The Theology of Trust
We’re sitting at a cheap Mexican place eating cheap Mexican food and there’s bad lighting all around. A football game between lord knows who is playing with the volume set too loud. My roommate sits across from me and toys with small talk for about thirty seconds before asking a difficult question. It’s the question that I’ve been waiting for, but have been hoping would be glossed over. I trip over my words and thoughts and pride. I can’t say everything that I want to say, but I say something. It’s one of those moments where you have to get something out, anything really. Anything except, “I don’t know.” I suppose that’s the problem with being an adult, you have to answer the questions that come your way, even the ones that you’d rather ignore, rather rewind, rather run from.
The truth is, is that the conversation my roommate and I have lends itself to paint me in a light of weakness. It’s a good weakness though, the kind that says “the way up is the way down”. A pale light that shines and says I haven’t got it all together and that I’m mostly fumbling through life giving it the best shot I can. It’s a conversation that proves my nature as a mistake-maker. A conversation where we eventually end up talking about God and how we see the world and other hard things that you talk about over mediocre tacos.
Days later, I roll back the film in this story and land on this reality: when I’m broken and afraid of myself, when I can barely stand up straight and I seem to be venturing down the wrong road, that’s when trust in God seems to matter most. Because regardless of where I fall on the spectrum, saint or atheist, mystic or agnostic, I’m continually trusting in something. I’m trusting in myself or school or that relationship or my government or pop music or the shopping mall; I’m trusting in money or notoriety or philosophy or talent. And so, when I think about life in terms like that I have to brace myself for the hard truth that challenges who and what I spend most of my days trusting in.
I have to be honest about the fact that when life gets hard my faith in God seems to sink under the high tide of each day’s pressure. But as I mature, I have to respond differently. I have to stare down a theology that lacks trust and rests heavy in personal prosperity and trade it for a truer Gospel. All of this beckons me to step into a new way of following Christ; a trust-centric way of living out my days. A way that says, “come disease, come poverty, come broken heart, I’ll still follow Jesus.”
Most of this means trusting that God is walking with me in my most challenging moments, that he is for me and knows only of the good that he has created within me. I’m learning that if our theology isn’t rooted in a deep trust of God, we’re bound to throw up defeated arms at the sight of unforeseen circumstances and unanswered prayers. I’m seasoned in stomping my feet when I don’t get what I’m hoping for, and even worse, I’m well-versed in a faith that is often dependent on my emotions. Trust, at the very core, chooses to believe in the promises of God rather than the escapism of vending machine theology. Trust moves beyond what I feel and forces me to wrestle the lies that tell me I’m no more than a deserted disciple.
Trust, I’m coming to believe, is what will keep us fighting the good fight and pressing into the life intended for us no matter what the days to come look like.
