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Growing up, I spent a lot of time on Lake Erie—my grandparents lived on the lake and we avid boaters. And because they were avid boaters—and because my Grandad had a knack for getting out into the middle of the lake and running out of gas—it was very important to my parents that my brother and I knew how to swim and to swim well. Add to that the fact that my dad was NOT a swimmer and was VERY uncomfortable on the water, and you’ll understand why swim lessons were pretty much MANDATORY.
The problem with swim lessons being mandatory was that I had inherited some of my father’s discomfort in the water. And by discomfort, I mean ABSOLUTE TERROR. I loved to be ON the water, I loved to be NEAR the water, but being IN the water, quite, frankly, scared me to death.
I remember my first time in swim lessons, in a summer pre-kindergarten program that included swimming instruction. I remember being in the baby pool and being asked basically just to CRAWL to the middle of the pool and back to the edge, and I remember I absolutely WOULD NOT do it. I walked to the middle, I walked back. I was NOT getting fully in that water. PERIOD. And going with the teachers into deeper water to play after lessons were over? While THEY HELD US UP? Completely out of the question.
For reasons I couldn’t yet understand or put words to, I didn’t trust the water, I didn’t trust my body, and I certainly didn’t trust my teachers. And I didn’t even have a reason yet to not trust swim instructors. YET.
Fast forward to early elementary school, my mother tried again to ensure that my brother and I would know how to swim should my Grandad capsize our boat (while we were out of gas in the middle of Lake Erie), and we took summer lessons at the local public pool.
I was a little older at this point, and a little more concerned about pleasing people, so I did actually GET IN the pool this time. And I learned a stroke or two, I learned to float, I learned to do a sit-dive off the side of the pool—and I learned that I was fairly comfortable in three feet of water as long as I didn’t have to get my face wet.
We got to the end of that two-week session, and on the last day we had to pass a test in order to pass the class—hold my breath under water, float, do my strokes, do a sit-dive. And I was somewhat anxious about it, because, you know, you’re never too young for test anxiety, but I handled it. I was fine.
Until, after they’d done all of that, they told us to get out of the pool and they walked us down to the diving board and told us that the last thing we had to do to pass the class was to jump off the diving board into the deep end and swim to the side of the pool. And then I was NOT FINE.
We’d never been in water over our head. We’d never been off the diving board. We’d never been told this was something we’d have to do. So, needless to say, I began to FREAK THE HECK OUT.
I’m in complete panic internally, and I’m pretty sure I’m crying, and there is NO WAY IN HECK I’m getting on that diving board. NOT. HAPPENING. So my swim instructor very kindly talks to me in a sweet, soft voice, and she tells me that I can do this, and she tells me that she’ll be right there, and she tells me she will hold my hand and she will walk out to the end of the diving board with me and that we will jump together and I will be safe because she’ll be RIGHT THERE.
Which was great. Except that that’s not what happened. She calmed me down somewhat, she held my hand, she walked me out to the end of the diving board—and then she counted to three AND THEN SHE PUSHED ME IN THE POOL. I didn’t know, obviously, how to time taking a breath, because I’d never done this before and because I was too busy freaking out, so I inhaled water as I went under, choking and sputtering and fighting to breathe while also trying to fight my way to the side of the pool—ALONE. I got out of that pool, shaking and choking and sobbingand at that point, you’d better believe me, ALL TRUST IN ANY ADULT WHO SAID THEY WOULD HELP ME WAS COMPLETELY GONE.
I was never taking swim lessons again, I was never getting in the pool again, and I was certainly NE-VER trusting someone who said they were going to help me EVER. AGAIN.
The call to TRUST is not always easy, because we’ve all in some way, at some time, had our trust betrayed. And believe me, I understand that my little example here today is extremely mild compared to some of what many of you women have been through. We’ve all been given, at a variety of points in our lives, plenty of reasons to potentially be distrusting of others—and perhaps, even, to our limited understanding, distrusting of God.
There’s another story about trust that I think most of you will be familiar with, though it’s probably not the first story you’d think of in the bible when you think about trusting God. I want to take a moment to share it with you now, from The Message:
Job was a man who lived in Uz. He was honest inside and out, a man of his word, who was totally devoted to God and hated evil with a passion. He had seven sons and three daughters. He was also very wealthy—the most influential man in all the East!
…One day when the angels came to report to God, Satan, who was the Designated Accuser, came along with them. God singled out Satan and said, “What have you been up to?”
Satan answered God, “Going here and there, checking things out on earth.”
