When ‘Trusting God’ means ‘Don’t hurt me, God’

Life as evacuation plan

‘Straw’, by Susan Hable

Someone smarter than I, whoever that bastard is, once said, ‘God comes to you disguised as your life.’

That’s good news, because it transforms your problems in life.

One of our reflexes, all of us, is to make God just like us. We make him bigger, and older, and we put him in ‘heaven’. But he’s pretty much like us, a powerful and benevolent elderly king. We’re made in his image, so that seems like a reasonable construct.

And on this God we ‘call,’ whenever we’re in trouble.

Calling on him, this remote and kindly God, means asking for an end-run around our troubles. That’s what we do. We want escape. What we could do instead, is go to meet him in those troubles. There is a place for requesting divine cavalry, to be sure. God does intervene. He does open ways through adversity. But at no time is he elsewhere, somehow above the troubles, waiting to be talked into making the troubles go away. It’s actually in the troubles that you’ll meet him. He’s right there, where the hurt is. And that’s where we do our best trusting.

Meeting God is better, and more productive, than calling on God.

Trusting God, to say it differently, needs to mean something other than hoping he’ll let us avoid being hurt. Because sometimes we will be. Life isn’t a getaway plan, to say it yet another way. The idea isn’t to put off a growing relationship with our Creator until we’re safely in heaven, away from our troubles. The idea is to grow now, using those troubles as a catalyst. And you don’t do that all by yourself.

It looks to me, as a matter of fact, like the very point of life is to force us into relationship with God. We really do have to capitulate. There is a necessary suffering, as Richard Rohr coins it, that exhausts us to the point that we give up trying to engineer our own deliverance. At that point we discover the truth about our problems, and about what and where ‘God’ is.

Conceived of like this, you might as well actively enter into your problems to find God, and the deliverance that he intends (not the one you imagine). Logically, after all, if you’re happy trusting your Redeemer to get you through the fear and chaos that is death eventually, in which you truly have no control and have only limited understanding, you probably should consider trusting him here, right where you are, and where he is, now.

How do you do it? I’m learning that. It’s got something to do with entering mystery, and being comfortable in that scary place. How do I know when I’m on the frontier of that mystery? I guess, when I have no idea where to go. It’s comforting at least to observe on that frontier that things are still going. That proves that it’s not my responsibility to drive things. Do I feel lost? Sure. But I can see that Creation around me is not lost.

I wouldn’t know any of this if I had just run away from my problems and asked God for simple escape.