Trusting Grace

Anxiety has been my natural posture; stiffness, my default. The way I curl my toes up, tight retreat. How I angle my jaw, braced, chisel the brow with the lines of distrust. How I don’t fold my hands in prayer, how I weld them into tight fists of control. Always control—pseudopower from the pit. How I refuse to relinquish worry, like a babe a mother won’t forsake, an identity.

Do I hold worry close as this ruse of control, this pretense that I’m the one who will determine the course of events as I stir and churn and ruminate? Worry is the facade of taking action when prayer really is. And stressed, this pitched word that punctuates every conversation, is it really my attempt to prove how indispensable I am? Or is it more? Maybe disguising my deep fears as stress seems braver somehow.

An untroubled heart relaxes, trusts, leans assured into His ever-dependable arms. Trust, it’s the antithesis of stress. “Oh, the joys of those who trust the Lord” (Psalm 40:4 NLT). But how to learn trust like that? Can trust be conjured up simply by sheer will, on command?

I can’t fill with joy until I learn how to trust: “May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow” (Romans 15:13, emphasis added). The full life, the one spilling joy and peace, happens only as I come to trust the caress of the Lover, Lover who never burdens His children with shame or self-condemnation but keeps stroking the fears with gentle grace.

If I believe, then I must let go and trust. Belief in God has to be more than mental assent, more than a clichéd exercise in cognition. What is saving belief if it isn’t the radical dare to wholly trust?

Pisteuo is used more than two hundred times in the New Testament, most often translated as “belief.” But it changes everything when I read that pisteuo ultimately means “to put one’s faith in; to trust.” Belief is a verb, something that you do.

Then the truth is that authentic, saving belief must be also? The very real, everyday action of trusting … Then a true saving faith is a faith that gives thanks, a faith that sees God, a faith that deeply trusts? How would eucharisteo help me trust?

I read the verse several times in the Amplified Bible on an afternoon while young hands work scales up and down the piano keys. “Jesus replied, ‘This is the work (service) that God asks of you: that you believe in the One Whom He has sent [that you cleave to, trust, rely on, and have faith in His Messenger]’ “ (John 6:29 AMP). That’s my daily work, the work God asks of me? To trust.

Sometimes, too often, I don’t want to muster the energy. Stress and anxiety seem easier. Easier to let a mind run wild with the worry than to exercise discipline, to rein her in, slip the blinders on, and train her to walk steady in certain assurance, not spooked by the specters looming ahead. Are stress and worry evidences of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God? To stay in love? I don’t like to ask these questions, sweep out these corners where eyes glare from shadows.

Stress brings no joy. Isn’t joy worth the effort of trust?

And I know and haltingly confess: Much of the worry in my own life has been a failure to believe … a wariness to thank and trust the loving hand of God.

I make soup and I bake bread, and I know my supreme need is joy in God and I know I can’t experience deep joy in God until I deep trust in God. I shine sinks and polish through to the realization that trusting God is my most urgent need.

He gave us Jesus. Jesus! Gave Him up for us all. If we have only one memory, isn’t this one enough? Why is this the memory I most often take for granted?

He cut open the flesh of the God-Man and let the blood. He washed our grime with the bloody grace. He drove the iron ore through His own vein. Doesn’t that memory alone suffice? Need there be anything more? If God didn’t withhold from us His very own Son, will God withhold anything we need?

If trust must be earned, hasn’t God unequivocally earned our trust with the bark on the raw wounds, the thorns pressed into the brow, your name on the cracked lips? How will He not also graciously give us all things He deems best and right? He’s already given the incomprehensible.

Christ our Crossbeam.

The counting of all blessings is ultimately summed up in One.

The radical wonder of it stuns me happy, hushes me still: It’s all Christ. Every moment, every event, every happening.

It’s all in Christ and in Christ we are always safe.

Lord, cause me to take a deep breath right now and really trust in my Savior — that He really saves. Thank You, Lord; in my Savior I am always safe.