I will probably repeat myself in this post because I am once again going to write about "faith," and I wrote quite a bit about that during the season of testing our family went through in 2009-2010. But I thought it would be good to write about trusting God on the other side of things during a time when I am once again being challenged to trust Him at uncomfortably deep levels. So here's a few things I am learning.
First, more than ever I am aware that "faith" is something that is present in every human being. The question, of course, is where a person chooses to place his/her trust. We exercise enormous amounts of faith every day. We trust other drivers to stay alert and in their own lane of traffic, we trust those who worked on the airplane we are boarding to be responsible, we trust those who prepare our food to exercise good hygiene practices, etc. And, most of all, we trust ourselves and our own perception of things. It's that last truth that creates the challenges for us as we hear God invite us to trust Him. We are conditioned all of our lives to trust "self" and self alone, and this self-trust is so automatic as to be almost invisible and unconsciously exercised. But God invites and challenges us to transfer trust from a very limited and highly ignorant person (that would be you or me!) to Himself, the infinite, all-knowing, completely loving One. Sounds good when we say it, eh? But learning to transfer trust to Him is a lifelong process that is often fought tooth and nail by both our adversary and our self. Big revelation there, eh? We all know this fact all too well. But it does help to bring this to the light, I think. When I realized that I wasn't trying to create faith or generate more faith but rather transfer my trust from self to God, it helped me both to want to do so and made me see how possible it is to trust God (I just shift my trust from unreliable self to totally reliable Papa God!).
Second, "faith" is best built mostly during the good times so that it's there to sustain during the bad times. This isn't what I was taught in church, though. I was told that times of testing come to grow my faith (exercise my faith muscle, etc.). But this isn't what scripture says, and it isn't what life experience teaches us! Trust grows in our lives in response to our experience of another's trustworthiness. We learn to trust another person by their showing us through their actions that they are trustworthy. The more experience we have of their trustworthiness, the more we grow to trust them. Eventually our trust is deep enough that even when they ask us to trust them in something we haven't previously experienced with them, we do so because their character has been revealed through our experience with them up this point. I think you can see how this applies to the God journey, too. And Scripture bears this out, showing us God's trustworthiness over and over again as experienced by people just like us, and telling us that struggles come not to grow our faith but to reveal it in the midst of the test (see, for example, 1 Peter 1:6-7).
But how does the above truth help us? I am learning that paying attention to God's faithfulness during the good times, taking time to be grateful and to reflect on His goodness when things are going well can actually build my trust level in Him in wonderful ways. That is indeed what happened during the season of pain that we went through. The trust that had already grown in our hearts sustained us and invited us to trust in uncharted waters even in the midst of the storm. And God, of course, was also continuing to reveal His trustworthiness during the troubled times in many different ways. (So, in fact, faith can grow during times of testing, too, but that shouldn't be the primary place, in my opinion).
Third, by its very nature, faith is meant to increase and grow in any relationship, and especially in our relationship with God. We were meant to trust God, born for that very purpose because we were born in order to be in relationship with Him! But because increase is part of the journey, we will often find ourselves faced with a new choice to trust God in a new way. Personally my sense of self trust is so deeply ingrained in me that I find God's invitations to trust Him in new ways rather stretching at the very least and downright annoying and scary at the most! Yet the invitation continues all the days of our lives: "Trust in the LORD with all of your heart and don't trust in your own understanding." And so my anxiety becomes God's call to trust Him more deeply, not blindly but based upon His character as revealed by our experiences of His faithfulness and the testimony of many others. (But it's still scary and annoying at times! It wouldn't be faith if the need to trust weren't involved!).
Finally, I have discovered again that it really does help to translate belief, believe and faith as "trust" when we read scripture. There is something wonderfully down to earth and easy to understand about Jesus asking the disciples, "Where is your trust?" instead of "Where is your faith?" Because of our religious conditioning, faith often sounds like a commodity or something we do, whereas "trust" is easy to understand as a relational concept. Try it, you may like it. The word "trust" will fit in all of those places where believe, belief or faith show up.
And so here I am, facing the uncertainty of life in multiple dimensions, with no sure end in sight. But as happened during the painful journey, I hear again the words of Lamentations 3:57 and cannot do otherwise than transfer my trust once again to the One who alone is trustworthy.
Tom, one of Abba's children
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