Do I trust God to provide? Do I really trust him to come through when I need it?

I dance around this issue every day, living on auto pilot, self-medicating with food and TV, filling my mind with mindless stuff to drown out the cries of my soul.

The raw truth is there are things I want. There’s a way I want to live, a standard which I decided long ago is what I "deserve", or at the very least desire. But daily I am reminded that in a flash of light, in the blink of an eye all of it could be easily wiped out, taken from me never to be attained again. Never to be mine ever.

This is the vision my soul claims is my rightful provision from God.

But the Spirit in me whispers that nothing could be further from the truth. It is the Reality Check within that wars with my soul, my humanity-spirit, that wars with itself longing both for the physical and the spiritual. The material and the ethereal.

I know in my head that God never promised to provide me with a great place to live and a cool car, a cool job and a bright American-dream future. But I just can’t seem to ever transfer it to my heart. My soul cries out for… something to fulfill it and my heart hands it a ready-made American Dream package, complete with Honda hybrid, home ownership of my own log cabin on lots of acreage and a solid, secure-till-death employment deal.

Faced with the realities of the Abundant Life I know I will be lucky indeed if I ever grasp hold of one of those things. The whole package? Well, it’s called the American Dream for a reason.

Is this the lie that Satan uses to trap me in my own mire of fear and regret? I think it is. And its effective. Very effective.

Tonight I flew right into the heart of his spiderweb of lies. A documentary program on rising poverty in America caught my attention and soon I was stuck and the more I struggled, the stickier the lies, and more stuck, I became. I am such a product of post WWII American greed. I want so much. Oh, I want so much! And I don’t want to have to work for it. I think I deserve a good living and a good car and a good home of my own. I think I deserve a cheap education and inexpensive health care and retirement benefits at 65.

And if I’m not going to get them, then I don’t want to live.
That’s my own version of a spiritual tantrum.

What a spoiled child I am.

If its true that I have been put here to bless others, to just be who God made me and shine out the God-reflection in me so everyone around me can see Him, can get a different sort of glimpse of who He is… then what does it matter what I have or don’t have? When it comes down to it, what does it matter, really?

The real question isn’t, do I believe God will provide? The real question is: will it be enough for me? Will I choose to be content whatever is taken from me and however God chooses to provide my needs? Will I pay the price it costs to follow, or will I choose to fly into the web of lies day after day after day?