You for our contractor Mark we can trust, thank You for the shutters I found for $25, thank You for this beautiful place we call home......I get to about blessing #15 when I realize that gratitude always leaves me looking at God and away from dread.  It does to anxiety what the morning sun does to the fog on the lake.

It burns it up.