God said to Satan, “Have you noticed my friend Job? There’s no one quite like him—honest and true to his word, totally devoted to God and hating evil.”
Satan retorted, “So do you think Job does all that out of the sheer goodness of his heart? Why, no one ever had it so good! You pamper him like a pet, make sure nothing bad ever happens to him or his family or his possessions, bless everything he does—he can’t lose!
“But what do you think would happen if you reached down and took away everything that is his? He’d curse you right to your face, that’s what.”
God replied, “We’ll see. Go ahead—do what you want with all that is his. Just don’t hurt him.” Then Satan left the presence of God, and swiftly set out to devour Job’s children and every single thing that Job owned—property, crops, even his field hands. Only he and his wife remained.
When Job got news of the devastation, he got to his feet, ripped his robe, shaved his head, then fell to the ground and worshiped:
Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
naked I’ll return to the womb of the earth.
God gives, God takes.
God’s name be ever blessed.And not once through all this did Job sin; not once did he blame God.
Another day the angels came again to report to God, Satan also showed up. God once more singled out Satan, saying, “And what have you been up to?” Satan answered God, “Oh, going here and there, checking things out.” Then God said to Satan, “Have you noticed my friend Job? There’s no one quite like him, is there—honest and true to his word, totally devoted to God and hating evil? He still has a firm grip on his integrity! You tried to trick me into destroying him, but it didn’t work.”
Satan answered, “A human would do anything to save his life. But what do you think would happen if you reached down and took away his health? He’d curse you to your face, that’s what.”
God said, “All right. Go ahead—you can do what you like with him. But mind you, don’t kill him.”
Satan left God and struck Job with terrible sores. Job was ulcers and scabs from head to foot. They itched and oozed so badly that he took a piece of broken pottery to scrape himself, then went and sat on a trash heap, among the ashes.
His wife said, “Still holding on to your precious integrity, are you? Curse God and be done with it!”
He told her, “You’re talking like an empty-headed fool. We take the good days from God—why not also the bad days?”
And not once through all this did Job sin. He said nothing against God.
There are numerous reasons why we, as mere humans living in a fallen world, may have difficulty with this call to trust. Many of us here in this room have had Job-like seasons in our life—if not an entire lifetime of them. You might be in one right NOW. But few of us experience a Job-like level of TRUST. Why not? I’m going to talk for the next few moments about what I believe to be the four core issues that get in our way of Job-like trust, and end our time talking about how we can cultivate a trusting heart for these times when trust is hard.
So, I’ve given you four D-words, so your paper looks like a bad grade card—sorry about that for you performance-driven types. I realize that’s a little triggering. And our first D-word—our first obstacle to the call to TRUST—is, perhaps, the most obvious. The first thing that causes us to struggle with trust is DISAPPOINTMENT. And let’s start right off the bat by noting that disappointment can range from mild disillusionment, as in my story, to full out devastation, which was JOB’s story.
Disappointment—to go word-nerd on you for a moment—is that feeling of dissatisfaction that follows the failure of expectations or hopes to manifest. Similar to regret, it differs in that a person feeling regret focuses primarily on the personal choices that contributed to a poor outcome, while a person feeling disappointment focuses on the outcome itself.
Disappointment, disillusionment, devastation—all arise because the OUTCOME we desired is not the outcome we GOT. We all know this pain. Expectations go unmet. Prayers go unanswered. Dreams die, as do people. Vows are broken. Innocence is stolen. Desires go unfulfilled. Hopes are deferred and they indeed, as we read in Proverbs, make the heart sick.
We all have at least one area in our lives about which we can look at squarely and say, “This was not the outcome I expected. This was not the outcome I wanted. This was not the outcome I prayed for.” And if we don’t know how to address that disappointment appropriately, it becomes a brick in this invisible wall that starts to build up between us and God.
The next issue that gets in the way of the call to trust—and our second “D”—is DISBELIEF or DOUBT. We read in James,
If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do. James 1:5-8
What creates this doubt? I believe we fail to trust God because there is a chink in our belief-armor. Many of us believe IN God, but we sometimes struggle with misconceptions about his CHARACTER—usually because we are projecting on to him the characteristics of those who have wounded us in the past.
We believe God is love, but we sometimes struggle to believe that God sees and knows and loves US personally and intimately. We believe God heals, but we sometimes struggle to believe that he has the DESIRE to heal in a particular situation. We believe we are called to pray, but we sometimes struggle to believe our prayers have any impact. We believe God is our Father, but we sometimes struggle to believe he is a GOOD father with GOOD intentions toward us. We ascribe to him characteristics that are not true to his character because we try to take what we know about humans and apply that to God rather than taking what we know from the Word about GOD as our primary source of information.
