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We are all troubled one way or another. Doesn’t matter who we are, what we do, how young or old we are, how rich or poor we may be, we are all troubled. Just that some of us don’t want to face up to it and acknowledge it and others just seem to be bogged down completely by troubles.

What are troubles anyway? First of all, troubles are not external to us. Two persons can be in the same situation but one may be troubled and the other not. Troubles, my friends, are internal things. They are heart matters. They affect us on the inside. And what is inside are things that we think about and question all the time. Sometimes, we can’t help but think of all kinds of questions and get ourselves all worked up over nothing. But it will appear very real to us. Very, very real indeed.

And these troubles are there because we are unable to resolve them. We are unable to depend on anything we know that can take care of them to make them go away. This is the root of our troubles. We feel them real inside of us because we can’t figure a way to take care of it properly and make them not a problem anymore. We always think of our own ways, our own strength, to solve them and we don’t think we can. We doubt our own ability. We don’t know what to do. That’s why we are troubled. Think about it.

A man in a sanitarium always looks happy. He smiles all the time. Sometimes, when we see someone smiling all the time, especially in difficult situations, we tend to call them insane. Isn’t that right? But have you ever thought why he is smiling? Because he has no troubles. He has nothing in his heart that he cannot resolve by having dependence on something to fix it. In fact, he has no fear because he believes he has solved all of them or he can solve them. They are not problems at all and it doesn’t bug him. He has no troubles because he believes in something, in this case, himself, to fix it. So he can leap off the cliff for all that matters and believes that he can fly. He will at no time think that he can’t and since he is not troubled, he does it with all boldness.

Now, we who are not in the sanitarium think that we are normal. But being normal means we are laden with troubles in our hearts. That’s the honest truth, isn’t it? Let’s face it. Who in this world has no troubles? Someone said, show me a person without troubles and I will show you someone who is insane. There is some truth to that.

Jesus said to them to NOT be troubled. Easy to say, isn’t it? We too tell our friends not to be troubled when they are. But they can’t hear us. When we are in trouble, we too will not hear. What we feel inside is very strong and they can become overbearing to the point where we feel we have a big rock pressed upon us. That’s trouble. And words are not going to talk it away. Not then, not now, not ever.

Jesus did not stop there by merely telling them not to be troubled. He said to them to believe in God and also believe in Him. You see, the way to solve troubles is to have faith in God and in Christ. It is to move your dependence away from yourself and place it in Christ. That’s the concept and it’s not a theory. The reality is that this is very much dependent on our relationship with Christ to make that trouble go away. How much faith we have in Christ is a derivative of how intimate we are in our relationship with Him. And how intimate we are with Christ will show how much faith we have to remove the dependence away from ourselves to Him.