Learning to Trust

Today was a good day at church. Nelson was moving a little slow, so I took advantage and decided to walk to church. Asher wanted to come, too, so we walked. He was just chattering away. It was a really good way to get my head and heart in the right place.

Our lesson in ABF was the “Okay” of prayer. Following up our past two lessons on “why?” today we considered the position of acceptance. We started by looking at Job and his response in chapter one: The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord. Dr. Flora went on to present Paul’s life and how he responded to his light and momentary troubles. Please read that and understand it ‘s quite tongue in cheek. Paul describes the extraordinarily horrific trials he went through in his time of service (see 2 Corinthians 11:23-29).

As a class we were invited to consider people we knew who struggled with overwhelming circumstances and came out on the side of faith. I immediately thought of the mother of one of my good friends in high school. She died as the result of the ravages of breast cancer leaving behind five children between the ages of five and fifteen. Her sweet, encouraging spirit touched my life and her words have been foundational to my faith: never give up. No matter what, never give up.

Right now, I feel pretty overwhelmed. There are so many directions I can go. And while I’m familiar with some of what I think I want to do, I feel like I’m walking completely into the dark. I don’t know how to give up, but I’m not sure how to go on either.

Then I found these verses:
8 We think you ought to know, dear brothers and sisters,[a] about the trouble we went through in the province of Asia. We were crushed and overwhelmed beyond our ability to endure, and we thought we would never live through it. 9 In fact, we expected to die. But as a result, we stopped relying on ourselves and learned to rely only on God, who raises the dead…And we are confident that he will continue to deliver us. (2 Corinthians 1:8-10)

A God who can raise the dead is worthy of my trust. I can rely on that even when I can’t see where my next foot will fall.

Two more thoughts were quite powerful for me. The first thing had to do with answered prayer. We talk a lot about it, and even more about the times when we think our prayers aren’t answered. But the teacher posed this question: what about unprayed answers? What about the times when grace abounds when we weren’t even looking for it?

And finally, did you ever hear that there is only one door for joy and pain to enter your heart? If you close the door to one (typically pain) then you close the door to the other, joy. After Job’s wife, totally exasperated, told Job to curse God and die, Job responds with a question: shall we take the good and not the bad? Job may not have understood why things were happening the way they were, and he may not even have been ready or able to say “okay”, but he was willing to trust God with his questions, his anger, his agony, and his future. I can relate to that.