FOOLISHLY TRUSTING

Hallo hallo!

How e dey be? I hope things are going well with you and that God will continue to be with you.

Welcome to today’s gist.

You already know I love Brooke St. James, but have I told you I love Francine Rivers? Anyway, she’s another author I’m completely in love with. There’s something about the way she writes that prevents me from dropping the book even when I am supposed to be doing something else, I’ve literally been cooking while reading her book while cooking and the food may or may not have burnt.

Why am I giving you all of this information? I’ve recently undertaken to read all her books (I have just about 3 to go after the one I’m currently reading) and over the course of the weekend, I read her “Mark of the Lion Series” (I honestly think that if you would never read any other book, you should read this series, of course I’ll probably say that about any book of hers but oh well!)

In the book she tells us of Hadassah, a Christian Jew who was taken from Jerusalem and sold to slavery in Rome. As I read Book 1 and 2, I saw Hadassah’s faith tested time and again; God kept demanding her trust and I saw her placing her trust in Him time and again, even in situations where I was placing myself in her shoes and going the opposite direction. And I saw that time and again, God kept bringing her out of terrible situations; for as long as she kept following God, He always came through for her -there was never a time when He left her in a lurch.

But the issue I struggled with while reading the book, and in life generally, is the uncertainty: the lack of knowledge of what comes next, the ignorance of the outcome of our decision, the absence of ‘omni-scient narrator’ ability to know that following what we want will lead us into problems, the unhealthy ‘optimism’ that we can “eat our cake and have it still”…. We begin to believe the lie that though the Lord has required that we trust Him, we can ‘trust’ Him yet go about doing things our own way.

But what God is teaching me about trust is that I cannot claim to trust Him yet have some ‘back-up plan’ of who I intend to reach out to ‘in case’ He doesn’t come through as quickly as I want Him to: the entire essence of trusting God is that He becomes my only resort, there should be no one and nothing else for me to want to fall back to, it must be God and no one else, to, as my dad says it, “trust God foolishly”. And that is really hard! I find myself wanting to trust God, in fact saying I trust Him, yet at one corner of my mind, I’m thinking “who fit help me solve this problem?” But the thing is, I cannot trust God and have back up plan, it must be Him and no one else.

It’s a lesson I’m still trying to learn, some days are better than others and I remember that God who has brought me through all that I have been through is still alive and able to get me out this time. I’ve spoken before about keeping record of the things that God’s done for us and using them as a reference point in new situations of trial (the post is titled ‘stories from before’). It is important that we do not forget all that God has done for us and that we use all He has done as a reference to remember that we can always trust God to come through for us and He will.

Yesterday God showed me something really instructive in Jeremiah, the Bible says that the man who trusts God is like a tree planted by the waters, whose roots will spread and will not fear heat, for whom no anxiety will come in the year of drought (Jeremiah 17:7-8) because He remains connected to the source of newness and freshness. God showed me that it is trusting Him that I can stay connected in Him because to trust Him is to remain in Him, and where else will I want to be?

It is not easy, but I’m learning that I can decide to trust in God and I can be assured that He will never let me down, I’m learning to constantly and intentionally place my trust in God especially when my feet is wavering, to learn to cry “I believe! Help my unbelief!”

So, if we must trust, then the only person we should trust is God! I pray that God will help us trust Him and Him alone.

See you next week!

 

Love,

Achenyo.