Trust

I just finished reading a fiction novel called "Why the Sky is Blue" by Susan Meissner. It's about a family whose mother conceived a child through rape, and how they gave the baby up for adoption -- an event told through the eyes of both the mother and her oldest daughter. This daughter, as an adult many years later, eventually comes to the realization that she only trusts God to a point when it comes to the people she loves -- a result of loving her unborn half-sister and then going through the pain of giving her up all those years ago. Anyway, the idea of trusting God "only to a point" really spoke to me.



I've never lost someone close to me in a way that scarred me emotionally, so it's not even a result of being hurt. But I know how easily it can happen...my grandpa died when he and my grandma were still young parents, leaving her with four kids to raise alone. (And the way my grandma still talks about my grandpa, you know that they were as in-love as anyone has ever been.) In the news you always hear about young couples who are tragically separated when one dies. Just today Bryan told me about a Saskatoon couple who were volunteering in Honduras, and the husband was shot and killed trying to defend his wife from muggers. There are car accidents, sudden health problems, random attacks, and any other number of ways in which a person can be killed. And I suppose my trust problems come from my focus on how much it would nearly destroy me if anything happened to Bryan.



To be bluntly honest, I keep rediscovering a wall between myself and God, and more often than not, lately it's related to my husband. I know God loves him, and me, and that He knows what's best. But I also know that sometimes He doesn't stop bad things from happening to His children, so I don't know if I will always have Bryan. No matter how much God loves him and me, I can't say with any certainty whether or not He will allow us to have a family and grow old together. This causes me to hold my heart at bay, clenching my fists around the gift of my husband and not allowing God to remain too close, just in case He will require me to give Bryan up in order to fulfill some greater purpose. I love God and don't doubt that He is good, but I so often feel like I can relate to the man who cried to Jesus, "I do believe...help my unbelief!"



But near the end of the novel, I read this paragraph and it spoke to me in a refreshing way. I thought I'd share it in case anyone else can benefit from it.



"I must be willing to meet with God alone...and see where the level of my trust starts and where it stops. If I am going to love people completely and at the heart of who they are, I am going to need to trust that God will watch over them in the way He sees as best. Because loving people will cost me, and I need to be able to meet that price with trust so that I can enjoy love's best moments and endure the worst."

I recently read another quote from a book. I can't remember exactly how it went, but the gist of it is this: the issue isn't that we mistrust that God knows what's best. The issue is that we can't foresee if God's best might be painful.

There are certainly no easy answers to the deep questions of life, but I think that we who trust God always have a beautiful hope: that this life on earth is temporary, and no matter what we endure, heaven will erase all of that pain and turmoil. So even when life is really good, and we're uncertain about whether or not it might someday become hard to even breathe, there is no reason to worry. In heaven, there will be no end to our joy, our peace, and our relationships with God and the other people who've arrived, and there will be no more worries about good-byes.