Trusting God as My Defender

Believe it or not, the cardinal sightings for us continue. Last week I received more to the puzzle, something that has been staring at me most of the year, yet I failed to recognize His message for me.

I was in a meeting confessing my double mindedness. I preach a message of surrender and yet for most of this year have held on to anger and mistrust towards God because financially, things did not work out the way I thought things would this year. At all. Instead of praising Him, I turned my back and actually made the situation worse through denial, spending anyway, and just pure rebellion.

As I confessed and repented, the ladies looked at me and smiled. One of them, who also has been seeing cardinals and having them dive bomb her, related her cardinal revelation with me by saying,

"Just how many times do you need to see a cardinal before you realize God is asking you to trust Him as your defender?"

It was so simple and dead on it was hysterical. As we googled cardinal earlier in the year, we learned the male cardinal is a defender and if I saw a male cardinal trying to get my attention once, it happened a dozen times. He dive bombed me at least three times.

And yet my anger and rebellion continued.

All the way home I kept praying the words, "Your banner over me is love and I want to trust You as my defender."

It's a process for me, I know this won't be an overnight change unless God deems it.

But I'm aware now.

He is my defender, and yours. And I really want to trust Him that way.

Do you?

Julie Arduini is a surrendered writer with her own blog, http://thesurrenderedscribe.blogspot.com/. A graduate of the Christian Writers Guild, she also blogs for the Christian Writers Forum Sundays as the mommy blogger. She is active with FaithWriters and has several writings ready to publish in different books and anthologies in 2008-09. One of the books will be a quote in Kathy Vick's Simon and Schuster/Howard's gift book, "Run Like a Girl."You can also find Julie the third Wednesday of each month over at Take Root and Write with her column, Finding Freedom through Surrender. She facilitates a group by the same name at the sister social networking site, Christian Women Take Root.