How many times — especially in challenging times have you asked yourself 'Where is God in all of this?' Well, you are not alone my friend. But as quickly as that question is asked, you must get rid of it just as quickly. And I'll tell you why — I have discovered that God is as present as we believe and accept Him to be.

 The human reaction to anything challenging is to look at the appearance of the thing — go by how difficult it looks; think about what people will think more than anything else. So we think that because we still feel some pain that we are not healed. We believe that because the money has not shown up in our wallets that the need is not met; we may feel lonely today and tell ourselves that our prayers for love have not been answered. In other words, we choose to believe what things look like and go so far as to think that God is not with us.

And so we start to feel sorry for ourselves and cry our eyes out. Look I know because I have been there and I am not sure that we are ever totally out of it — the doubting-of-God challenge — but we have to get past that panicky stage or we will never really experience growth in our lives.

It may look like God is either deaf — and we demonstrate our belief by praying about the same thing over and over. I loved what Jesus did you know — He gave thanks before He saw what He prayed for. And that is the main example we should follow for our faith to be strengthened. We must also ask ourselves why we pray if we will turn around and doubt.

People have spoken of God in derogatory terms and that riles me so. But I eventually calm down because for one thing God needs no defending and secondly we will experience as much of God as we allow our faith to receive God and answered prayer. Hello. Do you want to read that again? A lovely example of our receiving from God or knowing for sure that He is always with us, is the one where the story is told of someone who was given a cheque for a large sum of money but never cashed it — and continued to say that he was broke. So many times we already have what we pray for but doubt blocks the blessings.

There is always the temptation to do what is easier and doubting is easier than exercising faith, but what we should concern ourselves with is the results of either practice. We prefer to believe that God is somewhere out there than to believe that He is always with us because our doubting thinking makes Him inaccessible to us — leaving us in an uncomfortable comfort zone.

When we pray it is not so much as to 'bring down God' as much as it is to strengthen our faith, so we pray 'Help my unbelief' because that is what will open up the windows of our inner heaven so that the blessings will flow.

'God is not dead; He is still alive. God's not dead, He is still alive. I can feel Him in my hands, I can feel feet; I can feel Him all over me.' What does that mean then? We sing that but do we believe that God is always with us, all over us, all around us? Then why do we cry so much then? Oh I know that it hurts when things look like they will never get better, I know. But 'looks like' is not the report that we want to believe at all, because it is not the report of the Lord.

"God is good." We say that all the time, but at the slightest sign of what we believe to be bad, we put our faith in that 'bad' and speak of evil and how bad people are and the bad that others do. And the more we speak of all the bad there is in the world, the stronger our faith in bad gets. Here's what I liken doing that to — cooking what you want to be a really tasty 'pot' but adding ingredients that will spoil the pot. Hello.

Know that God is in your spiritual, mental, emotional, relational and financial pots as much as you allow Him in them, because God is everywhere.

So let us walk on water because weak faith panics, growing faith prays and seasoned faith walks on water in the midst of the storms.

Much love.