"Be still and know that I am God"

This is pretty long, so if you don't read the whole thing,  I won't be offended!:)
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Why do you believe in what you do? Is it because you've always grown up believing it, and it just seems like the right thing to do? Or maybe it gives you a sense of purpose?

As a little kid, there is really no need to question your belief. I mean, most five-year-olds have such limited experience... not enough to know doubts in faith. And, honestly, how amazing is a little person's faith?! When I was five, I don't think I even knew there were people who didn't believe in God. As I've gotten older though, I've had to face the fact that faith is hard. But what is faith without it being hard? If life were easy, and all the answers obvious, faith would have no meaning... It wouldn't need to exist. God wants us to seek Him and created us to need Him. The best place we can be is where we are so aware of our deep and utter need for our Heavenly Father... Where we know we are broken and seek Him for answers that the world can't provide and we can't "figure out" on our own. Then, when we place our troubles on Him and trust Him with our whole hearts, though we may not understand, he gives us peace. This is faith.

The most dangerous thing I think we can be is "lukewarm" in our faith. Complacent and unaware of our need for God. We lose activeness and stop seeking the Lord, instead hoping we can run our own lives in this world as we see fit while still being "good enough Christians" to have a place in the Kingdom. This is where I fear many Christians have found themselves in today's world. There could be various reasons for this, but perhaps it's because they never knew why they were following God... It just offered them purpose and spiritual stability because Christianity has been so accepted in the United States. But what happens to their faith when it becomes somewhat UN-acceptable? Will they follow the crowd because that was the backbone of their faith in the first place? What happens when the United States fails to recognize Christianity as the key to our existence? Are we to fall as well?

We must remember that the U.S., though a strong nation built on biblical beliefs, is of the world and is certainly, though we may not prefer to admit, broken, just as we are broken people. It's inevitable that we are to see our nation fail in some way in our lifetime. But this does not mean our faith is to fail. Faith isn't built on a nation... It's built on a personal relationship with God. At the end of this life, when we go home to our Father, the only thing that lasts is our relationship with Him, and that's the only thing that will matter! So as children of the Lord, we must "fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" 2 Corinthians 4:18

But, as for our time on this planet, we as followers of Jesus want to make this truth that we are so joyful of known to everyone else. So, what do we do? Our country is divided and people are turned against one another. We, as a family of believers, have a voice and the Creator of the universe on our side! But our Strength is something that the rest of the world may be unable to see, considering we can't physically see God. And since non-believers don't know God, we may struggle with how we are to combat their worldly arguments with Heavenly answers.

The single greatest instruction we have been given by our loving Father is love. Not control, not strength, not justice, or success, or knowledge, or anything else. Love is the key. We are to love our Father and then love others. It may not result in the answers we expect or hope for, like the United States one day uniting in the Truth... but it will result in God's ultimate plan of bringing us to Him, our ultimate Treasure.

 God knows our pain and our fears, and He knows the condition of our country, but he also knows where we are going and how joyful and full of LIFE we will be when we are united with Him! So  trust in Him and do not lose faith! Psalm 46:10 says "Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth."

We are to be persecuted, but He never sets us up for battle without providing us with all that we need.
I pray that, the more we struggle, the closer we will draw to God. We as a nation may falter, and we as a people may fail, but our God is everlasting and we know he will prevail.