My heart struggles to make peace between God's ability to change hard things and His apparent decision not to change them for me.

I love the thought that God is in our midst and that He will quiet me by His love.

And if we ground ourselves in the reality that we trust God, we can face circumstances that are out of our control without acting out of control. We can't always fix our circumstances, but we can fix our minds on God. We can do that.

Jesus doesn't participate in the rat race. He's into the slower rhythms of life, like abiding, delighting, and dwelling — all words that require us to trust Him with our place and our pace.

I can rest in the fact that God is in control.

It's tough. And yet the Bible makes it very clear that we are to make time for rest. More than just physical rest, we need to take a spiritual and emotional rest from going our own way—literally. Once a week, we are to hit the pause button on life and guard a day of rest for our souls. Guard it fiercely and intentionally — even if the demands on our schedules beg us not to.

I am God's girl. That's right, I am. I am going to humbly and quietly let God have His way in me. And when I do, God will lift up me and my frayed nerves from this situation and fill me with a much better reaction than what I can give you at the moment. Give me just a few minutes and then we'll talk calmly about this.

Power enters our prayers not by sounding powerful, but by listening for even the slightest whisper from the One who is all-powerful. That

Do not check in with the screaming demands of the world before you exchange whispers with God

Don't set into motion what needs to remain still.

When all of life feels like an urgent rush from one demand to another, we become forgetful. We forget simple things like where we put our car keys or that one crucial ingredient for dinner when we run into the grocery store. But even more disturbing, we forget God. We say with our mouths that we are trusting and relying on God, but are we really?

God will handle this, and even if you never see how God handles it, you know He will.