Choosing Trust

As the stresses of life mounted, in particular the stresses of a whirlwind life of pastoring in a fast growing, thriving church, the fractures in the foundation of my marriage became more and more apparent. There were a few people that I confided in, but for a variety of reasons (future blog entry!) I distanced myself relationally from friends and coworkers. If anyone asked, things were 'fine' or 'getting better'.

One of the things that is frustrating to hear well-meaning people say when things in your world seem to be getting out of control - and I must ashamedly admit that I used to tell people this on occasion - is you just have to learn to trust God. Now, that is not frustrating because it is untrue, but it is difficult to hear because HOW do you apply such advice? I thought I WAS trusting God. There was not a book on marriage that I didn't read. Any suggestion that I came across to better a marriage I would try. Date night? check. Pray together? tried it. Doing dishes and vacuuming? oh yeah.

One time when reading some book (they seem to all run together at some point when you are desperate) the topic of pain or suffering or perseverance or something like that came up and the author very succinctly said that the answer was to trust God and quoted a verse and moved on like problem solved. This frustrated me so much that I circled the paragraph with a pen until I had eaten through several pages of the book. How, how, how? Was all my mind could think. Is this really so easy for everyone else? (another blog, when it is so bad you start to think everyone else has their game together)

Problem for me is that was addressing the fruit rather than getting to the root. (What a happy accident, that rhymes. I'll use that someday.) I wanted to change my behavior to show that I was trusting God. The thought goes something like, 'if I am willing to try behavior X or Y, then I must be trusting God'. When all these behavior changes made no difference, my frustration became deep bitterness, resentment and anger.

Even after God worked a miracle in my heart for my marriage and I turned wholeheartedly from my sin, I started down the same road of performance (the fruit) rather than trust (the root). Rather than face my fears head on, I was still trying to get around them. It is so easy to say All I have to do is trust God. But I had still not addressed what that meant. For me, the answer was not found in the question how do I trust God? but rather in the question who do I think God is? This would be the key for me to figure out why it was so hard to trust God.

That paradigm shift led me to real progress. My earliest conception of God, which I was carrying with me as a pastor, was of a God to be pleased. As a kid, I had to pass a class in order to take communion. Another class to be 'confirmed' as a member of the church. You had to go into a closet to tell all your sins. What if I said something so foul that I was laughed at? There is no hope for you dude, leave the closet and close the door on the way out. Sounds funny now, the dots that a kid would connect - and rather than the dots making a pretty picture of a flower or bunny, they were connected wrong to get a page full of scribbles. A messed up picture of a God to be pleased, ready to reject, with plenty of hurdles to jump over.

Surprising as it sounds, 12 years after starting a relationship with God, I still had not dug down to my root issue. God had to be pleased. One wrong move and you were not good enough. Hard to trust that. Especially when the life that few people see was not going so well. But once the roots were exposed, all the knowledge that I had in my head about God - knowledge that was so easy and effective to pass on to others, but never rang true for me - all that stuff rushed to my heart. The grinch's small heart grew three sizes that day!

So now I am choosing to trust. It is a daily decision. Staring my fears and failures in the face and walking into them with God, rather than trying to conquer them on my own before approaching God. Not perfectly by any means, but still choosing to trust. It is so amazing what happens when you address the root rather than the fruit.