Trust Isn’t Always Pretty

Trust is a foundational principle for entering into a relationship with God and trust continues to be a foundational principle as we live out that relationship within the context of our circumstances, our relationships, and our emotions, feelings, and thinking.   And “living out” embraces the moments that meld themselves together to form our days, and those days accumulate layer upon layer through the years and decades of “earthly” life with God.  I vividly remember some of the many times, I sang with a congregation or simply pondered the words myself to the old hymn, Trust and Obey.  Trust and obedience were proclaimed as the strengthening pillars of the Christian – walking with Jesus, blessing, happiness, favor, even the delights of God’s love – solidified and enlarged by trusting and obeying.  Obedience has rules to follow and being a rule-follower simplifies the obeying.   Trust though is much more abstract; its parameters lacking clear definition.  It’s even debated – how much is needed, what it can accomplish, what hinders trust from giving us the answers we are looking for.  

Feeling dissatisfied with most of the definitions of trust I have heard, especially those definitions that inject predetermined feelings, I struggled with the whole concept, wanting God to give me something that was real, true to life, and fully dependent on Him.   What I came away with was that trust allows God to love me in all the circumstances of my life, as I draw from Him strength, encouragement, wisdom, direction, enablement – or still more.  Trust is my response to God’s love.  In becoming a believer, I had to trust God’s greatest demonstration of love.  I had to believe that the death of Jesus was an acceptable payment before God for my sin, that it was a free gift God wanted to give to me, and I had to open my own heart and life to receive it.  Trust opens my heart to God.  I trusted Him at salvation, and the answers that life demands require that I continue to trust Him.  I need to allow God to love me in all the circumstances of my life.  That’s“trust.”

Allowing God to love me is trust.  The resources are there because God is there.  As I look to God, allowing Him to love me, He will meet me in the circumstances of my life.   And that is where trust can get really messy.  Trust isn’t pretty when the young mom is told her newborn child is not going to live.  Trust isn’t pretty when the wife who has given all she knows to give, finds out her husband has been having an affair.  Neither is it pretty when differences destroy a friendship, when physical or mental health issues change the whole landscape of a family, when adult children place a call to mom and dad because they are being charged with a crime.  Trust isn’t pretty when an addict struggles and fails, or when the survivor of abuse or abandonment still feels dead inside, but she is crying out to a God she cannot touch or feel, and He seems very, very distant.  Trust is far from words on a page at those times, far from simply a doctrine, or an academic understanding.  Trust at those times is fraught with emotion, and often with pain.  It is soaked with tears, restless nights, and tension filled days.  But it is a trust that believes God is still in the darkness, even when He isn’t heard.  It is a trust that stays at His feet, desperate for His presence, desperate for His answers.  It is a trust that often literally feels the arms of God wrapped around her.  It is a trust that knows God can, and is willing to wait.  And in the midst of such a messy trust, self-sufficiency gone, a heart aware that nothing, absolutely nothing else, can bring any semblance of rationality, in the midst of a brokenness that lies vulnerably and prostrate before her God – in the midst of it all, she can know she is trusting as few others trust.  It isn’t pretty, but it is trust.

                                                                                                                    – Bev

(Related Bible reading: Psalm 13:1-6)