“The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart trusts in him, and he helps me.  My heart leaps for joy, and with my song I praise him.”I am using the same scripture verse as yesterday because re reading it, there is so much more to it.  I am in awe of scripture lately.  I never realized how amazing it was before.  I have read the Bible before and I enjoyed a lot of it.  There are some parts that are hard to get through, like Leviticus and all the genealogy parts.  However, until listening to it this year with Father Mike Schmitz, where he takes the time to explain something about what he read each day, I never really saw it, or understood it like I do now.  Also, taking the time to examine just a few verses each day, is also helping me see how much God speaks to us through His words in the Bible.Yesterday I talked about the first part of this verse, “The Lord is my strength and my shield;” and that is so true and important for us to remember.  I was thinking there was the second part of this which was about joy.  However, there are three sentences in this verse and each one seems important for us to look at.  The second part of this verse says, “my heart trusts in him, and he helps me.”  There is that word again.  Trust.  How many of us struggle with that word?  Trust is a funny things.  Sometimes we struggle to trust people because we have been hurt or let down one to many times.  This makes sense, we learn from our experiences.  If we have put our trust in someone and they have let us down before, it makes it hard to trust them the next time.  Also, if we grew up in a home that did not have a lot of trust, then we will naturally be reluctant to trust.  Our default settings are created from our past experiences.  If we grew up being about to trust those around us, then we will trust more freely.  If we grew up without having that trust, then it will be harder for us to trust others.  The reason I say that these are our default settings is because you can always change if you choose to.  I know people that grew up in homes that did not have a lot of love or trust and yet they chose to work on themselves so their children wouldn’t grow up in the same kind of environment.  I have been surprised to learn over the last several years how much of our lives are run on auto pilot.  How much of our day we just do the things we have always done and we don’t even think about what we are doing.  I don’t even think we are aware of most decisions that we are making.  I just did a quick internet search to see how many decisions we make in a day and found an article that says we make about 35,000 decisions in one day.  Can you imagine that?  I think most of them are made on auto pilot, we aren’t aware that we are making a decision.  And if you have set up good routines or habits, then is a great way to ensure better choices.  What if you haven’t?  When your alarm goes of you have so many options of what you could do.  You could hit snooze, you could turn it off and go back to bed, you could get up.  Then once you decide what to do, you then have a whole host of new decisions to make.  When looking up the amount of decisions we make it a day a found a quote that I think fits perfect here.  John C. Maxwell famously put it—“Life is a matter of choices, and every choice you make makes you.”  The reason I am telling you this is because once we become of aware of something, we can decide if we want to change it or not.  Maybe you are happy with all the choices you are making, even the automatic ones, if so, that is great!  If not, now that you are aware of how many choices you are making each day, you could consciously choose to make better choices, ones that will lead you closer to heaven.  If you are unhappy with your relationship with God, or if you wish it would be better, ask yourself, are my choices helping my relationship or hurting it.  Ok, I feel that may have been a tangent, but it was an important one.  Back to the main point which is the verse, “my heart trusts in Him and He helps me.”  Trust in God is different from trust in others.  Others can let us down.  We are imperfect humans living in an imperfect world.  No matter how hard we try, we don’t always get it right.  However, God is not human and He never lets us down.  His promises are the real deal and He will always keep them.  We don’t have to worry about that.  We don’t have to wonder if He will let us down or break His promise.  We can trust that He will follow through on what He says.  I know that just saying that we can trust God, does not mean that we will automatically start trusting God.  Trust is something that many of us have been taught needs to be earned.  We can’t just override all that we were taught through our experiences and from those that influenced us growing up and suddenly start trusting God. Maybe you grew up in a home where trust came easily, or you have had plenty of experiences where you have put your trust in God and He has shown that He is trustworthy.  I hope many of you can say this.  However, if this is not you, don’t worry.  Even if you struggle with trust, you can increase your trust in God if you choose to. I feel like I need to explain why trusting God is so important.  So, if you were just asking yourself this question, this is for you.  The verse says, “my heart trusts in Him and He helps me.”  How many of us could use a little help in our lives?  We could all use a lot more than a little help in our lives.  God wants to help us, He is there and ready to help us.  However, if we don’t trust Him enough to ask for His help, then He is not going to step in and help.  