Q:  How can I practically trust God when my feelings scream that I can’t? Is this an emotion I need to grasp, a skill I can develop, or a daily choice I should make despite everything?

A.  I think the answer to your question is that it really is a bit of all of those things.

Think about what it says in Proverbs 3:5: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.”

That is such a great description of how we’re supposed to handle trust in God. Our feelings and our thoughts are all part of our understanding, and this verse is saying that even when those things are saying that we can’t trust God, we have to choose not to lean on them.

This really is a practiced skill, friend. It’s a habit that we have to get into by choosing every day to trust God. For example, maybe you didn’t get enough sleep last night, so your understanding is saying, “Oh, I’m so tired.” That’s normal, but you don’t want to just stay there, because that would be leaning on the wrong thing.

Instead, you’ve got to develop the skill of trusting the Lord by saying to yourself, “Nope, I’m not leaning on my experiences. I’m not leaning on these emotions. By my own choice, I am going to trust in the Lord.”

I talked to a woman recently who told me about a time when God told her to just practice walking in His peace. She had life happening and thoughts and doubts coming into her head, but she made a choice every time to just meditate on the peace of God inside of her and say, “Lord, I’m turning from that thought or feeling. I’m not going to lean on my own understanding, but I’m going to trust in You.”

About two years after she started practicing this discipline, she received the horrible news that her husband had been tragically killed in a plane accident. In the natural, she should have been devastated, but all that practice from the past two years was like a fortress inside of her. Even the normal, natural grief that came over her could not match the power of the peace that was on the inside of her!

So to answer your question, it is a choice and a skill, and when you treat it that way, you are opening the door for God to build something on the inside of you that will not crumble when things get hard.