My belief in God grows with the people showing up in my life looking like god

There's a popular Christian song out call 'surrounded.' I've heard several artists and groups sing it. I heard it while I was running yesterday. It's not a terribly complex song when it comes to the lyrics. Essentially, the song is an ongoing repetition of these words:

This is how I fight my battles. It may look like I'm surrounded but I'm surrounded by you.

When I heard this song yesterday, it made me wonder. How is it that when some people are in battles, to them it looks like they are surrounded by God, which suggests they feel surrounded by power and hope and love, while other people simply feel surrounded. They feel surrounded and they feel like life is closing in on them.

Why is that, I wondered.

Why is it when I feel like I'm battling life these days, that song resonates with me. Why is it that I don't see a world closing in and threatening to destroy me, and instead I see a God reaching in with a loving hand and assuring me he's got me.

As Christians, I think some days we feel like that perception is as simple as belief. We think that if you believe in God you instantly go from feeling suffocated and hopeless to liberated and happily ever after.

I think we're guilty, sometimes, of looking at people fighting battles in a way that doesn't look so Godly to us, and we walk up on them in their battles and shake our heads and say those people need some God in their lives. And then we walk away with some level of disgust as if we weren't supposed to be that God in their lives.

The battles in my life changed the day I wanted hope in my life and there was a crowd of people surrounding me saying let us show you the way. In time, I came to discover those people looked like God in my life. They didn't show up because I suddenly started believing in God. My belief in God suddenly strengthened because they showed up.

One of the things I've long said after working with groups of at-risk kids who were hopeless is that a group of hopeless people can talk themselves into some destructive ideas of what moving forward looks like.

They can come up with some destructive ideas to feel less surrounded. Ideas they genuinely believe will leave them feeling less suffocated in life. I learned that when you spend your whole life being abused and taken advantage of and mistreated in ways I never could have imagined, the idea of fighting your battles can begin to look a lot like the battles that have been fighting against you.

I used to watch these kids, and witness their poor and destructive choices, and silently and sadly sometimes out loud I called them nothing but a bunch of thugs.

Then one day I started listening to their stories. I started listening to them tell me about the battles they'd faced in life and realized they weren't nearly as much thugs as they were kids who'd spent much of their lives being thugged.

I noticed when the other counselors and I started listening to them and being their allies instead of their enemies, they felt less surrounded. The way they fought their battles started looking remarkably different.

I confess, it felt good to call those kids thugs. It felt like they were getting what they deserved.

But that's the difference for us Christians, isn't it. When it feels like we're surrounded by God, we know we're surrounded by someone who isn't interested in giving us what we deserve, we're surrounded by someone interested in giving us what we need to feel loved and like we belong and like we're equally appreciated in this journey of life.

But that God surrounding us isn't represented by a belief. That God is represented by real people surrounding us. People who understand life has already given us way more punishment than we deserve. People deeply committed to doing the hard work of listening and reaching and walking with us toward hope.

People who make all the difference in what it means to feel surrounded.