Why Is Life So Hard?

Life is like a wheel. That’s what God showed me and I’m going to share with you about this wheel. The outer circle is where almost all people live. The reason they live there, in this illustration, is because they want to be, or they need to be, they have to be 100% in control. Just think of the outer rim as being a 100% in control. Now I realize that not everybody is 100% in control, but for this illustration it’s really going to make a lot of sense if you’ll look at it and say, “Okay, I’ll go along with him, 100% control.” The way that we … When we live on the rim, we really … Now when I say 100% control, we call our own shots, we actually decide what we’re going to do. We decide what the situation is and we make a decision, so we are in control. There’s a reason for that.

Now I want you too look at that perpendicular line that’s going down to the smaller circle which I have said is The Hub. Now The Hub, for this illustration, is where God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit reside. God’s kingdom is a part of that smaller circle called The Hub. Now if you notice that when you are at The Hub, what happens is if you’re in 0% control, you know who’s in control? God. God is 100% in control in his kingdom. Well that makes sense doesn’t it? It’s very interesting to see what happens there. If we were to go down the perpendicular line and we call that line trust, then the more we can trust God, the less control we have, and the more we can give up control of our lives. That’s a very, very important situation. The key to this thing is, is that if we give up more and more control then we give that control to God. That’s really critical.

Here’s the way Jesus said it. He said it in Matthew 6:25, “For whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, but the person that will, give up their life for my sake, they will find it.” Now I don’t know about you but I, even as a pastor, I wondered about that. It was a verse of scripture that was an enigma to me. What do you mean, “Give up my life?” What do you mean that if I give it up I find it? If I try to not give it up, then I lose it. Well I’ll tell you what. The wheel and the circles are going to help us a lot, because here’s what I believe this verse is all about. I didn’t see this until God showed me this wheel. What I believe is half of what Jesus is saying is, if you will trust me, for my sake, if you’ll do what I ask you to do which is trust God more, then you will have a better life. He said I came to give you life. John 10:10, “I came to give you life and life more abundantly.”

Well if you are not living the abundant life and if life is hard and life is not working well, one of the things that is probably happening is that you are not able to trust. If you’re not able to trust, that’s very understandable. I’m going to explain that why, please don’t beat yourself up. I believe most Christians cannot trust God and there’s a reason for that. It’s not an accident, trust me. What happens here is that we end up hearing sermons, we end up hearing, as pastors and teachers and everybody saying, “Just let go and let God.” Huh? Let go and let God? Why is it so difficult, have you ever wondered? I wondered for years. I couldn’t trust God. I absolutely thought God was going to hurt me. You say, “What?” God sent his only begotten son and all the rest of that. Well that’s all true but experientially I couldn’t trust God. I couldn’t trust him and there was a reason for that.

The reason for that is because of what happened to me as a child. What happened to you as a child probably was very similar. As children, we counted on our parents as babies and infants and toddlers 100%. We were out of control. Guess what? When we were out of control oftentimes our parents, doing the … Let’s get this straight, they did the best they could. My dad and mom did the best they could, but here’s what happened. I was abused. You may have been abused. I was abused physically, very much emotionally, and I’m so sorry to say this but some people get abused sexually. That’s a horrible, horrible thing. Some people also get neglected. They have a parent there but the parent’s not emotionally available. That’s happened to so many people. What happens when we have abuse and neglect, you know what happens? We can’t trust our parents, particularly our fathers. Sometimes mothers but particularly fathers. If we can’t trust our fathers and mothers when they’re the authority figures in our life, who are we going to trust? Well you got it, we trust ourselves. Guess what? We need to be in control. Why? Because we found out that when we were not in control we got pain, and we don’t want any of that anymore. We say, “I’m going to be in control.” We think that that’s a great way to live, problem is it doesn’t work.

I’m going to explain why in just a minute. Here we are as babies, toddlers, and infants, and even as children grow up and we are feeling pain. We decide we don’t want to do that again. We can’t trust so we can’t trust God. God, he’s the ultimate authority. If I can’t trust my mom and dad, I can’t certainly trust God. Well what happens is that brain scientists have called what happened to us trauma. Now trauma … We’ve all been traumatized. You may say, “Well, I’ve not really been traumatized.” Yes you have and I’ll tell you why. The reason is because the definition is much broader than you thought it was. Brain scientists have defined trauma as anytime our central nervous system is overwhelmed. Well, let me tell you something. Behavioral scientists have seen a child wandering away from a mother, if they’re young enough and they can’t see the mother quickly enough, they will start to go into panic, they will start to go into an overload condition. They will actually feel like they are going to die. That’s called trauma, that’s trauma. Well that happens to every kid, but most children have been very, very traumatized. If we’ve been traumatized then we can’t trust God. If we can’t trust God we’re going to live on the rim, 100% in control or controlling our lives. Jesus said we’ll lose our lives, we won’t have great lives, because we really can’t be.

Let me tell you something. This is vitally important. I got to tell you a truth. You can’t be in control. It’s an illusion. We don’t control out lives. It looks like we do but we really don’t because why, because our lives are out of control, because we’re living in fear. When we live in fear of the pain coming back because we don’t want to experience that again, what’s going to happen is we are going to be in a place like Adam and Eve were, hiding from God. Guess what? It’s not going to be good. Satan will be doing far more in our lives than he has a right to. That’s not what we want, that’s not at all what we want.

What is the answer? I always believe that you’ve got to go to the root, the real root. Let’s get that root and then we’ll have better lives. The root in this situation is trauma. If we can heal the trauma in your life like we have in the people’s lives at JoyStones and our church, they you are going to see you having a better life like other people in our church are having the best lives they’ve ever had. Now were they 100% healed from trauma, let me not say that. They are more healed than they’ve ever been, and the people we work with are more healed than they’ve ever been. What I want you to realize today is that we’re trauma experts. We know how to heal trauma. We are experts at healing trauma. God has given us a whole way, lots of many different ways, but a way of repairing it, getting what we didn’t get. Getting the healing we need so desperately from trauma.

Why do we need it? We need it so desperately because if we’re going to fulfill our calls, we’re going to have to trust God. You know why, because he’s got to trust us. He can’t help us, and help us to get down the road without being able to trust us, but we first got to trust him. That’s hard, so we have to get this trauma healed. We have ways to do that. What I want you to do, is I want you to leave your email and tell me you want more information about trauma healing. The trauma that you experience as a child heals. If you’re looking at this on YouTube, this video, or you’re looking at it on Vimeo, then come to JoyStones.org and you will see a lot of different information about healing trauma, a lot of different information on many subjects that you’re going to be very, very interested in.

If you want a better life, if you don’t want life to be so hard, then what I want you to do is leave me your email and tell me you want a better life. We’ll get back to you and we’ll show you the steps that are necessary in order for that to be accomplished. You want a better life, we want a better life for you. We are absolutely committed as a ministry, to help people to have better lives by healing trauma. By healing trauma, that’s what we do. That’s absolutely what you need and that’s what we do.