Trust Again

             Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

 

I’m not a control-freak. Really! If I understand what is going on, and if it’s being handled well, I’m perfectly content to let someone else do it. You can stop laughing and pick yourself up off the floor any time you want to. I’ll bet there are times when you’re the same way. And of course, the problem is that with God, we don’t often understand much of what is going on, and if it’s not being handled well. At least, we’re not handling it well. (“What do you mean, I’m supposed to love that rapist, or that animal abuser, or that person of the other political party or denomination?”)

I memorized this passage years ago, though as usual, I’m iffy on the reference. I don’t so much need to memorize it as I need to live it. Some people talk about moving verses from one’s head to one’s heart, but this is one that needs to be in my head and in every cell in my body. I would do well to put it on sticky notes and signs posted every ten feet throughout my day.

As I once again contemplate the idea of trusting God, I find myself thinking about prepositional phrases. We tend to trust someone with, in, or for something. When there’s no prepositional phrase, it seems as though there must be an infinitive verb. We trust someone to do, to have, to be, to help. While today’s passage says to trust in the Lord, it doesn’t give us the prepositional phrase. Trust in  the Lord in what, for what, with what? In everything, for everything, with everything? OK, but I’m sitting at my desk. There’s no crisis. I don’t think there’s really a doubt or a specific need involved. What am I supposed to trust Him with, for, or in? What am I supposed to trust Him to do?

It comes to mind that there are two kinds of trust. There’s a resting trust, and there’s active trust. We may have a resting trust in our awareness of potentialities. I have a resting trust that the chair I’m sitting in could, if the need arose, break the window and window screen next to me, allowing me to escape if the need arose, but most of the time, I don’t think about the chair being used that way. On the other hand, I have an active trust that if I leave Grace in the trailer with the windows open, she will tear the screen and escape. I either don’t leave, or I close the windows, or I take some other precaution. The fact that I don’t act based on my trust in the chair doesn’t mean I don’t trust it.

I think I can say that I trust God the way I trust my chair more often than I trust Him in a way that results in some action on my part, like my trust of Grace. I can trust my chair to behave consistently with chairs, if only in its having sufficient mass and density that my use of it to break a window will be effective. I can trust my dog to behave consistently with dogs in general, and herself in specific. And, I can trust God to behave like God – though that doesn’t mean that I can trust Him to give me what I want or to agree with me about everything. And when He does something that doesn’t fit what I believed I could trust Him to do, I can trust that there’s a good reason.

Which means that I can trust that I still trust, even when there’s no crisis or need.