It is not that we need to trust Him completely for Him to help, but we need to trust at least enough to ask Him.  Trust can be scary because it make us vulnerable.  I think this may be why we try to solve everything ourselves.  If we don’t rely on anyone else then we won’t be hurt when they let us down.  I get it.  Being vulnerable is difficult, more so for some than others.  However, you never have to worry about that with God.  God will never let you be vulnerable with Him, put your trust in Him, and then not come through.  He is too good of a God for that.  The thought that just came to mind is “be foolish for Christ.”  He will not leave you hanging.  This is why so many miracles have happened all over the world.  People have taken that leap of faith, been vulnerable, trusted in God and He came through.  He did not leave them hanging.  It says in Mark 11:22-23 ““Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “Truly I tell you, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in their heart but believes that what they say will happen, it will be done for them.”  This is so crazy for me to wrap my head around.  I continue to pray for this kind of faith.  I am definitely not there yet.  But, do you see what I mean my “be foolish for Christ?”  It seems to foolish that we would tell a mountain to throw itself into the sea, however, if we truly believed, we could do it.  I can’t think of any reason why we would need to send a mountain into the sea.  However, I am sure we all have something that we could use God’s help with.  So, how do we learn to trust God with this unfailing trust that He will come through.  I have been asking myself this question for a long time now.  I definitely don’t have the complete answer so please reach out and let me know if you know of any ways to increase your trust in the Lord.  I have found a few ways that have helped me, so I will share those with you now.  First, I found a prayer called the Litany of Trust.  I started saying this every day and did so several months.  I found this incredibly helpful in strengthening my trust.  I think the main reason for this is not necessarily what the prayer says, although it is is great and does give you a better understanding of what trust is, but rather the fact that I was asking God every day to increase my trust.  For it says in Matthew 7:7-8 “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.”  If you ask God for something He is going to give it to you.  If you ask for increased trust, He will increase your trust.  This may seem too simple, but I bet we would be surprised at how many people really want something but do not ask for it for one reason or another.  One main reason I don’t ask for things is because I didn’t know I needed them or it didn’t occur to me that I could ask for that.  This is the case for both trust in the Lord and the Holy Boldness I talked about in a previous episode.  Once I realized these were things I could ask God for, I did, and He came through, because He always does.  I know I keep saying that, and I will continue to keep saying it because even if you get nothing out of this podcast, I hope you get that God will ALWAYS come through for you.The second way that I have increased my trust is by reading scripture.  Reading about God’s promises and how He has kept them over an over again has helped me to see that He will do the same for us.  It says in Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus is the same yesterday, today and forever.”  If He kept His promises before He will keep them now.  Reading scripture was not only helpful because it proved He has always kept His promises, it was also helpful in teaching me what His promises are.  Also, the more you read scripture, the more you get to know God.  The more you know about someone, the more you know whether or not you can trust them.  The more you learn about God, the more you will see that He is trustworthy.  These are just two ways that I increased and strengthened my trust in the Lord.  I am sure there are many more.  However, I think the biggest one is to just ask God for more trust.  If you ask Him for it, He will give it to you. He will probably also place on your heart some ways that will help you.  Sometimes I think that we make things more complicated than we have to.  I think if we ask God for something He will give it to us.  So instead of us trying to figure out how to get more trust, just ask God and then listen to what He has to say.  He will lead you to what will work for you.  We are all different and just because these two things worked for me, doesn’t mean they are the best for you.  God will know what is best for you.  Will you ask Him?  Will you start to trust God more fully?  Let's ask him together, right now.Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that you bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord we ask you to increase our trust in you. Lord you know where each one of us is at, you know our past, you know what we've been through and you know what it will take to overcome that so we can trust in you completely. Lord God we want to trust in you with all of our heart. We want to not doubt anything. Please help us Lord.  We know that you have said ask and you shall receive and so this is us asking Lord. We ask that you increase and strengthen our trust in you. We ask that you give us the trust to be foolish for you Lord.  We love you so much and we want to be able to trust and to ask you when we need help Lord. You are so amazing and we're so grateful that you never let us down. We asked all of this in accordance with your well and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen.