The Key to Trust

Good morning, my friend

My normal sanguine spirit is subdued this morning at the onslaught of the pain that is splashed all over the news and sprinkled in the lives of friends and their friends.

I'm reading CS Lewis this morning and here is a paragraph I underlined:

"But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. "

God is not the author of disease, natural disasters or fatal car crashes. He permits them, but He doesn't conjure them up to prove a point. In a mystical way, sometimes deeply maddening within our human limitations of understanding, He can bring about beauty in tragedy and reveal a glimpse of the depth of His personal love for the individual through it. If one is open to it, He and His Kingdom (and the eternal nature of it) become crystal clear in the midst of the fog of pain and tears and hurt. In a teensy weensy way (compared to others), I've already experienced that. If I'm open to it, and because I know there is more earthly pain ahead, I'll experience it again.

But here is the reason I do not have to live in fear or in a posture of "when is it going to be me..my husband...my child??" (in the 'good' moments! Unfortunately, worry is often my first instinct.). It is because I am loved far deeper than the measly definition of love that I know. My husband, each of my children are loved abundantly and personally, so that anything that we encounter will not catch our Father by surprise. He counts and catches our tears and weeps with us, I am convinced. He doesn't like earth's condition any better than we do. He hates sin and the havoc it has wrought within the lives of those He created (and not just those who know and walk with Him.). I would suppose His heart was grieving the choices of the tortured gunmen in recent weeks made in desperation. They had no concept of how much they were loved, and in time their minds were so warped by the devil that it led to true death. For those who walk with Jesus, there is no true death. Only 'sleeping' in this reality on planet Earth.

Forgive me...you are reading a personal trail of thoughts, a glimpse into a journal. My thoughts are only human, open for error.

Here is another quote from the book "The Shack" by William P. Young, that I found so profound, so true for me:

(In the book, it is God conversing with the main character, McKenzie, here):

"You really don't understand yet.

You try to make sense of the world in which you live based on a very small and incomplete picture of reality. It is like looking at a parade through a tiny knothole of hurt, pain, self-centeredness, and power, and believing that you are on your own and insignificant. All of these contain powerful lies. You see pain and death as ultimate evils and God as the ultimate betrayer, or perhaps, at best, as fundamentally untrustworthy. You dictate the terms and judge my action and find me guilty.

The real underlying flaw in your life, Mckenzie, is that you don't think I am good. If you knew I was good and that everything-the means, the ends and all the processes of individual lives-is all covered by my goodness, then you might not always understand what I am doing, you would trust me. But you don't.

....You cannot produce trust just like you cannot 'do' humility. It either is or is not. Trust is the fruit of a relationship in which you know you are loved. Because you do not know that I love me, you cannot trust me. "

A person cannot fully trust someone they do not fully feel loved by. They can say they do all day and all night. But saying it doesn't make it true.

So that is my constant prayer for myself, my family and those dear people I've heard of who are face to face with pain deeper than I have ever known.

That we would begin, just begin, to understand how deeply we are loved.