So many of our catastrophes never come to pass. We project disaster and we do not allow for the working out of solutions that will happen as the days tick forward. We think that the worst will happen, only to find out, living through it, that what happens actually may be far closer to the best.
What I am talking about here is the silver lining. We may get tired of trying to look for one, but the truth is that one is always there. Inside every adversity lies opportunity. Take the dicey matter of finances. We always think that what we want is more money, when what we may really want is a gut-level assurance that God will provide — and this is something that often comes to us not in periods of abundance but in times of shortfall. It is when we do not know where the rent money is coming from that we notice the “miracle” that puts the cash into our hands. This is not to say that we need to manufacture misery in order for God to rescue us, merely to say that when we are rescued, we have a tendency to know the face of our rescuer and that face is God.
It is during hard times that we come to rely on God and that is a reliance that we can encourage in ourselves at all times. We do not need to be broke to ask God to help us with our money. Consider the flow of the natural world. Supply comes just where it is needed. We can ask God to be for us such a source of supply. We can ask God to make us attuned to our financial seasons, to cue us when we are free to spend and when we should curtail our spending. We can ask God to take away our fear of financial insecurity and to direct us as to where, from what corner, our prosperity might best come from.
We live in an abundant universe. Our share of that abundance comes to us as we rely upon God. Whenever we make our employer into our source — in other words, when we make our employer into God — we enter a period of fear, for our reliance is not squarely where it belongs. We are intended to rely upon God. God intends us good, and we are tutored by God daily in how that good can come to us. God moves in mysterious ways, but his ways become less mysterious as we try to draw closer to him. When we believe that we will be cared for, we fixate less upon exactly how.
— Julia Cameron, Faith and Will, p. 20-21