In his book, Trusting God, Jerry Bridges states:

“I acknowledge it often seems more difficult to trust God than to obey Him. The moral will of God given to us in the Bible is rational and reasonable. The circumstances in which we must trust God often appear irrational and inexplicable….Obeying God is worked out within well-defined boundaries of God’s revealed will. Trusting God is worked out in an arena that has no boundaries. We do not know the extent, the duration, or the frequency of the painful, adverse circumstances in which we must frequently trust God. We are always coping with the unknown.”

_{Trusting God, 1988, p. 17.  Used by permission of NavPress – http://www.navpress.com. All rights reserved.}

Sometimes, when I think about my anxiety, it feels like if I were caught in a flood, careening through a torrential river, everything moving too fast to see or catch hold of, struggling to breathe or even keep my head above water. I fear being crashed against rocks or plunging off a precipice into the unknown below.

When I’m in a spiral like this, I cling onto my hope in God as if I’ve found a tree root near the shore, I can’t pull myself onto the bank, but if I hold on with all my might, I can avoid being pulled back into the current. It’s not a comfortable place to be.

As I’ve continued to grow in my faith, I’ve learned that this is not a good exercise of faith. God isn’t the tree root near the shore. God is the river.

God is the river.

He gently calls me to trust Him, to believe that He won’t let me drown. I don’t have to fight the current, I can let go. It feels very unstable to me, I long for the illusion of control, not understanding that I am with Him, and even if I don’t feel safe, that’s the best place I could possibly be.

In C.S. Lewis’s allegorical gospel novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a young girl named Susan and her three siblings find a magical realm behind a row of coats in the wardrobe of an old English country house. In this realm there are talking animals and mythical creatures engaged in a battle of good and evil, and the one who can turn the tide, their only hope, is a lion called Aslan. In this scene, Susan discusses Aslan with her new friend, Mr. Beaver.

“‘Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.’

‘Ooh’ said Susan. ‘I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion…’

‘Safe?’ said Mr Beaver, ‘Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’”

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis, 1950.

The river doesn’t feel safe, but I know God is good, and I know he works for my good. Scripture promises us that these things are true. For example, Romans 8:28 tells us:

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

If you back up a bit to verse 18, you’ll see that Paul is referencing some sincere trials that the church has been enduring, and that the hope we have in God is there to bring us closer to Him.

One of the most frequently quoted Bible verses when people are struggling to trust God is Jeremiah 29:11:

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”

Jeremiah 29:11

If you zoom out of that verse and examine the context it helps us to understand the nature of God better. Jeremiah was a prophet who had the unfortunate task of bringing the news that the Babylonian exile would last not two years, but 70. So the future that God is promising to these people is going to be a long time coming. It’s not toxic positivity here, it’s God’s promises, coming to fruition, in God’s timing. I bet those people struggled with trusting God during that time period. The exile followed a period of disobedience to God, and it was God’s way not of punishing the Israelites, but drawing them nearer to Him. The subsequent verses expand on this:

“Then you will call on me and come and pray to me, and I will listen to you. You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart. I will be found by you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back from captivity. I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you,” declares the Lord, “and will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”

‭‭Jeremiah‬ ‭29‬:‭12‬-‭14‬ ‭NIV‬‬

The truth is that none of us know what lies beyond the bend in the river. We can’t see what’s coming. The bible says that our current vision is blurred. 1 Corinthians 13:12 says: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.” When will we know even as we are fully known? According to verse 10, when completeness comes. Colossians 2:10 tells us that Christ is the one who makes us complete. This is not to say that accepting Christ as your savior means you will immediately know all the mysteries of the universe, but that in due time you will, possibly not until we are all reunited in Heaven.

Not knowing can be frightening. I believe most fear boils down to fear of the unknown. I love the show Doctor Who. If you watch it often enough you will definitely find some pretty creepy/spooky episodes, but what I love the most about the show is that by the end of each episode you know what the scary thing really is, and why it’s not actually that scary. For those of you who remember Australian conservationist and animal expert Steve Irwin, the Doctor is sort of like a science-fiction version of him. Steve Irwin used to talk about animals that most people would find terrifying, like crocodiles, as if they were glorious works of art. Then he would personally help them get untangled from fishing net or whatever was hurting them, and then release them back into the wild. The Doctor is like that, but with scary aliens. The most dangerous emotion is fear of the unknown. It can make peaceful, rational people into murderers.

