This Lent we have been taking a look at where we are in our faith journey; honestly assessing how much we trust and follow Jesus. Over the course of this season we have been urged to trust him enough to "take the next step" in that journey.
I don't know what that next step might be for you. I don't know where God is calling you. What he is asking you to leave behind. What he is calling you to take up. Where he is calling you to speak up.
Maybe when you are trying to figure out what faith looks like, you could ask this question. “What would someone like you do if they were absolutely certain God was with them?”
Certain that ultimately God has a plan to give you hope and a future, even if life is painful for a while. Certain that God actually loves you and hears you when you cry out to him. Certain that God does not, has not, abandoned you in your pain but has come, has entered into it, and has made a way through it.
Certain that God is leading us through our pain, our exile, and is taking us home.
A reading from the Celtic Book of Daily Prayer puts it this way.
Often I strain and climb and struggle to lay hold of everything I’m certain You have planned for me. And nothing happens: there comes no answer. Only you reach down to me just where I am. When You give me no answer to my questions, still I have only to raise my arms to You, my Father and then You life me up. Then because You are my Father You speak these words of truth to my heart:
‘You are not an accident. Even at the moment of your conception, out of many possibilities, only certain cells combined, survived, grew to be you. You are unique. You were created for a purpose. God loves you.’
May you trust this is true, and may it change the way you live.