Trust

It never fails to amaze me how God works it out so that what I read is exactly what I need to hear. I've been reading Brennan Manning's "The Ragamuffin Gospel" on and off for awhile. It's the kind of book I need to let sink in before I move on to the next chapter. Sometimes even a paragraph causes me to stop and absorb, ponder, worship...

I've been giving some thought lately about what it really means to trust God. Wayne Jacobsen's article and the CD's that George passed on to us have really got us thinking about it. So, the other night I was beating myself up regarding some of my many shortcomings, as well as some decisions about our family's future and I came across this:

"Second, our response to the love of Jesus demands trust. Do we rely on our resume or the gospel of grace? How do we cope with failure? Grace tells us that we are accepted just as we are. We may not be the kind of people we want to be, we may be a long way from our goals, we may have more failures than achievements, we many not be wealthy or powerful or spiritual, we may not even be happy, but we are nonetheless accepted by God, held in his hands. Such is the promise to us in Jesus Christ, a promise we can trust."

For those who feel their lives are a grave disappointment to God, it requires enormous trust and reckless, raging confidence to accept that the love of Christ knows no shadow of alteration or change. When Jesus said, 'Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened,' he assumed we would grow weary, discouraged, and disheartened along the way. These words are a touching testimony to the genuine humanness of Jesus. He had no romantic notion of the cost of discipleship. He knew that following him was as unsentimental as duty, as demanding as love. He knew that physical pain, the loss of loved ones, failure, loneliness, rejection, abandonment, and betrayal would sap our spirits; that the day would come when faith would no longer offer any drive reassurance, or comfort; that we would echo the cry of Teresa of Avila: 'Lord, if this is the way you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few!'

Manning goes on to point out that as long as a disciple is relying on "tangible reassurances" and craving "spiritual consolations" we are trusting in the response of God and not God himself. He points out that "What the disciple has not learned is that tangible reassurances, however valuable they may be, cannot create trust, sustain it, or guarantee any certainty of its presence. Jesus calls us to hand over our autonomous self in unshaken confidence. When the craving for reassurances is stifled, trust happens."

This is why I cannot rely solely on how I feel as a determination of my actions. I don't know about you, but I have been to the place where God is silent; where there is no tangible evidence of his presence. When I can't see, when I can't feel, when I don't experience, when there is no clear path, when there is no right answer, when there is no reassurance...These are the times of authentic trust!