Some Stuff I've Been Thinking About

so you may have noticed that i am suddenly all philosophical again. weird, isn't it? i have no explanation whatsoever. it's just happening. deal with it.

trusting God is alot harder than trusting, say, my friend ruth ann. today we were driving to go tubing, and she had the directions. i said, "i trust you implicitly, so tell me what to do and when. i have no idea where we are going." so ruth ann studied the directions, sang along with my cds (which of course i was doing like the whole time because it's who i am), and chatted it up with the chicks in the back seat. we drove and drove and drove. guess what - we went too far. guess what - turns out the directions were wrong, and we were supposed to be taking the highway south instead of north. turns out we were now more than an hour and fifteen away from where we were supposed to be. everyone else in the larger group we were going with (RUF - shocking, i know), was also lost, since the directions were wrong. and the funniest part was that the exit we were supposed to take was one exit south of the one we got onto in the first place. meanwhile we're gallavanting across northern north carolina, passing all sorts of increasingly smaller towns. whoohoo! [actually, we had loads of fun.]

now, there is a point to all of this, but you will have keep tracking with me. suppose ruth ann had written those directions (she didn't, ps). after about an hour or so, i would have started to wonder about her and those directions. i would wonder if she'd gotten them right, and probably ask her if she's sure she knows where we're supposed to be going. after all, it stands to reason that if a drive is supposed to take about 30-45 minutes, and after an hour you haven't gotten off the highway yet, you're going the wrong way. and though that reason is awfully handy to have around, it also is very easily something we use improperly - to evaluate God.

the act of trusting God demands more of me than trusting my copilot ruth ann, because it demands that i trust someone more than i trust myself. trusting God requires that i believe Him when He doesn't make sense to me. it requires that my assumptions become conformed to this guiding principle: God is always right.

the best example of this i can think of is scripture. (incidentally, this is where the trust-issue has been cropping up most frequently of late.) when i'm reading the gospels (which i am at the moment actually), and something Jesus says doesn't make sense to me, and i think about it and chew on it and try to pick it apart, and i can't, i find myself trying to shove it off. as if my puny little brain could compete with God Almighty, or catch a mistake He made. how ridiculously vain can i be?

you know that saying that comes up in movies and tv shows that goes something like "when i say jump, you say 'how high?'" i think that's where our hearts should be in relationship to God. not that we don't think, and not that we don't wrestle with tough stuff, but that we do both of those things operating from a baseline: God is always right. the kind of life that would inevitably lead to would be ridiculously wild and crazy, but also the safest place for us to be.

our trust should be just that - TRUST. trust comes in relationships - deep, intimate relationships. trust is about two things - love and reliability. we have a God Who epitomizes love and is always right. this kind of faith - which, ps, leads to obedience - is unlike faith we put in anyone or anything else. my directions failed me this afternoon - big time. everything else in life does the same eventually - except our God. because of that fact - that He Who He is, that He is always consistent in character - really trusting Him means all the tools we have at our disposal rest underneath Him, not over Him. there is no judging God.