When God told me this, I was pretty offended. Of course I trusted Him, I’m on The World Race aren’t I? I’m basically homeless, not knowing what my tomorrow is going to look like, and with no life plan when I get home.
But after I thought about it after a while, I had to admit that it was true. I didn’t trust Him.
I trusted Him with some things, but not all things in my life. There have definitely been points when I questioned what He said, questioned if I was hearing correctly, and times when I blatantly ignored what He said because I didn’t believe in what He was asking me to do.
It was a beautiful fall day in Romania and things were getting deep so God and I went on a hike.
You don’t trust me.
I know.
I trust you.
AW DANG IT. You can blame all your problems on other things, push the problem to the side, or just pretend everything’s okay, but when God pulls the ‘I trust you’ card, you know it’s time to get your junk together and start listening. Basically God was saying that He had some crazy plans for me and He needed me to trust Him completely and follow Him no matter how crazy/difficult/impossible it sounded.
Have I ever given you a reason to not trust me?
Multiple memories of times when He’s protected me flooded on me as I started to realize that never in my life has He betrayed me. He’s completely taken care of me every step of the way and those times when things did seem to go wrong was only because I stepped out of His will for me. And even then God was still with there protecting me.
I will never leave you nor forsake you. I will never abandon you. I will never let you fail. Why would I? I love you and I never wish for harm to come to you.
Why don’t we trust in the Lord? He’s our Father. Of course He’s going to take care of us. The Bible is littered is people who trusted in the Lord and were continually blessed for their trust. We continually sing worship songs filled with lyrics of declaring our trust for the Father. But when it comes down to those moments of really having to place our life in His hands, why don’t we truly trust God?
People. Each of us have been hurt by others, each of us have had people let us down and disappoint us so we create a wall so others can’t hurt us like that ever again. This barrier spills over into our relationship with the Father.
But we can’t just blame people because others also just act out of their own hurts and brokenness. People hurt people because they in turn have been hurt. It’s a vicious cycle.
Dang sin. Ruining the fun for all of us.
So where do we go from here? I had no idea. How do I learn how to trust God with everything I have and truly believe in the promises that He has for me?
It’s funny that God brought up my trust issues in Romania. The culture here is cold towards foreigners, or basically anyone outside your family. Each person that we’ve talked to keeps saying the same thing:
You can’t trust anyone here.
For Romanians, it’s a way of life to not trust anyone. And for them, they have their reasons: communism only ended 23 years ago and most of the people still remember the days of having to always being careful of who’s watching you. No one could be trusted.
But that’s also the past.
Forgive.
So I did. I sat on a stump and forgave people. I also asked for forgiveness for the times when I hurt people because I myself didn’t want to get hurt.
And I dropped my mistrust of people and the Lord in the middle of a forest in the Romanian countryside.
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding"
Proverbs 3:5
