Are we cultivating a secret garden?

I have noticed a tendency in myself (and I never think I’m unique) to toss God my second- and third-tier problems but not my first-tier ones. It needs no debate that God invites our problems as well as our worship, because He cares for everything about us, down to the hairs on our heads:

“… casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7, ESV).

And so I find myself regularly asking God for a good visit with a friend, or traveling mercies, or blessings on an important meeting. Some of my requests stretch even to the miraculous: the salvation of my children, the healing of my neighbor with advanced cancer, the return of national revival. Somehow I have no trouble trusting God to answer these petitions.

But what is very odd is that there are other personal matters—matters that can eat at me all day long—that it never occurs to me to pray for, matters of deep-seated, lifelong self-image and fatalistic self-evaluations. Instead of articulating these to God, I entertain their miseries in a secret garden, as if God can do nothing about them and I must simply bear them and do the best I can under this sentence until the day I die.

When I realized this, I saw that it was nothing but rank unbelief. I have been throwing God a bone, as it were, “casting cares on him” that I thought he could do something about, but withholding those that I deemed impossible to change.

Even as Christians, people indwelled by the Holy Spirit, it is possible to believe the lies of Satan for years and to never challenge him. Would that we were half as good at believing the Bible as we are the lies of the devil! Instead, we let negative self-evaluations nibble at us all day unchallenged. The case is even worse because we hardly see these destructive mental themes, as they become like elevator music in the soul. And yet they color every hour and every interaction.

No wonder Paul the apostle enjoins a certain periodic self-evaluation and introspection, to see if we are really believing God, or just playing at it. Do we believe that Jesus is in us, and that He wants to set us free (Galatians 5:1) and to give us joy (5:22)? Or are we harboring and cultivating a secret garden of misery and that we keep off limits to God because we feel our problem are impossible for even Him?

“Examine yourselves, to see whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Or do you not realize this about yourselves, that Jesus Christ is in you?” (2 Corinthians 13:5, ESV)

Dig deep, and give God your first-tier problems, the ones nobody knows but you.