Learning to Trust

I think I'm failing on this lesson right now.  Perhaps.  Well, I think I am still getting a passing grade on the learning to trust God.  It is the trusting other people that is more the issue right now.

I've taken a gut punch in this subject, and I am still reeling from the unexpected blow.  I just did not see it coming and am utterly confused about it.  But, oh, you can be sure I'm on guard now!  Not about to take another blow with no protection!

But while we had a week away, the week with the spiders and freezing cold, I had sometime to think,  The time involved sitting in meeting every morning and evening, and to be honest, I could not concentrate enough to understand all that was being said, so I busily worked in my journal.  (I do have this bad habit tuning out some meetings and just quietly writing. - but really, it can be such a effort to concentrate enough to understand!)

I wrote in the first part of the week about how I was feeling... hard to find words to express all that.  We have been through one thing after another this year, and recently lost some friends in a tragic accident, so we were in shock and pain.  At the funeral, we sat crying, but something impressed itself on me through the grief.

There were some of us who counted loss as a normal thing - not a welcomed thing, not a sure thing, not a thing to be belittled, but something that did not shock us.... we already knew that life is not a guarantee and that God lets the unexpected happen.  We grieve, but we turn in our grief up to God.

A verse that comes to mind (I know it is an odd one) is one about my soul rests like a weaned child upon the Lord.  A picture of quiet rest not demanding and fussing.

Then there were those in another context who I think had never before really faced that life has no guarantees of anything happening... people who are shocked when cars crash, when sickness hits and cancer steals life, when planes fall out of the sky... as if just because we believe in and follow God, that He will stop everything to see that we all live to be 97 and die peacefully in our sleep.  Their shock, horror, pain, and sheer incapability to deal with the death was awful to see.

We grieved, we gathered together and comforted each other, we cried, but we did not rale against God.  There was the quiet acceptance already that we all knew things happen.  It didn't shake our trust in God.  I don't think in the entire thing that I was tempted to look up at God and demand the answer to an angry "why?".  I've lost friends before....  I still know each one... I miss them..... but I have to accept that God knows what He is doing and my long life and comfort is not really the top thing on His priority list.  Neither is it on mine, I hope.

We looked up at God with deep sadness, pain, hurt, a shock in the fact that they are gone, not in that God allowed it.  In tears....  but a settled trust.

So it is not the trusting God that has taken a blow.  It is trusting other people.  I'm not doing good there at all.  And it hurts.  It's ripped open a gash in me similar to the wound in my son's arm - big and ugly.  And it is not healing well.  The problem is I'm not sure I want to be doing good there again.  Why trust if it only means you will get hurt?

The first days at camp, I journaled about how I felt, but came to no resolution.  Then the day of the spiders, I decided to relax (OUT of a boat!) by sitting in the sun and reading a book.  Just a junk book - there wasn't much choice if I didn't want to read a commentary on I Peter.  One of those books authors write to get a paycheck, but the world would not have missed if it had never existed.

But the book was about trust.  About  girl who struggled with trust.  I read it in about two hours, and set it down.  But then I began to think about trust....

Really, the pain that I'm struggling with, that I curl up silent against my husband late at night and wrap his arms tight around me because of, is about trust.  I had felt safe.  I had not expected to get hurt.  And I did.  And I still have no real clue as to why.  And that hurts.

It is about trust.

Then I began to think...  that evening, I wrote down a series of questions.... why do we trust?

Honestly, I see no logical basis for trust at all.  None.  Not for trusting other people.

But it is late and I can't find my journal.  When I do, I will sort out the questions and answers here.  I haven't given up on the whole idea of trust, but I am less willing to do it now.

Yet, strangely, the one person I trust the most in my life at this point is one who has also hurt me quite a lot in the past.  My husband.  Right now, he is my comfort, the one I trust, the one I run to with my heart hurting and confused.

He can't say much right now.  He's a little confused, too.  But he holds me.

Trust - it isn't that logical at all.  Yet, I trust my husband.  Even after what we have been through.  So perhaps hearts heal.  Mine just hasn't yet.  To be honest, I don't know if I want it to.  Not in this case.  The gash is too close to my heart to ever want to go through it again.