Trust: Is it that simple?

Brennan Manning tells the story of John Kavanaugh who works with Mother Teresa in Calcutta for three months. One day he requests a prayer. She asks what he’d like her to pray for and he indicated "clarity." Mother Teresa firmly denied the request. She claimed that clarity was the last thing he was clinging to and need to let go of-- she told him she would pray that he would trust God.

Sometimes trusting God is the most difficult thing in the world and sometimes it is the easiest thing in the world. I suspect that at least once a day I utter, "Help me to trust you."

There is a huge difference between trusting God to be God and trusting God to give me what I think I need. What I want may not be what I need. Like clarity, what I want may be the very thing that prevents me from trusting God.

What if God really does know what is best for me and will actually see me through if I would simply trust God to be God? Trust is not always for the destination, but trust is for the journey.

I find that God never fails to be God. I need to trust God to be God, not Santa Claus.

A friend once shared with me that he was "trusting God to restore his marriage" but felt like God wasn’t "responding."

I asked him if he would still trust God even if he and his wife didn’t get back together?

I sensed my friend was attempting to cut deals with God that if he "trusted" enough that God would magically restore his marriage that was severely damaged. He was clinging to himself like a huge piece of Saran Wrap jumbled together in a mess. My friend wasn’t trusting God, he was hoping God would see that he had been on his best behavior and was "trusting" that God would reward him for his efforts. That is trust of self, not God.

A few months later he was in a new relationship and soon after married. That marriage also ended in divorce. He never truly trusted God to be God in his life. He never trusted God to begin to heal his damaged emotions and walk with him as God mended his brokenness. He never allowed himself to expereince God as the lover of his soul where he would find that God was walking with him in his journey whether he was conscious of it or not.

God doesn't need our trust to prove or remind him that we love God. Maybe trust is simply to remind oursleves that God loves us?