Trusting God
Gregg’s Reflection
Psalm 119 tells us, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” A question I ask folks I coach, ‘A lamp only lights a couple of steps on the path. How will you see beyond the two steps?’ The most interesting answer I have gotten is, ‘Throw the lamp?’
I think God only lights a couple of steps on the dark path to see if we will trust enough to take a step without knowing where you will end up. I think God knows that if we saw the whole path we would never take a step because there is no way to trod that path to its conclusion without God’s help.
If we wish to find and follow God‘s faint path, we have to surrender to the mystery, to the unknown. We must let go of the need to control. You know that bumper sticker, ‘God is my copilot’? Whose hands are still on the steering wheel? I wonder why it doesn’t say, ‘God is my pilot.’ The deeper journey into Kenosis or self-emptying asks us to move beyond the fear that leads our ego to hold on tightly and not let go.
I had a sense of calling in my life pretty soon after I was baptized as an adult. My first vision came the year of my baptism, to achieve financial independence and walk away from business at age 45 to pursue God’s calling. I did walk away when we sold the business at age 48, but I still had no clarity about calling.
I realize now that my motivation in those days was fear, not trust. I was driven, and when I examined the drivenness, I realized it came from a place of ‘not good enough’ and I was intent on proving myself worthy (So I would not reap punishment and judgment when I faced God).
I have since learned to see a God of compassion, grace and love. (See my post on the Image of God). And I have lived into trust the last twenty years. What I have found is that when I am at the edge, peering into the void, and ask, “Is this the way?” I hear nothing. It’s like that old Indiana Jones movie where he seeks the holy grail. At the edge of a cliff, he sees his prize on the other side of the void. When he steps out, he finds an invisible bridge taking him there.
In a similar way, when I take the step into the void where I discern God leading me, I don’t get affirmation until I have taken the step in trust. Walking away from my first career into the unknown with no clue as to my actual calling was an act of trust. And trusting God to light the path for the last 25 years has seen a calling unfold beyond anything I could have imagined.
Wade into the stream of God’s love and experience what trust feels like. Come along and find the foundation of trust in God through the words of Scripture, the saints and mystics. Blessings.
Journaling Prompts
Do you find fear or trust your primary motivator in your faith journey? Why? What would it look like to trust God more deeply? How might that trust help you find and follow God’s faint path?
Scripture
I am going to send an angel in front of you, to guard you on the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.
Exodus 23:20
The Lord is a stronghold in times of trouble. And those who know your name put their trust in you.
Psalm 9:9-10
The Lord is my strength and my shield; in Him my heart trusts.
Psalm 28:7
O Lord of hosts, happy is everyone who trusts in you.
Psalm 84:12
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not rely on your own insight.
Proverbs 3:5
Thus said the Lord God, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”
Isaiah 30:13
Trust emerges as one of the central signs of the transformation of human character according to God’s purposes.
RENOVARE Bible notes on Old Testament, P. 8
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Consider the birds of the field… Are you not of more value than they? And can you by worrying add a single hour to your life? For it is gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
Matthew 6:25-34
Eight days later, his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”
John 20: 26-29
All spiritual formation is founded on the trustworthiness of God’s character and the truth of God’s revelation in the person of Jesus Christ.
RENOVARE Bible notes on Hebrews 6:19
Ancient Writings
You can never trust God too much. Why is it that some people do not bear fruit? It is because they have no trust either in God or in themselves.
Meister Eckhart
Often our trust is not full. We are not certain that God hears us because we consider ourselves worthless and as nothing. This is ridiculous and the very cause of our weakness. I have felt this way myself.
Julian of Norwich
“That which is impossible for you is not impossible to me.”
Julian of Norwich, Brendan Doyle, Meditations with Julian, p. 58
All difficulties in prayer can be traced to one cause: Praying as if God were absent.
St. Teresa of Ávila
Modern Writings
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
T. S. Eliot
Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Hearts on Fire
Faith demands the integrity of inner trust which produces wholeness, unity, peace, genuine security.
Thomas Merton Essential Writings, p. 76
You can only face up to who you really are in the presence of someone you trust.
Thomas Keating, Open Minds, Open Hearts, p. 91
THE METAPHOR OF PILGRIMAGE: GETTING INTO THE CORACLE
From the early church in the Celtic lands, we receive a version of pilgrimage that is quite different. In Celtic tradition, rather than starting off with a destination in mind, such as Jerusalem or Rome, pilgrims got in a little boat known as a coracle, round in shape with no oars.
Once on board, the pilgrim trusted the currents of the sea or the river to take the little boat to a destination hid with Christ. The current was the means by which the pilgrim was brought to the "place of resurrection, the geographical spot where the pilgrim would live out his remaining days and eventually die.”
Mary C Earle, Broken Body, Healing Spirit, p. 60-61
The root choice is to trust at all times that God is with you and will give you what you most need. . . . God says to you, “I love you. I am with you. I want to see you come closer to me and experience the joy and peace of my presence. I want to give you a new heart and a new spirit. I want you to speak with my mouth, see with my eyes, hear with my ears, touch with my hands. All that is mine is yours. Just trust me and let me be your God."
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 11/20/20
Learn to Trust God
Most of us distrust God. Most of us think of God as a fearful, punitive authority or as an empty, powerless nothing. Jesus’s core message was that God is a lover, whose only desire is to give us what our hearts most desire. To pray is to listen to that voice of love. That is what obedience is all about. The word obedience comes from the Latin word ob-audire, which means “to listen with great attentiveness.
When we no longer pray, no longer listen to the voice of love that speaks to us in the moment, our lives become absurd lives in which we are thrown back and forth between the past and the future. If we could just be, for a few minutes each day, fully where we are, we would indeed discover that we are not alone and that the One who is with us wants only one thing: to give us love.
Henri Nouwen, Nouwen Society Daily Devotion, 1/20/21
We can rest in the divine flow and trust that it will, as it always has, carry us within it.
Kathleen Singh, The Grace in Aging
The most courageous interior thing a person will ever do is trust that their little soul could be in a unique relationship with God, that reflects a facet of God’s glory that no one else will ever reflect in that way. It causes you to fall in love with the God who has chosen you, lives in you, and loves you exactly as you need to be loved on each stage of your journey.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 100
Patience is the very shape of love. The ride is the destination, and the goal is never clearly in sight. To stay on the ride, to trust the trajectory, to know it is moving, and moving somewhere always better, is just about the best way to describe religious faith.
Richard Rohr
Faith is actually having the security to be insecure, enough certitude to entertain a good degree of uncertainty, enough full-body knowing that we don’t give the full job of understanding to our minds alone. This knowing doesn’t need to eliminate all doubt but includes creative doubt in the process-which is why true faith is always humble and receptive to more information.
Richard Rohr, On the Threshold of Transformation, p. 74
We have to surrender to the fact that evil is part of reality, and our logical mind does not know why. The only real question becomes how to trust the light, receive the light, and spread the light.
Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 221
Is God to be trusted? That is the great question the human race is asking at the most basic level.
Richard Rohr, Yes, and, p. 106
The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.
Father Bert, Phileena Heuertz, Mindful Silence, p. 139
The challenges we encounter are often road maps, pointing us in a different direction than one we might have planned. If we can open ourselves to trusting the divine and allowing our lives to unfold, it’s amazing what can happen.
Polly Baca