And so we struggle to embrace the call to trust because we only believe parts of what the Bible says about God and not the whole thing. And for each truth we fail to believe, we add another brick to that wall.
Our next “D”—the next issue that gets in the way of the call to trust is a DIVIDED HEART. We have allegiance in our hearts to more than one God. When we look at this scripturally, such as in Matthew 6, which says No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, the “god” or “master” they are alluding to is money—it’s wealth. But that is only one of the many gods our hearts can be divided over. Reliance on wealth, reliance on others, reliance on medical professionals, reliance on institutions, on governments, on social media, even on the church—these are all ways in which our hearts can be divided and we can fail to trust God.
But the main issue I want to talk about here—the main way in which our hearts can be divided—is when we put OURSELVES on the throne and think that we can do this god-of-our-lives thing better than God. And you KNOW WE DO IT. We rely on our OWN wisdom. Our OWN strength. Our OWN willpower. Our OWN intellect. Our OWN creativity. Our OWN sense of right and wrong.
We read in Proverbs 3—one of my favorite passages—that we are to Trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding. Friends, you can’t lean in more than one direction. Imma say that again: YOU CANNOT LEAN IN MORE THAN ONE DIRECTION. You can’t lean to the left AND the right at the same time. It’s impossible. That’s called SWAYING. If we are relying on ourselves and LEANING on OUR strength and understanding, we ARE NOT WALKING IN TRUST. Period. We’re either leaning on God, or we’re not.
And, finally, our last “D”—the last obstacle we encounter as we are called to trust—is DISTANCE. We struggle to trust God because we feel far from him. Sometimes, this is admittedly the result of our own doing. We don’t trust God sometimes because we don’t feel close to God, and we don’t feel close to God because we don’t spend any time with him. We don’t take the time to sit in his presence. We don’t actually LISTEN for his voice—we merely jabber away to him, or, on the other hand, simply tune him out. We don’t spend time in his word. We don’t make our relationship with him a priority.
But there are also times, much to our dismay, when we seem to be doing EVERYTHING RIGHT and we STILL don’t hear from God. We cry out, like David, for instance, in the Psalms, “How long will you hide your face from me? Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” These are actual words from scripture—not just something that came out of my journal—though, depending on the season of my life, you’ll certainly find some of these questions in there. This is IN THE BIBLE. God, why are you hiding from me?!?!
So we experience some of these David or Job-moments and David or Job-questions, but we frequently forget to apply the David and Job-solution. We ask the questions, over and over, but we never get to doxology—another D-word. We live out the first part of biblical lament without ever living into the second. We never turn our hearts back around to praise, to dwelling on the character of God, to reminding ourselves of his faithfulness in the past. And when we leave these kinds of questions open-ended—when we live in the questions and not the answers—Satan gets a foothold and he tricks us into adding more bricks to that wall.
So, what do we DO? How do we heed the call to trust when we have one or more of these bricks in our wall built up between us and the ability to completely relax back into a float, trusting that the arms which hold us will not pull away, trusting that our bodies will, indeed, be buoyant, trusting that we can never truly be in over our heads, trusting that our feet will find the bottom of the pool when we need it?
I’ve answered this question many, MANY TIMES, though in a slightly different way, to couples in counseling after a betrayal of trust. I want to share with you briefly what I share with them. Speaking to the spouse who must now learn to trust again, in this case we’ll say it’s the wife, simply because we’re all women, and I look at her squarely and I tell her that “what you’re probably trying to do right now—because everyone does it—is to say to yourself over and over and over ‘He would never do that to me again.’ And THAT is where you are trying to place your trust and find your peace. In the hope that your betrayer, in repentance, will never hurt you again. But that WILL NOT bring you peace. Because the unfortunate truth is they very well could. After all, you didn’t think they’d do it the FIRST time either. They COULD betray you AGAIN. So your foundation of trust has to be built elsewhere.”
I then share that the next place people’s brains usually go, then, is to the false belief that “God will never let that happen to me again.” And they attempt to reassure themselves that God, in his grace, would surely never strike a person twice, would never allow destruction on top of destruction. He’s a good God—surely he puts a limit on our suffering. They’ve obviously never read the book of Job. And they try to find peace by repeating this to themselves over and over again.
