God can be trusted! If you are finding this lesson of trust, difficult to learn, read my article below. It will help you believe in God. Once you believe in Him, it is easier to trust Him.
“God sits above the circle of the earth. The people below seem like grasshoppers to him! He spreads out the heavens like a curtain and makes his tent from them.” Isaiah 40:22
The ant exists in his own little world. Within himself he feels wise. He feels that he knows everything.
He thinks that his little ant brain is it. The absolute! He knows all the ant hills. He knows the ant trails. He is the smartest ant around.He speaks ant.
He loves crawling into boxes. He thinks these big structures will teach him what he needs to know. He spends a lot of time hanging out inside the square. He knows the corners perfectly. The little escape cracks that take him out of the boxes keeps him busy.
One day the ant decides to think outside the square. So he leaves his box. He figures he knows everything in life but he is getting bored.
On the way he meets me, Helen Olenjin, the blogger.
He suddenly becomes big enough so he can see me.
A big blogger faces a big ant.
We are both the same size now.
We talk.
A bit like the talking donkey scenario in the Bible.
Where you would say, “Huh? That doesn’t fit.”
The ant can understand my English with his new but still limited supernatural brain.
He hears me but he still doesn’t completely understandyet.
I get this!
As I just googled and read, “Each ant’s brain is simple, containing about 250,000 neurons, compared with a human’s billions.” (sciencefocus.com)
He has lived in dirt for so long that is all he knows.
I tell him about life above the dirt.
I tell him about humans.
I tell him about our complex networks above ground.
He hears about our cities, our countries, the internet, electricity, cars, mobile phones, planes and all the high tech stuff. He hears about social distancing. This is very surprising to him! His tribe are super squashed together.
In his world, ants can’t measure the 1.5 meters. Hand washing? Nah, never heard of it! He doesn’t even know what a hand is. Simple maths and literacy skills are incomprehensible to his tiny brain.
When I try to explain to him how to sign into Facebook, I notice he gets really offended.
He simply doesn’t get me! He even refuses to believe in Apple!
But then the ant slowly learns. The more I talk, the more his humility grows.
The ant thought He knew absolute truth. In actual fact, he was dead wrong.
He only believed a false absolute.
“A false absolute is not the same as absolute truth,” I patiently explain.
He crawls home with a huge dose of humble pie on his back.
He thinks, “How wrong I was. I thought my square was the whole world!”
This ant makes me think of a human who refuses to even logically consider the possibility of a God!
Mytheoretical ant was an atheist! But he made progress!
The iPhone talk finally broke him. He understood that if he could not comprehend the iphone, he indeed was created!
In that exact moment, he grew.
“I have a Creator!” he shouted.
“My unbelief in Him stopped me from growing for all these years!”
OK, end of my ant story.
So where does that put us humans doing SOAP?
SOAP stands for Scripture, Observation, Application and Prayer. It is an excellent study method to use at it encourages you to focus on God’s Wordand apply these lessons to your own life.
If a human had a conversation with God during SOAP/Bible study, we would be like the ant. Blown again by heavenly truths we never knew existed. I don’t think we could even understand God at his level. Just like the ant can’t understand ours.
Now is your hardest SOAP question answered?
Not so offended at the real God anymore?
Yes, yes, yes!!
Finally we start to spiritually grow. Like the ant.We finally understand that the God we were believing in previously, was fiction. God didn’t like your fictitious God either!
Becoming an ant short term was not a wasted SOAP exercise for me.
It showed me how small we really are.
And how full of ourselves we are.
And how wrong we can be about God and life.
We only see the world from our own tiny human shell.
We have a very close personal relationship with our own shell.
We know it perfectly.
We may think our shell is our whole world. We may perceive this to be everything and the absolute truth. We may centre all our thoughts, beliefs and perceptions around self.
Like the ant we may create our own personal reality through it. But is this the absolute truth? Of course not. It is only an ant’s eye view.
An ant atheist thinks the thoughts he has in his shell represents absolute truth.
“I don’t believe in God based on 250 000 neurons, therefore he doesn’t exist.”
“Or because I cannot grasp how the iPhone works, I also don’t believe in God. Simply because both are unexplainable to my tiny brain.”
As you and I struggle to write SOAP we see the reality of the situation.
We are like the ant too. But with 86 billion neurons. Still a tiny brain next to God.
We have a tiny Biwbel (Squeaky voice for Bible).
We wrote a tiny SOAP.
We are SOAPING from the perspective of tiny.
But we still keep going as the application of it makes perfect sense through faith in God.
My SOAP view trusts God and His Word. But not my human brain only.
For the Christian, faith is always stronger than logic.
But we still need to keep logic.
With this ant’s logic and faith, he would finally be able to grasp the incomprehensible belief that God really existed!
When 1 + 1 didn’t = 2, he could coolly surrender tofaith in the supernatural workings of God above the dirt!
We become like the ant too, no longer getting offended when 1 + 1 doesn’t always=2.
God’s math system doesn’t always make sense!
Hello faith!
