Moving into Trust

This is one of the first scriptures I learned in childhood. I remember getting a book for learning it, a book that I would later read to my children and grandchildren. The truth is, it’s one thing to know and memorize a scripture verse and it’s another thing to live it.

Trust comes hard, even in a perfect God, to a person who’s hurt and broken. When you’ve learned that sometimes you can’t even trust yourself, trust in the Great I Am seems impossible.

How do you move into the truth of trusting God in all your ways when you don’t know how to trust?

You learn to trust by letting go.  You learn to trust by letting go in those moments of desperation when there’s nothing else that you can do. Sometimes God gets us to the point that He’s our only option, so that He can show us that we can trust in Him. And sometimes because of our stubbornness God takes us there over, and over, and over again, until we can truly learn to trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not to our own understanding but in all our ways acknowledge Him so that He can direct our paths.

Haven’t you been there?

Your marriage in complete disarray. Wondering why you ever said “I do.” Questioning if it’s worth the effort.

Your child in trouble again. Focusing on every parenting mistake you ever made. Questioning where you went so wrong.

The unexpected broken relationship. Questioning missed signs. Looking for answers to questions never posed.

The job loss. Wondering if you should have done something different. Should you have been looking sooner?

Sometimes we spend so much time on the what if questions, that we miss the most important lesson. Or we spend so much time trying to fix it on our own we miss the why in the brokenness.

So often the lesson is trust. We often place some amount of trust in a person, and refuse to place any in God. We are quick to talk about the broken trust from a relationship, when God’s saying “place your trust in Me.” We are quick to listen to the sympathy of a caring friend, when our Lord is pleading “Listen to my guidance.”

The why in the brokenness is often God trying to get our reliance back on Him. We misplace our trust in our own ability. We think we can fix things if we try harder, or if we fix some perceived flaw in who God designed us to be.

Somethings are not meant for us to understand. God tells us lean not on our own understanding. We may not understand why we lost a job, why a relationship ended, or why our child has gone astray. Instead we are called to acknowledge Him in the midst and let Him direct us.

We learn to trust, by taking our brokenness and placing it in God’s hands.