Tag: God

What Is Needed Is Trust

Journal & Essays

“Fear is useless. What is needed is trust.”

The one thing God asks of me again and again is trust.

It’s not just any trust He desires, for He doesn’t want a partial trust, or a trust all mixed up with worries and doubts. Instead, what He desires from me is a radical trust, which means a full and complete surrender to Him.

It may sound like a simple thing – and it is – but “simple” doesn’t always mean “easy.” In fact, most of the time, I find trusting God to be an extraordinarily difficult act, especially since I keep finding myself in situations that look and feel as if they’re impossible to resolve.

But perhaps the impossible situations are precisely the moments when God can demonstrate His love most powerfully – and when my decisions to trust become most meaningful and sincere. When I can no longer rely on human efforts to untangle the messes I’m in, I can resign myself to despair – or I can cast everything in zany dependence into the hands of God. Sometimes, to the outsider, trust looks like a supremely unreasonable and illogical activity, in contradiction to all the most obvious likelihoods and probabilities.

But I’m of the belief that faith, if it’s true, often has a bit of craziness in it. (Ah, so maybe that’s why I’m a little unhinged.)

Brief Thoughts (No. 36)

Brief Thoughts

In your suffering, you have turned to God. You have questioned Him and grappled with Him. You have asked many questions about life, and its purpose, and why things are the way they are.

It’s not easy to accept a cross like yours; it can feel impossibly heavy at times. But in choosing to carry it, you have in fact made a choice that reveals something very deep and essential about who you are: namely, that, even when things are hard, your instinct – your choice – is to follow Love.

This fact of your character tells me something very important about you. It tells me that your soul is impressed upon by God, and that, somewhere in the very core of your being, you have hope in the beauty and the goodness of life, even as a thousand pieces of evidence are telling you otherwise. That’s a rare and a beautiful gift; may no one ever take it from you.

Is It Possible?

Journal & Essays

Often, you find yourself trapped in a cycle of belief and disbelief. The position you occupy in this cycle usually depends, in large part, on the circumstances of your life: how you’re feeling, if you’re suffering, whether things are going your way.

That’s not to say that you’ve abandoned God. On the contrary, I know that you’ve sought Him with great perseverance even through long periods of darkness and illness. It’s not wrong to express your anger at God. It’s not wrong to cry to Him in your despondency. He welcomes you in your reality – in the fullness of who you are.

But sometimes, your tendency to be upset with God causes you more unhappiness than you can bear. Sometimes, seeing God as the Person to blame for the sufferings of life adds an additional layer of helplessness to your already heavy despair, and the weight of such a burden leaves you vulnerable to collapse.

So what’s the answer to this conundrum, to this longing to express your anguish in the face of injustice, and your sorrow at feeling abandoned by the One Who is supposed to be Good, without putting yourself perpetually in a place of conflict with God? How do you reconcile the truth of your hurt and frustration (which you have every right to feel) with your desire to have a sturdy friendship with God? You can’t find peace if you’re always at war with the Source of Peace. You can’t trust if you’re always doubting His trustworthiness.

My message isn’t meant to strip away your humanity, or to condemn you for feeling the way you do. I know your sorrow is real and the pain of your confusion is deep. I know your heart is sincere.

But I’m asking you to consider that maybe God is not the Author of your misfortunes. Maybe God is not the One willing your suffering.

Is it possible that, in the midst of your trials, God has been with you in a profoundly important way? Is it possible that God has always been for you, not against you, and weeps with you in your pain? Is it possible that God keeps a light on for you, even as the darkness swirls around, threatening to consume you but never actually penetrating the true, unbreakable center of who you really are?

Is it possible, in other words, that God is, in fact, just as Good as You so were so desperately hoping He’d be?

Brief Thoughts (No. 31)

Brief Thoughts

You want to escape the boundaries of convention and blaze your own trail. That’s the spirit of the adventurer in you – the spirit that responds to the call of the wild, the thrill of the unknown.

That’s not to say that convention lacks appeal for you – you know its virtues and its charms. But there is truth to be found outside these walls, as well as inside them, so don’t be afraid to turn your gaze to the wider world, so long as you keep your heart fixed on Him.

The Shortest Route to Heaven

Journal & Essays

If you’re looking for the shortest route to Heaven, choose the simple way.

The simple way is about holding to what is good and letting go of the rest.

When you start to follow the simple way – which asks of you Trust and Surrender – you will begin to feel freer and lighter, because you are letting the grace of GOD do much of the work in your stead.

Your role in this simple way is to assent to the things GOD has given you – and refuse to wear yourself down with extraneous or unhelpful things.

For a soul who is called by this way, it may feel more difficult to surrender than to control – more difficult to trust than to worry.

But the GOD Who asks you to follow this way has intended this path for your good, knowing that simplicity and freedom are the keys to your soul’s being fully alive.

To complicate such a soul with worry and torment is anathema to this way of life.

You must take care to shake off such encumbrances and impediments to simplicity before they take you in their grip. But even then, when the complication seems immense and too deeply entrenched, the way out is to pick up and follow the simplest way home.

You will discover the great beauty of this path as soon as you begin walking it.

Why not trust and see?

To a Scrupulous Soul

Journal & Essays

There are too many possibilities. Too many ways to do right or to do wrong, and it burdens you immensely.

How crazy these confusions make you. How tormented with a sense that you’re always off-kilter, always doing something wrong. How can you live like that? You’re not a perfect human being. Not even close. But apparently your mind expects you to be.

You need help. This is not a way to go through life. There are simpler, better ways – it is those ways that you want. But you can’t make any decisions without racking up terrible anxiety and an awful uncertainty about the minutiae of every thought and inclination.

“NO, I’M NOT INSANE!” you want to shout. But the chaos is overwhelming; the din is too loud.

Where is the simple life? The simple life you long for in the stillness of your heart?

There are so many things to untangle, so many things to sort through. You’re afraid it’s all going to come pouring out. What are you supposed to do?

Enough of the fear! What a curse to your existence, living so small and so cramped. Especially dangerous is the fact that these thoughts – these fears – masquerade as aspirations to holiness and aversions to sin. But look at what they produce: a constant paralysis and anxiety that everything you could possibly do or think is a sin, cutting you off from God.

It’s a lifeless, listless, suffocating “faith.” This, if you ask me, is the devil in disguise, trying to take all that is good (and simple) and turn it into a source of anguish and fear.

You’re becoming afraid of life and shutting yourself off from it. You’re erasing yourself into nothingness – believing that your desires are selfish, misleading, bad – because you’re afraid of not being humble.

Holy ideas, misapplied and misunderstood – and the consequences are disastrous. This is not the life or the faith you desire – because there is no freedom or peace in it.

But you’re afraid to break free – afraid you’ll make yourself a “god” and not have the humility to conform to God’s ways. Afraid of offending God, of making yourself sole decider and determiner and king.

But look – doesn’t this “faith” sound like imprisonment to you?

“Well, yes, it’s being a slave to Christ,” your mind retorts.

But no! Stop! These distortions are complicated, unhealthy, and patently untrue.

Take a breath and let yourself follow the path of real peace. God will be with you the whole way through.

Brief Thoughts (No. 27)

Brief Thoughts

Why covet other gifts, when your own gifts are considerable? Faced with the prospect of losing the potentialities with which you have been endowed – would you hand them over, exchanging them for another set of talents?

In your heart, I believe you know that you wouldn’t – and that the natural aptitudes GOD has given you beautifully reflect the person you’re meant to be.

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