One of my best friends from college and I started a special tradition almost four years ago now. We had always kept in touch after graduating but we desired to start a new way of connecting that involved not only just updating each other on our personal lives but also growing together in our faith in Jesus. We started “faith chats” where we video chat every other Wednesday and discuss various topics of faith. In the week leading up to our faith chat, we each write about a topic in a shared Google doc. In preparation for our chat, we read each other’s entries and reflect on what the other has written. We start each of our faith chats with prayer and then discuss our topics and reflections for the week.
It’s been amazing to witness how we have grown in our faith in the last four years, and I know our biweekly faith chats have blessed our journeys both individually and together as friends. Through our discussions, we have shared questions, struggles, encouragement, tears, laughter, despairs, hope, prayers, and much more.
The first year of our faith chats turned out to be a very difficult time, filled with deep emotional pain and challenges in both of our personal lives. Because of this, many of our discussions that year were focused on persisting in faith through suffering. We even deemed one of our chats as “The Suffering Webinar” (while giggling a little about that name) because both of our topics that week were focused on suffering. Throughout that year we discussed a lot about finding comfort in the midst of suffering through Jesus, holding onto faith through pain, and making even the smallest efforts we could to glorify God in the middle of desolation. Towards the end of that first year, we realized how our sort-of unofficial theme for the year had been suffering. And yet, we also felt things shifting, that maybe God was helping us shift our perspectives on what we had experienced.
We decided it would be cool to come up with a theme for the next year, and in light of this shift we were feeling, we decided that the perfect theme would be “Changing Our Perspectives.” In that second year of our chats, we reflected on how our perspectives on various things in life needed growth and change in order to deepen our faith in God.
It was neat how towards the end of that year, we again felt things evolving in our discussions. We started talking about how we not only desired for our perspectives to change, but also for our hearts to be transformed by those changes. So there came our theme for our third year- “Transformation.” Throughout our third year (most of 2023), we worked towards transforming our hearts and minds to grow in love and faith in God. The thing about transformation, which didn’t take long to realize, is that it’s really a lifelong journey. Our hearts will always have more room for transformation. There will always be parts of ourselves that need to become more like Jesus.
Towards the end of our third year, we decided to come to our faith chat with some ideas for our next year’s theme. Given this truth about transformation and how the last three years’ themes had arisen, I was very curious how this next one would come to be. It felt like the last three themes had come about so naturally through the Holy Spirit, like each new theme was the natural next progression in our journey. During our chat, we each shared the ideas we had come up with while pondering themes separately. After sharing our thoughts, we realized how two of our ideas aligned so perfectly together. My idea was part of a Bible verse that had popped up in my mind while I was contemplating themes in silence. The phrase that had come to my mind was “Not a spirit of fear” from 2 Timothy 1:7 (“For God has not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.”) My best friend’s idea was focused on trusting in the strength of God through our own human weakness. She summed this up with, “I am weak, but He is strong.” We talked about how these two ideas were perfect given the fears we have for the upcoming year in our lives and how we want to find strength in God through it all. So put together, we decided our new theme for this year would be “Not a Spirit of Fear: I am Weak but He is Strong.”
It’s amazing to see how once again the Holy Spirit was at work in guiding us, and especially given where we started, it’s very special to have this new theme. It’s a blessing to witness how God has moved through our lives and helped us grow in faith. We now want to challenge ourselves to walk trusting in God’s strength and choosing to move through life loving and glorifying God despite the fears we may feel. While going through painful times, there may be a season where you lie down with that pain and let God comfort you. But each day He strengthens you, works to change your perspectives and slowly transforms your heart day by day as He will throughout your life. And somewhere in all of that He may bring you to a season where you will be challenged to walk forward trusting in His strength He has shown you and moving through the challenges of life despite your fears.
I pray that anyone reading this may remember that God has not given you a spirit of fear and that you may find strength in God no matter what season of life you’re in.