But here’s the deal—and this is a hard one to swallow—for reasons we will not understand until heaven God JUST MIGHT allow pain and suffering of that magnitude into your live AGAIN. And for some of you, that thought is terrifying. There’s nothing in the Word that assures us that suffering will only strike once. In fact, we often
see the opposite—ESPECIALLY when we look at Job. So we cannot make up false truths in our minds about God and place our faith there, because these things WILL NOT HOLD US STEADY. So what DO we do?
We turn back to Job to find our answer.
We find, in Job, a man who is completely and utterly devastated, yet still walking in trust. A man who questions God but refuses to blaspheme God. A man who charges God with no wrongdoing. A man who praises God from a place of loss. A man who proclaims, to his misunderstanding friends, “Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him.”
Here is what I tell the offended spouse when trust has been betrayed: the ONLY THING that you can 100% count on and place your trust in and get your peace from and hang your faith on IS THAT GOD IS GOOD, NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, AND HIS PLANS ARE NOT TO HARM YOU, BUT TO GIVE YOU A HOPE AND A FUTURE. That is the ONLY thing worth our trust when we’ve been disappointed, when we’re doubting, when we’re divided internally, when we feel distant from our Lord. When the call to trust is difficult and the risk seems immense, THIS is where we find our courage: GOD IS GOOD. ALL THE TIME.
So I want to close briefly with three things you can do—based out of the life of Job—to answer the call to trust in your life.
1. The first thing we learn is that Job laments. Lament is an important and valid part of the trust process.
We read in Job 1:20 that, upon learning of the fate of his children, “Job got up and tore his robe and shaved his head.” In 2:8 we read he sits in ashes in silence with his friends for an entire week. Each of these behaviors are cultural expressions of grief. Many times in this book he laments what has happened, though, as we read in chapter 1:22, In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.
You CAN go to the Lord with your grief and your anger and your fear and you CAN CRY OUT TO HIM in honesty and desperation. For as long as it takes. You just can’t blaspheme the Lord. And you just CAN’T STAY THERE. It’s like when Beth Moore talks about how we all find ourselves in a pit at some point. The red flag is when we start decorating. So we look to the next lesson.
2. In the midst of his grief, Job praises God. Not AFTER—IN THE MIDST OF.
Immediately on the heels of Job’s first expression of lament, Job praises God:
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,
and naked I will depart
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
may the name of the Lord be praised.” Job 1:21
Praise acknowledges God’s sovereignty. Praise draws our broken heart back to God. Praise rights our faulty thinking. Praise puts our grief in context. Praise affirms our belief in the goodness of God. We can call out honestly to God from the darkest places of our heart and we can go to the mat with him—but we’ve ultimately got to remember that he is God and we are not. We’ve got to remember that he ALONE is sovereign and allow that sovereignty to be our ANCHOR. Because believe me—either HE is going to remind us—as he did with Job in a rather clear way toward the end of this story—or WE can be the ones to remember and affirm that WE are the child and HE is the loving Father. And it typically goes better if WE are the ones to make that first move. I’m just sayin…
3. And finally, Job reiterates, often and verbally, his trust in the Lord.
In Job 13:15, we read, Though he slay me, yet I will hope in him. Some versions translate that “trust in him.”
In 19:25-26 we read:
I know that my redeemer lives,
and that in the end he will stand on the earth.
And after my skin has been destroyed,
yet in my flesh I will see God…
And at the end of the book, once God has reminded Job which one of them is God, Job responds, in 42:2-6:
“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted…
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know…My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
Job’s choice, in ALL THINGS—in loss, in physical pain, in confusion, in the face of stupidity, in the face of God’s utter and complete rule and reign over this world—is to trust. HIS CHOICE IS TO TRUST. Not because it soothes the loss or eliminates the pain or quiets our questions or gives us a “logical” answer to our suffering, but because choosing to trust God even when trust is hard is the ONLY THING that will not ever fail us. His character and his goodness are steadfast.
So what I want you to hear today—what I want you to take with you at 4:00 when you walk out of here—is that this call to trust God—even when it’s hard, even when we’ve been disappointed or had doubts or have struggled to fully believe or are distant in our hearts from his embrace—is a risk worth taking.
Because God is the ONLY one—when we’ve walked out to the end of that diving board and we’re facing a risk that terrifies us—who will ALWAYS keep his word. Who will ALWAYS keep hold of our hand. Who will ALWAYS be present with us when we make that leap. Who will ALWAYS get us through it and back to the edge of the pool no matter how hard we’re choking and sputtering. Always, always, ALWAYS.