Trusting Well

The hours leading up to church on Sunday mornings are some of the hardest hours that any family faces in the midst of a given week. They are the hours in which the bed is the warmest and coziest, no one wants to eat what has been prepared, and two matching shoes can’t be found in the entire house. Those hours are waging a parenting battle against the sanity of every adult attempting to drag their children out of the door with any hope of arriving to church before the last song ends! 

Luckily for us, we bypass those hours because we arrive at church around 7:30 every Sunday morning; our chaos is crammed into 1 hour that simply feels like it lasts 4 hours. 

Our morning starts early on Sundays and we are usually peeling our toddler from her bed before the sun is up. The oatmeal that she loves is only moderately eaten and the clothes we pre-planned the night before are only accepted through massive negotiation. Teeth brushing and hair-styling are tiny miracles of God that have been known to draw tears from both of us. By the time we leave, we look like we’ve got it together but the morning has been hard fought and full of mumbled prayers.

A few weeks ago, after the normal Sunday morning riot the toddler girl and I were walking quickly through the gravel parking lot of the church. She innocently gazed up at the sky and said “God, I know you’re up there…but sometimes I just don’t know.” (She is a great little communicator and these were her exact words.)

Those words bolted through me like lightning and caused me to thank my Jesus for the struggle of getting her through those doors each week. We struggle to get there but we always get there because we are certain that He will show up. The innocent words she uttered were full of certainty that He was “up there” yet the doubt of humanity was present in her simply stated “I just don’t know.” 

The doubt of her humanity is an inevitable factor of the flesh she walks around in, but the fact that she stated first her resolve of His existence…makes every Sunday morning struggle worthwhile. The words she innocently stated that morning are the same words that have run through the heart and mind of anyone on the journey of spiritual growth. “God, I know you’re up there…but sometimes, I just don’t know.”

The truth is, at some point in all of our lives…we don’t know, but those of us who believe in Him choose to place trust in Him. We trust that in the midst of unbearable circumstances, riotous children, unfulfilled dreams, broken relationships, longing hearts, unpaid bills, empty wombs, hospital beds, and secret shame that He is good and that He has a good plan for our lives.

We may mumble the words “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24) from a place of brokenness or exhaustion or pain but those mumbled words are overflowing with beautiful desperation.

Desperation is often what leads us to trust Jesus with a little, in order for Him to help us trust Him with more; which is a beautiful gift of grace. Relying on the One we want to trust as our source of help in the trusting process, portrays Jesus as both our partner in the journey and our sought after destination.

Dear friends, when we are in the midst of life’s most ominous challenges with a steady heart, mind, and spirit…we demonstrate the unwavering hand of the Father to an unsteady world. The quaking world is watching and our faith is on the center stage of life. We must showcase our trust in Jesus well, so that the on-looking faces of the weary might choose to take refuge in Him.

May we utter simple, humble, and childlike prayers so that the evidence of our growing trust might speak loudly to the world around us.

Trusting well requires us to have a right perspective of our human condition, which actually prohibits us from fully trusting Him without help from Him.

So as we choose to trust Him more, we must also remember to thank Him abundantly for helping us journey deeper than we ever could on our own.

My simple prayer today: “God, help me trust you more and lead me to trust you deeper. Strengthen my trust and my satisfaction to be in you alone.”

© Dani Hardy, March 5, 2019

For more on trust, check out Episode 1 of the “It is Well podcast with Dani Hardy” on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you stream your podcasts.