“But you trust God, right?”
I haven’t gotten her question out of my mind since she asked me last week. It came at the end of a long conversation about my current season of life – about transitions and letting go and all the unknowns (big and small) that are just around the corner for our family.
I don’t know about you, but often in the summertime I struggle with being a little too “in my head”. I get stuck in all the “I-don’t-knows” and “what-are-we-gonna-do’s” that come with life and kids and the vast possibilities of an unknown future. And that’s where I was that night. Until her question.
Her question – simple, straightforward & gracefully assuming – came to me like a deep breath for my soul. I think I even sighed, dropped my (proud) head, and laughed a little when she asked it – those simple words that invited my heart and mind back into the wide open, spacious place with Jesus.
Trusting God
Trusting God doesn’t always feel like this. Sometimes it feels like white knuckles clenching onto a seatbelt of a wild rollercoaster ride. But I want to acknowledge that it can. Trusting God CAN feel like one thousand pounds of weight removed from your back because you don’t have to be the one to figure it all out. You don’t have to make it happen. You don’t have to hold it all together. In some seasons, I might need my friend’s question one hundred times a day (over and over) because it forces me to take a good, honest look at the story of my life but also because it assumes what is true.
Yes, I do trust God … but how often do I talk faith and live worry? Talk faith and live fear? Talk faith and live trying to grasp for control? Most of my life is lived in the tension of the two.
If you’re still reading this and you’re one who’s a little too in your head right now too – trying to figure it all out or hold it all together – may I offer my wise friend’s question to you as a reminder that you do.
You do trust God. Right?
Hindsight
I wrote those words above exactly two years ago, but I remember that moment like it was yesterday. And you know what’s crazy? Every single one of the unknowns that I was in knots about that night are in the rear-view mirror now. Every single one of them. And while I wish I could tell you that they all played out just as I hoped they would, they didn’t. Actually, most of them played out just as I worried they would.
Yet here I am. I’m still standing, and God’s still good.
In my walk with Jesus, I’m still learning that God’s faithfulness is best traced in hindsight. What I couldn’t see then I see clearly now: enough grace for each day, the with-ness of Jesus, the God of all comfort, and the joy and strength that comes in never walking alone.
Trusting God doesn’t mean I get the neat and tidy life that I think I want. But it does mean that I can release my cares to the One who holds the whole world and my life in His able hands. Today’s cares are not too great for Him.
And for that, my friends. I am grateful.
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