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Overcoming Life Stress & Improving Communication/Intimacy with God
God gives us all a remarkable opportunity, that even among Christians, many of us do not fully take advantage of. I am sure many of you are familiar with becoming fully enveloped in each day’s tasks – busily hurrying from one location to the next, hardly taking any time for ourselves to absorb what is going on, much less dedicating a few moments to contacting God. We constantly engage in mentally or physically demanding situations that may lead to information overload, stress, and if left unchecked even potential burnout. Have you ever noticed in yourself or others how often we seem to rush through life events without any pauses whatsoever? Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely understand that time is precious and we should certainly strive to make practical use of it with any reasonable means possible. However, I think a lot of the time we tend to speed hastily in an attempt to arrive at our destination, when often we do not really need to hurry so much.
A lot of us should aspire to learn how to enjoy the process of working, driving, and generally navigating through the roads and seas of life, not agonizing through them in an effort entirely for the purpose of getting to the destination. For example, often times we’ll defer our happiness or satisfaction “until we graduate college and get a good job” or “as soon as I find the right person I can get married to.” The problem with this frame of mind is, until that point in time, we’ll be subconsciously unappreciative of each day at hand, essentially failing to grasp how each individual day of life is a huge blessing of God. Our happiness will not be present, and will be based off of circumstances that may be pending for a considerable period of time. We should not undermine the journey, because we may be looking forward to something that God knows we probably aren’t ready for. It is also problematic because once we finally achieve what we’ve been waiting for, we’ll arrive to our metaphorical destination and although momentarily jubilated or at least excited we unavoidably end up thinking to ourselves: “Is this it, was this all I was waiting for?”
Sometimes when we get caught up in these sorts of routines, where we are extremely focused on the end result alone, we may forget to keep open lines of communication with God in the process. Allow me to make one thing clear: there is nothing wrong with setting goals and achieving them whatsoever. What I am suggesting is that we should not get so caught up in that end result, that we just endure our time up to that end point rather than making the best of each day.
Even worse is when we fail to consult God about what He has in mind about a specific endeavor and lean on our own understanding instead. When we obey God’s plans for us we could literally bypass immeasurable amounts of unnecessary heartache and struggle and potentially replace much of them with real satisfaction and peace. We all know the reality is we have no excuse not to keep in close touch with Him, but instead of doing so we continually seek to resolve our own issues with a stubborn and often selfish view of the world around us. So many of us get caught up in ourselves and we forget that God has a vastly superior plan in mind. It is difficult to articulate or even attempt to fathom what God’s particular intentions for us may be in consideration of a specific set of circumstances. Beyond simply reading and studying the word of God and trying to dissect how we should react – we need to prayerfully and worshipfully consult Him to provide us with much needed guidance. This is why it is beneficial for us to humble ourselves as small children before God, and be willing to admit that we by no means have all the answers. Remember that even though God equips us with many tools, blessings, and resources – including the ability and the opportunities needed to resist or even flee from the full array of temptations and sinful behaviors we face as human beings – He does want us to rely on Him for His supernatural provision.
I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that in the confines of our selfish attitudes and emphasis on being self-sufficient, we’ll likely never experience the full extent of God’s blessings. When we rely on ourselves all the time, without consulting God about our situation, we are mistakenly assuming that our own willpower or resources will be enough. The truth is our finite minds often fail to understand that we cannot fully delight God on our own strength, following our own will rather than God’s. We need to be willing to admit that we all have shortcomings and face our own share of sins, but without conceding our struggles to God for Him to help us take care of we will never fully overcome those issues. We need to learn to embrace the fact that all of us fall short of perfection and have some flaws that may separate us from God if we do not seek His help.
Now that I have discussed various reasoning as to why we should enjoy our journeys through life as much as we can, rely on God in all aspects of our life, and submit to His divine will for us rather than our own flawed intentions, I want to talk about how to improve our personal communication and intimacy with God. In order to communicate effectively with God we need to learn or remember the qualities of prayer that make it effective.
The first facet of effective prayer is the inherent need to be fearful of God (respectful and worshipful fear not terror-type fear). This is vital because as much as we can speak to God silently and even casually to a degree – we should always be careful with our word choice and remember we are speaking to our Creator. Whether it is a silent prayer or spoken prayer, I sincerely believe this element of prayer should never be forgotten.
Another important part of effective prayer is a simple one – be thankful. I believe when we are sincerely thankful about all the blessings God has bestowed upon us, and acknowledge all that He does for us on a continual basis, we start to touch God’s heart in a very special and unique way.
Think about the last time you did a considerable favor to someone, and they didn’t really communicate any hint of appreciation for what you did. Now, take a few moments and consider the last time you did someone a similar favor, but they were particularly thankful and appreciative. Who would you honestly prefer to continue to do favors for? Although I believe that thinking like this might be oversimplifying God’s character, I think to an extent it might be a model of how God operates on a super-micro scale. I don’t want to completely cement this idea and conclude that God would stop listening to someone who might have not fully appreciated the blessing bestowed upon him by God, I am neither saying that in all cases imaginable God would always prefer to favor an individual who is thankful and appreciative rather than someone who doesn’t thank God directly for what He has done for them. What I am trying to do is convey to you the power of gratitude in prayer and speculating a bit about God’s perspective based on what we know about His character already.
Do not just take my word for this. Personally, I would suggest that you try a prayer sometime with sincere thanksgiving from beginning to end, and let God know that you really appreciate all that He has done for you. Thank him for giving you basic things we sometimes take for granted, as well as the ultimate gift of salvation and everything in between. I like to thank Him for the smallest of material blessings to the largest of spiritual blessings, it all depends what I feel in my heart to say at the time. You don’t need to ask God to change something in your life or help you in every prayer, some of them I believe should focus on purely thanking him and listening to what He has to say to you. You would be surprised how this will open the door to a better, more communicative relationship with Him than you may have ever experienced before. Remember, you aren’t trying to fool or manipulate God, he sees and knows everything – including the motives of our hearts, so try to stick to what you really mean from the heart. I know this should go without saying, but I figured I would bring the point home with this idea.
This brings me to my next point, too many of us (myself included) tend to have monologues with God and don’t take any time to listen to what God may want to speak to our hearts and minds. This is why, particularly lately, I have tried to incorporate moments of silence where I truly sit back and absorb what God has to say. Remember just because it may be an extremely rare occurrence for God to be heard audibly, it doesn’t mean that he won’t inspire us to accomplish His will or to guide us in other ways. He may send someone to plant a seed in you in conversation, which may lead you to start contemplating the idea, and then maybe he drives home the point with an e-mail message you receive that correlates to the original message. God works in mysterious ways, many of which may certainly be beyond our comprehension to fully grasp unless he chooses to reveal this to us.
I know that I may have practically just scratched the surface of what effective communication with God is about, and many of these concepts encompass a lot of subtopics that we may discuss in the future. My primary intent for this article is that it may assist you to think about how you may be able to improve your personal relationship with God through obedience and prayer in a broad sense. A portion of what I have stated you may not even agree with whole-heartedly, but I am certain the majority of it many of you will be able to relate to. I trust that when we learn to incorporate a combination of sincerity, gratitude, obedience (following-through with our God ordained responsibilities), and having a dialogue rather than only a monologue with Him – you will experience a consistently refreshed, intimate relationship with the One that paid the ultimate price for our sins. That of course is Jesus Christ, and who better to rely on than Him? No one!
-Victor Nunez