When we use faith and logic together, others who don’t have full faith yet, are more inclined to listen to your Christian beliefs.
So keep talking to the logical atheist you know or the former burnt Christian. Remember that God Himself will open their eyes through faith supernaturally, not by logic alone.
But “logic” can still be an initial stepping stone towards faith.
“Dear God. I am struggling to believe in You. Please reveal Yourself to me. I am your creation. You are my Creator. Please show me the right way. In Jesus name. Amen.”
The first day I started writing poetry was an odd day. I had no idea I could even write Christian poetry. As I started with my first poem, a very surprising thing happened. Something big clicked! It was the feeling that I needed to write more poetry even though initially, I had zero interest in it. As I persisted, I wrote more and more poems. Then I understood. God wanted me to “write” to bring others to Himself not to me.
“Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God; and the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus” (Philippians 6-7, NKJV).
Recently I had an experience that really encouraged me and helped me to look at life more simply.
It was the understanding of turning my physical issues into spiritual ones. And then simply trusting God.
How did this occur?
Through applying SOAP once again!
SOAP stands for Scripture, Observation, Application and Prayer.
Recently our tap in our main bathroom would not turn off. We rang the plumber who came out to fix the issue. After he checked out the situation, he quoted us an amount of over $600! I was stressed out and wondered if he was ripping us off. I am sure you know what I am talking about.
Whether you are at the dentist, or mechanic or dealing with an area you know nothing about, you know what I mean when I say, I felt completely ignorant about plumbing issues.
Even when the plumber explained it twice, I still had no idea what he was talking about! Which obviously meant that I felt unable to make a decision if his quote was fair and reasonable.
My husband was working from home that day and told the plumber to go ahead with the quote, but I was still boiling underneath! Why did we have to pay so much? But sometimes in life we must. There is no time to goggle, get more quotes, or do research as the plumber is standing in front of you!
“It is what it is.”
My teenage son uses this quote all the time. Some decisions need to be made on the spot! This is where we need to trust God and ask Him to intervene if what is happening is not His will.
I love this emergency trust concept! Here we learn to trust God on the spot! And know that He is in control, not the plumber!
So I prayed silently to God and the plumber continued on with his work.
As I surrendered to the inevitable, I knew I had to trust God with this plumbing invoice. Even if we were ripped off, (and maybe we weren’t), that wasn’t the issue. I realized I could turn this physical issue into a spiritual one and once doing that, the “lack-lie” disappeared.
Of course, God had the money to pay our invoices for life! In God’s economy, money does grow on trees. “And this same God who takes care of me will supply all your needs from his glorious riches, which have been given to us in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 4:19)
Or as my son said some time ago, “For some reason you have a million dollars in your bank account. You go to your transaction area to check out how this happened and you see that God had transferred it as you saw the words, God, Transfer.”
Yes, we do have this million bucks and even more! We just can’t see it. Yet. Spiritual currency is my point here.
So of course, God would pay this invoice as his resources were unlimited. But if I kept looking at it with my physical eyes and just seeing our lack of resources, I would have seen a deficit.
This is the view I saw initially – 1)The plumber standing there 2) A tap that needed fixing 3) Our bank account robbed once again!
The view God wanted me to see was the SOAP view. 1)He would pay for this 2) I needed to trust Him 3)I needed to love my husband and not argue about this. All biblical concepts!What an easier way to live!
In the evening, after talking to my husband about my cringe over the high plumbing bill, my view changed to one of trusting God even if I was ripped off. I realized how I needed to change my earthly issues into spiritual ones. Then I would experience God’s peace and his unlimited provisions.
I had just heard about a couple who were planning on separating and I felt very sad about this. I wondered if they had argued about irrelevant things when they could have SOAPED instead. Then their trust in God may have increased as well as their love for each other.
I saw God’s point and it was a profound moment of understanding in my marriage. I kissed my husband and said, “We don’t need to argue about this. We just need to love each other more.”
I am glad we remembered this. A number of years ago my husband and I agreed to love each other even more if life got tougher. Instead of disagreeing over plumbing bills and the stress of life, we had the choice to grow in love for each other and walk in the spirit.
Doing the above is SOAP in action.
Now I am thinking how simple life is when earthly issues are turned into SOAP immediately.
Not ten days after when you have ruined your love, peace and joy!
God never said, “Worry for ten days, then when you are done, hand it to me.”
Rather he wants us to start walking and praying in the spirit the second after a new wobble hits.
Now I understand that everything must be done through the spirit.
In this place, God’s strength and power is unlimited. We can pray and trust for a very long time as we are not doing this but Christ IS.
John 4:24 says, “God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the spirit and in truth.”
“Dear God. Please help me to view every issue through the eyes of Your spirit and not through the limitations of the temporal.”
This poem I wrote tonight is helping me with my intermittent fasting. It’s not always easy eating less but I realise that praying and being with God Himself, will help me conquer certain habits. Humour is a good way 😄 to grow. A merry heart is good medicine, remember? (Proverbs 17:22)
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