It wasn’t any one big thing; it was just a lot of little things: lots of travel, a particularly overwhelming experience and not enough sleep. My interior had sustained a stealth attack. A web of infinitesimally fine fractures was making me anxious, unable to move back into the flow of “normal”. I felt fragile, as though I might be “undone” at any moment.
But then the worship team began leading us in the hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul”. As I sang I thought, “Wow. It’s true; at the bottom of it all, my soul is taken care of.” Though my world may shake and the externals may fracture, nothing can alter the eternal security of my soul. Whatever comes my way, at the essence of my being it is well. If God is with me, who or what can truly prevail against me?
Yet, in those moments, I also realized that I needed to not just recognize the “truth”; I also needed to confess it to release the full force of its effect on those interior cracks. Confession is so much more than admitting my failures. Confession includes proclaiming Who God is and declaring the effect of those truths on my whole being. In Psalm 42 the psalmist repeats, “Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God.”
That Sunday morning, as I spoke to my soul, “It is well”, the glue of his glorious truth seeped into those anxious fractures. I felt “peace like a river” morphing my previous fragility into stability. I left church as “more than a conqueror through him who [loves me]” (Romans 8: 37).
Praising my Savior and my God from A(nxiety) to P(eace)!
Randi Nelson
Romans 8:31-39– What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us.Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written,
“For your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.”
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.