It's a trust thang

So a while back, I screwed up. I did a stupid thing that pissed a lot of people off and let a lot of people down. But my biggest sin in that equation, I've since realized, was that I misplaced my trust. I don't mean mistakenly trusting perceived friends to give me the benefit of the doubt re: my intentions and gently admonish me if I was wrong, which, yes and ouch, but beside the point; I mean that I put my trust and faith and hope in my own abilities and in my own perceived popularity to save me from a frustrating situation, when instead I should have put all of my trust and faith in God. I got a taste of BNF-dom and let it go to my head, and what's worse, I gave fandom and my own talents and abilities more importance in my life than my relationship with my heavenly Father. For that alone, I deserved the smackdown that soon followed.

What does trust look like?
So since then, I've been working on learning how to relax and trust God. It's involved a lot of prayer, and a lot of repentance, and a lot of Bible study. It's involved not panicking and rushing to find the quick fix to my problems, but instead approaching them with patience and prayer. It's also involved a lot of trying to figure out exactly how trust works and what it looks like, something I'm still struggling with.

The other day, I took my dog, a toy poodle named Fizzgigg, to my fiance's in an attempt to socialize him with Matt's cat. Fizz is not exactly housebroken (he's deaf and blind and not exactly a spring chicken, so what're you gonna do?), so when we left for church I had to shut him in the bathroom to avoid any potential carpet damage and to keep him from hurting himself. As I left him there it occurred to me: this little animal has complete trust in me. He knows that I'll feed him and take care of him and not let anything bad happen to him if I can help it, and even when I do something he doesn't like that he doesn't realize is for his own good, he knows that if he keeps barking, eventually I'll show up to either remove him from the situation or comfort him and make it easier for him to bear. If I'm willing to respond to the needs of this little barking dog, how much more is my creator willing to respond when I cry out to him?

I shared this little epiphany with Matt, and he shared another illustration that he heard from a former pastor. This pastor was on a road trip with his family when their vehicle broke down in another state, and they couldn't get back home until they could get expensive repairs done. He stressed about this to the point that he made himself and his wife miserable. While he was sitting in a park one afternoon with his head in his hands wondering what he was going to do to fix the situation, he looked up and saw his boys playing, running around and chasing each other with big smiles on their faces and not a care in the world. Then it hit him: they're not stressed because they trust that daddy's going to take care of everything. He knew then that he needed to apply that same trust to his own Daddy in Heaven.

About ten years ago, driving home from work one night, I heard over and over, like a little voice in the back of my head, "I am the father to the fatherless." I was having a lot of problems getting along with my dad at the time, and I shrugged it off as having something to do with that. A week later, my dad died. A few days after that I opened my Bible to Psalm 68 and read, "A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling (Ps. 68:5)." I think maybe it's hard, when you haven't had the kind of relationship with your earthly father that engenders trust, to fully grasp what it is to trust God. But I think I'm finally starting to get it. It means knowing that somehow, everything is going to be okay, because Daddy's here. It's just as simple and complicated as that.