Sustaining Your Faith During Difficult Times

Floods. Hurricanes. Death. Debt. Illness. All of these bring about difficulty in our lives. They make life harder, more challenging. How do we maintain and sustain our faith during times of hardship? How do we ensure that God remains our top priority? How do we prevent ourselves from losing faith?

There are several actions we can take to sustain our faith during times of trial. We can begin by reading the scriptures. God’s Word is a primary way of connecting to Him. When we read about Biblical figures, we are really reading about ourselves, in a sense. The struggles of Moses become our struggles. The doubt the apostle Thomas feels becomes our doubt. Scripture puts our lives into context of the greater Biblical narrative.

Prayer is another action we can take to strengthen our faith, but we must be intentional about it. Prayer is not a one-way conversation; it is a constant dialogue with our Creator and should be treated as such. If we speak to God, but don’t listen for His often-quiet response, we may focus too much on our own needs and not enough on God’s will for our lives.

Scripture and prayer:these are familiar comforts during difficult times in our lives. But what do we do when the scriptures aren’t speaking to us? What path can we take when we are having a challenging time discerning God’s will? God created us to be social creatures – to interact and engage with one another to overcome struggles. What would the peace movements of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Gandhi have been without those marching and fasting to keep moving forward? We need one another more than we tend to realize. When we are struggling, it can be hard to ask our neighbors for help, but sometimes, in the immortal words of Bill Withers, “We all need somebody to lean on.”