What It Really Means to Trust God

I’ve probably said the words “trust God” more times than I can count. I’ve preached them. I’ve prayed them. I’ve said them to people sitting across from me while their lives were falling apart. I’ve also said them to myself in seasons when I had no idea what was going to happen next.

They’re good words. I just think they can become too easy to say. Trust sounds simple when nothing important is on the line. It becomes a different conversation when the business is under pressure, someone you love is struggling, money is tight, a door closes, or you have to make a decision and none of the options feels completely right.

That’s usually when we find out what we actually mean when we say we trust God. Trust still leaves me with something to do! One of the things I’ve wrestled with over the years is the relationship between faith and responsibility. I believe God leads us. I believe He opens and closes doors. I believe there are things He sees that I can’t see, and I’ve lived long enough to know that some of the things I desperately wanted would probably have been terrible for me.

I also believe I still have a part to play and if I’m asking God to bless a business, I still have to make decisions. If I’m praying for a relationship, I may still need to have the difficult conversation. If I’m asking for direction, there may come a point where I have to take a step before I know exactly where the road ends.

Faith can become very convenient if I use it to avoid responsibility... I’ve watched people wait for God to do things He may already have given them the ability, wisdom or opportunity to do themselves. I’ve probably done versions of that too and there are times when prayer needs to be followed by a phone call, or an apology, or a budget or even just getting out of bed and doing the work.

Trusting God has never removed responsibility from my life. If anything, I think it has made me more aware of what actually belongs to me.

I don’t always get the answer I wanted and this is where trust becomes harder. There have been things I prayed for that didn’t happen the way I hoped. Doors stayed closed, relationships changed and plans didn’t work. Things I thought were right at the time looked very different a few years later.

I used to think faith would eventually give me more answers but age has done almost the opposite. I have more faith now than I did when I was younger, but I’m also more comfortable admitting that I don’t understand everything God is doing. That took me a while.

When you’re used to leading, building and solving problems, uncertainty can feel like something you’re supposed to fix. You want the plan, you want the timeline and you’d quite like God to send an email with three clear bullet points and a due date. He has not done that for me yet. I’ve had to learn that I can trust Him while still having questions.

Peace and certainty are not the same thing and for a long time, I think I confused peace with knowing what was going to happen. If I understood the plan, I felt calm. If I didn’t, I assumed something was wrong. Life has cured me of that idea.

Some of the biggest decisions I’ve made came without complete certainty. I had enough clarity to move, but not enough to know exactly how everything would turn out. There’s a kind of peace that comes from having the answer. There’s another kind that comes from knowing you’ll be okay even if the answer takes longer than you hoped. I value the second one much more now.

That doesn’t mean I never worry, I do. I can still lie awake thinking about a problem that looked perfectly manageable at three in the afternoon and somehow became an international crisis in my head at two in the morning. I’ve just become quicker at asking myself whether the thing I’m carrying is actually mine to carry.

And I’ve blamed God for things that belonged to me. This is probably one of the more uncomfortable parts of faith. There have been decisions in my life that were mine. I made them. Some were good. and some were not. Some worked out beautifully whilst others taught me lessons I would have preferred to learn from somebody else’s mistake. It would be very easy to spiritualize all of that after the fact.

“God closed the door.” “God moved me on.” “It wasn’t His timing.”

Sometimes that may be true. I also think there are times when we make poor decisions, ignore warning signs, rush ahead, stay too long, leave too soon or simply get something wrong. I don’t think trust requires pretending every outcome was secretly the plan. Sometimes maturity means saying, “I got that wrong.” God can still work with it.

That has been deeply reassuring to me. My mistakes don’t frighten God nearly as much as they frighten me.

Also, trust gets tested by control! Control can disguise itself as responsibility very easily and I know because I’m quite good at both. Give me a problem and I’ll start thinking about how to solve it. Give me a project and I’ll start building a plan. Put something important in front of me and my natural instinct is usually to get involved.

That has helped me build things but it has also made trust harder at times. There are situations where I can influence the outcome. There are others where I can’t, and the difficult part is being honest about which one I’m dealing with. I can prepare well for a meeting but I can’t control what the other person decides. I can love my children and at the same time I can’t live their lives for them. I can work hard on an organization but I can’t guarantee what the economy will do. And I can pray for somebody but I can’t force them to change.

There’s freedom in learning the difference, although I’m still practicing it. Trust sometimes looks very ordinary yet we tend to make faith dramatic. BIG moments, BIG prayers and BIG decisions. A lot of my faith these days looks far less impressive. It looks like getting up and doing what I know to do. It looks like being honest when something scares me. It looks like praying before I react. It looks like keeping promises when nobody is watching. It looks like choosing not to control a situation simply because I can. And it definitely looks like doing today’s work without demanding that God show me the next five years first. I think we underestimate those ordinary acts of trust and a life is mostly made up of ordinary days anyway.

In the Seventh Hand Principle, the final part is GOD: Learn to Trust Him. I put it last for a reason.

We dream. We take small steps. We build daily practices. We pay attention to the different parts of our lives. We learn to live with tensions. We work on our character. And then, eventually, we reach the edge of what we can do. There will always be something we can’t control. Someone may reject us, a market may change, an opportunity may disappear, a diagnosis may arrive and a person we love may make a choice we wish they wouldn’t.

There comes a point where effort has done what effort can do. I’m learning that trust begins there more often than I once realized.

What belongs to me? One question has become useful to me: What is mine to do, and what do I need to place back in God’s hands?

I don’t always get the answer immediately. But the question helps. It reminds me that trusting God doesn’t require me to become passive. I can still plan, work, lead, apologize, ask for help, make decisions and take the next step. I just don’t have to pretend I control the whole story. That may be what trust means to me more than anything these days. Doing my part, being honest about my limits, taking the next step I believe is right and learning, again and again, to leave room for God to be God.