5 – 23 – 17 What Does Trust Look Like?

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Optimistic. Something I would say that I am, usually. Something I would nearly always say I admired. Is it what Christ calls us to be? Another distinction, as there can be no good work done except through Christ, are we to consider ourselves masters of our own fate? Or know that we are not, yet continue to act as though we do?

St. Augustine is obviously wiser than me and he summed it up as: “Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.” Now this is a kind of benign self-deception. We know in our hearts that it will only happen for us if it is God’s will, but we pretend to have some influence in our own lives, as it seems commonsense that we should only get what we work for. To be otherwise would violate the cause and effect universe we see, a universe that God created and respects.

Though it may not seem to others, it somewhat seems to me that this is a nearly irreligious thought. To suppose that we are the masters of our own life, that we are in control. I think this problem may be solved by considering not what our work does on the universe around us, but what God thinks of it. To be clear some of the correlation between work and success can be explained by the nature of our cause and effect universe, but there always seems to be some good fortune, some lucky mistake, in any success story. In other words, a place where the only reasonable explanation besides random variance, which is after all not an explanation at all, is an act of God.

I think we have to work for what we want because God does not desire to overwhelm us. To put it concretely, he doesn’t want to gift us a sports car when we’ve just received our learner’s permit. We need to put in the hours to learn the intricacies of gear-shifting, which matters exponentially more at 70 than 15 miles per hour. We need to age a little to develop the restraint to not launch ourselves off the highway at one hundred because we were racing someone. In short, the work towards a goal is often the training required to receive the gift in the proper way. It will also teach us to treasure the gift more appropriately.

Secondly, I think God desires that we trust Him. I’m not saying this as I think it is any new insight, I think it may be one of the least contentious claims in theology, after such tautologies as “God loves us”, or “God is good.” To say that we trust him is one thing, to continue living our life without working towards our objective, investing none of our time or effort towards its procurement but expecting God to drop it into our lap is not so much trust as laziness and wishful thinking. Trust is putting ourselves on the line every day towards our objective, and trusting God to preserve us and carry us the rest of the way when we fall. Similarly, you could not say you trusted the bungee cord so much that it was not worth jumping as you knew it would operate properly and return you safely standing where you were, the way you demonstrate your trust is by submitting fully, even putting your own life at stake. The similarities continue, for the person who jumps knows that the pleasure is not in standing on the bridge after, or telling their friends about the marvelous scenery they overlooked. The pleasure in life is in the exhilarating (and terrifying) plummet towards doom and despair that suddenly recedes away as one is pulled back upwards.

In short, when we question whether we trust God, it is not an abstract question. It is not, do we think God trustworthy, does He love us, are His goals for us acceptable to us? It is a very simple question really, do you jump?