In God We Trust
Four words that we hear from many, but few truly understand what it really means to truly place our trust in God.
As a child, I was taught that a trust in God was really just a blind action, wherein we were to hope for the best and pray for the outcome that we wished for in any given moment. If the outcome was what we wished and prayed for, there was a claim that "our prayers were answered." If the outcome was contrary to what we wished and prayed for, there was a claim that it was "God's Will."
If God's Will is....then it has to be an impartial spiritual law that underlies everything and therefore can't be enticed to change "per circumstance or desire", or that would be a God that plays favorites, and no such God exists. A law is a law that can either be followed or broken.
In my own spiritual journey, I have come to learn that trust in God has nothing to do with imagining what God is or what he can do for me.
I have also since come to learn that when trust is blind, it can't see. It can only hope and hope comes from imagination, and imagination is not something real and living. So what I ended up seeing is that that kind of blind trust is limited and could never bring me into a real living relationship with God. I wanted to know, for myself, that God truly exists. I didn't want to just blindly accept that fact. As a matter of fact, until I could prove, for myself, the existence of God, I didn't believe a God existed at all.
If you consider how many Christians there are out in the world today that believe certain teachings that have been handed down generation to generation without question, wouldn't you think that the world would be a better place than it currently is if that teaching was truth? If the vast amount of Christians out in the world were praying and praying and the way they were taught to pray was the answer, then wouldn't we see a different world out there - a world getting better instead of a world descending?
I am not criticizing anyone or anything here. I just question things because it is good to question things and not just blindly follow or believe anything.
Perhaps it is time to entertain something new in our lives. A new way to pray. A new way to see. This idea will disturb many, but what it disturbs inside oneself isn't something real, for anything real can never be threatened or disturbed.
What if trusting God is an action that we are intended to take in each and every moment. Perhaps we can call it a non-action really because it is the opposite of the responsive actions that we typically take in any given moment.
What if trusting God is as simple as letting the moment unfold as it will, without our interference with it - without our wanting it to be different than what it is - without our complaining about it. To just purely see what is unfolding in the moment. To purely see what God is working to reveal to us in the moment, because that is the key.
We are so busy rejecting the moment in favor of what we want from it, that we don't see that God is truly working to have a living relationship with us. But that relationship can't exist if we interfere with it by wanting something else, or praying for something else.
When we agree to stand in the unfolding of the moment, we (as we know ourselves) disappear, and suddenly there is just God's life - there's just relationship.
What a difference there is between imagining God's life and truly becoming a living part of it. It is no wonder that so many people have a bad taste in their mouths when it comes to religion and Godly ideas. There was a part of me that refused to believe what I was told to believe about God when I was growing up, and so I understand why people feel the way that they do about the passed down ideas about God.
You can't look out at the world and try to make sense of "How can there be a God?" It doesn't work that way. There is a spiritual law that when broken by man, creates the ugliness that we see in the world. God did not create evil, but the breaking of his spiritual law by man does create evil. There is a big difference in that - can you see it? Man's hand, not God's hand.
We were intended to follow God's spiritual law, which is, as Guy Finley eloquently puts it, to want what life wants. When we are part of that living relationship moment to moment, we are not only carried by it, but are guided and sustained through it as well. We don't have to "pray" for anything because we understand that we are always given in each and every moment what we need to transcend our limitations. God's law is unfailing - we just need to remain in the present moment to receive that gift.
Instead of passing down old beliefs and ideas about God, why not give your child something new and true? Let them learn for themselves that God does exist, not because they read it or were told to believe it, but they have come to know if for themselves because they agreed to be a part of that living relationship.
What a blessing, the truest of blessings that would be.
Image Courtesy of: Photo by Dingzeyu Li on Unsplash
