How Can I Trust God? With What? – Brad Jersak

Question:

I’ve been spinning my wheels around the idea of what it means to trust God, and how we even get there. Trust God with what? We are not guaranteed safety in body, relationships, or really anything (from my experience). Is it simply God’s presence in all things, that God will never leave us? In all honesty, that feels like an empty answer—what good does presence do?

Response:

I get it. I clearly remember the day when I sat with my spiritual director and asked virtually the same question. I framed it as “I am told to trust that God cares. But for me, it is not enough to say that God sits on the divine throne and has caring feelings for me while doing nothing about these circumstances that I’m just supposed to accept… I’m falling apart, my church is falling apart, and my marriage is falling apart—and I realize it’s largely my fault. And yet God cares? So what? When I think of a caregiver, I think of the caregivers who work at Communitas and Bethesda. They are dressing, feeding, assisting adults in diapers in every aspect of their lives 24-7. That’s “care.” But I’m having trouble seeing God as a caregiver.”

Steve, my spiritual director, knows that his role is almost never to give answers. In over a dozen years of one-on-one meetings, he almost exclusively stuck to asking penetrating questions that led to self-discovery. But on that day, he made an exception because he could see I was drowning. He still framed his words as questions, but they were leading questions that pointed to the ways God’s care shows:

Questions: Do you ever…?

· Do you ever face a powerful temptation but have a moment of clarity, warning you about the consequences and reorienting you back to the way of love?

· Do you ever face a baffling situation but have a moment of insight, granting wisdom to a dilemma that has seemed to be an impasse?

· Do you ever feel like you’ve got not inner strength left in you but then somehow find a source of patient endurance to go on?

· Do you ever recognize that you are at the end of your own resources but discover friends who are willing to help you in the most practical ways?

· Do you ever feel alone and overwhelmed but find a nonjudgmental listener who is willing to offer companionship and even grieve with you and comfort you when you didn’t expect it?

· Do you have a community of friends with whom you feel a sense of belonging and fellowship?

· Have you ever thought of taking your life? What stopped you?

I don’t remember everything I wrote down that day in some long-lost journal but the above gives you the gist of it. On other days, I might have had more soul-strength to argue that all these questions can be refuted with (1) that’s not God, that’s my own soul or conscience or mind, (2) that’s not God, those are just caring individuals who came along at the right time, or (3) that’s not God, those are just groups I hang out with… and assigning those forms of care to God is a cop-out. If there were not God, they would happen anyway.

Thoughts: God is never separate…

But on that occasion, I had used up the last of my defiance in my initial question and Steve was speaking into the vacuum of my despair. And the first thought I had was that he was breaking his own rules of spiritual direction because he cared, and his care in this moment was indivisible from God’s care, because if God is love, how else should I expect his care to look right now? God’s care was not separate from or less than Steve’s care. And they never are.

My second thought was that if God cares, it is always indivisible from my mind and heart or from my friends and family or from my hiking club or twelve-step group or from the birds I listen to on my patio or from the sun and wind and rain and trees and rivers. It is there in the farmer who grows my food, the truck driver who delivers it to my store, the teen at the cash register who sells it to me, and the many people who make my income to buy it possible. God isn’t separate from that. God isn’t separate from me. In God’s care, I live and move and have my being.

That’s life. And God’s care is not separate from my life. Even when the sun scorches the crops, the wind becomes a tornado that shreds a trailer park (or church), the neighbors break into my house, or the Christians aren’t being Christian. He doesn’t magic it away, but in those moments, the Living Presence is most important and maybe even closest to us because that same presence suffered what I suffered to the nth degree to reveal some stuff that I can trust. And IF I’m given the capacity to trust that I could not find in myself, that does change how I live in transforming ways.

God’s care

Specifically, how would I live if I could trust that when life happens…

· God’s care is available via God’s indwelling presence as a real resource to our conscience, to our wisdom, to our resources of patience and endurance… when we ask for these, we can expect them as our hearts are open to it.

· God’s care is in the people and communities who care for us in emotional and practical ways, including their prayers, which God hears and answers—not often through changing circumstances, but through open eyes and arms and manifestations of mercy.

· God’s care means that God did not send the problems, and those problems are therefore not punishment, and in fact, grace is available that does not require me to expect or attach myself to a particular outcome.

· God’s care means that God’s compassionate companionship in us has a transforming impact on us, where even awful trials or terrible people are woven into something better and for our good.

· God’s care means that whatever I’m facing, this is not the end, it does not get the final word. Life gets the final word, and I am going to be okay.

Two Truths: The Treasury of Good Gifts and David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”

I’m reminded to lean into two truths. First truth, the words of the Trisagion Prayer:

O Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth,

Who is everywhere present and fills all things,

Treasury of good gifts and Giver of Life,

Come dwell with us,

cleanse us from every stain,

and save our souls, O Good One.

I don’t always know how that is true, but I trust that somehow it is true and I am watchful and grateful for every manifestation of goodness in my life and anything that gives my life meaning. For my family, my home, my work, and the re-enchantment of childhood wonder as I pay attention to ladybugs, squirrels, flowers, the baby in the stroller, and chance meetings with fascinating people (all people are fascinating when we listen well). When I see the presence of Christ in all people, I rejoice whenever I see real transformation in those I care about, and I attribute it to grace.

Second truth, the grace of God is the unnoticed waters in which I swim. From David Foster Wallace’s This is Water:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?”

And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

In my case, water is the grace-given existence in which Christ is in us and we are in Christ, without separation and without absorption, as every breath I take is a gift and waking up this morning is precious because it was not guaranteed … and if I hadn’t, my rebirth into the next life would also be a gift.

I don’t know what you have to be thankful for, but I hope you can take my response as a gift from Elsewhere.

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