Sometimes it’s popular to mention that “fear not” is the most commonly stated command in the bible, and whereas that is true, Rebecca Davis has looked into this claim and sorted out the wheat from the chaff. She sums it up nicely here: “Also, when you look closely at the ‘fear not’ Scriptures, you’ll see that when our Lord speaks to people who are afraid, He doesn’t treat their fear like a sin. He treats it more like an injury. ‘Here, let me make this better.’”

Rather than focusing on not being afraid, it’s more important to follow God’s leading through the fear you feel. That’s true trust. Knowing that God is working for your good even through the hard things, even when you don’t understand. Even when it doesn’t make sense.

But how do I know what God is leading me to do?

Discerning God’s will takes practice. Certainly we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be led into sin by someone else’s assertion that “it’s God’s will”. If you read Blackaby’s Experiencing God, you’ll learn some good ways to do this. Part of it is checking what aligns with scripture, and, as the Bible Recap podcaster Tara-Leigh Cobble often states, it’s important to let scripture interpret scripture. That means being in God’s word daily (it is the sword of the Spirit after all) and not cherry-picking, but looking at the commands of the bible overall as a whole. An unethical person can make the bible seem to say many things that it, in fact, does not say.

When my best friend, Michelle, was fighting cancer in 2018, a friend of ours from high school, Brittany, came and joined us in a laying-on-of-hands prayer session for her. A few years later Brittany herself was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. Having lost Michelle to cancer, I will admit that it has been hard for me to pray for sick people. It’s a sort of churlish, whiny response to God not healing my friend. When I went to Israel with our church a couple years ago, I remember our pastor saying “God is all good, God is all loving, and God is all powerful.” and I felt conviction from the Holy Spirit. In response I prayed, I never doubted your power, and He said, No, you doubted my goodness. And it’s true. I knew that God is mighty to save, but I didn’t trust that taking Michelle home was the best thing He could have done for her. I didn’t trust that He was doing what was good for her.

Today I woke up to a great many people I know posting asking for prayers for Brittany, and because this is hard for me, I prayed a lot about it. While I was praying I kept smelling something foul. It smells like green onions, but like, a rotten garbage smell, not a food smell. I have been smelling it for over a week in different places throughout my house, usually when I pray. So today I started to wonder if it was even an actual physical smell at all. In the old testament, the bible talks about how burnt offerings are “a pleasing aroma” to the Lord. It always made me wonder if maybe our sin quite literally stinks. If so, maybe God was letting me in on that. Either way, I felt led to do a prayer walk through my whole house, praying, opening blinds, and lighting candles in every room. In the guest room I have a candle that was Michelle’s last gift to me, it was a housewarming gift in 2018. I stopped burning it a while back because it wouldn’t stay lit, but I can’t bring myself to throw it out. Today I decided to try to light it, and prayed that God would keep it lit while I did my work. It glowed brightly for a short time and then became dim again, so I also lit a taper candle I keep in that room because it’s where I used to always go to be by myself to pray.

When I was done with that I felt led to clean all the dust off the fan blades throughout the house. The dust bothers me, but I am usually either too busy or too lazy to clean it. However, today I had both the time and the energy (thank you, God) and so I gathered several dusters and my vacuum and set to work. I continued to pray and sing while doing this, and began to see it as an act of obedience to God. I have a love-hate relationship with my status as a stay-at-home-mom, and generally I really resent chores like dusting. It takes forever, it gets dust in my nose, eyes, and mouth, and it just gets dusty again in a few weeks, what’s the point? But today while I was working, I felt the nudge of the Holy Spirit. I was reminded that it is Jewish tradition to thoroughly clean their homes from top to bottom before passover; they remove every crumb of yeast, because yeast represents sin. This is one of the origins of what we all know as “spring cleaning”. While I was thinking of that, it occurred to me that this is what God does for us through the sacrifice of Christ Jesus. He cleans us of our sin so that we can be near to Him. It doesn’t mean that we will never sin again, but He is faithful to clean us again when we repent. That realization brought me to tears. I decided to start blowing out the candles throughout the house, and I felt led to start in the guest room first. I blew out the taper candle, and I almost just left the room at that, but something told me to check on Michelle’s candle. When I did, I saw that the candle that I thought had burnt out a moment after lighting it, was still burning a very small flame over an hour after I lit it. I felt overwhelmed that God actually answered my silly little prayer, and it was a reminder that He is faithful, so as I went room-to-room throughout the rest of the house I thanked God for each of His answered prayers as I blew out all the candles.

I don’t know what God will do for Brittany in regards to her cancer, but I do know, that whatever He does, it will be the best thing for her, because He is good, and He loves her more than anyone else ever could.