Rest & Trust

I was inspired yesterday by something my high school youth pastor wrote on Facebook. (I never thought I would write a blog post inspired by a FB status but here we are).

"I started recognizing I wasn't truly trusting God and began to shift away from anxious activity toward rest and trust. Taking my hands off of things. We are standing on what we believe are promises from God and I am doing everything I can to hear his voice and not act otherwise."

While his circumstances are very different from mine, this resonated so deeply with me because I could have written it myself. Trust is trust, it doesn't discriminate against circumstance.

Trust, such a simple one syllable word. A word that we can easily take for granted by not giving it much weight or depth. A word we can throw around saying we mean, but when intricately looked at and dissected, will either expose the fact that we didn't mean it or validate that we do.

Lately, I have found myself saying, "I trust God with this process" and yet I am completely knocked off my feet by a concerning email or yet again another change of events in our process. It doesn't take much for me to get thrown into a flurry of anxiety and worry these days and that is not trust.

I say, "I trust God with this" and yet I am constantly keeping myself busy with tasks, finding any way I can to "keep my mind off" the situation. I have distracted myself into trust. That is not trust, not real trust anyway.

But what happens in the quiet moments? The moments where everything slows down. The moments where I have time to think. The moments where there hasn't been an update in a while. The moments of waiting. The moments where everything is a mess and is unknown.

If I am not able to confidently rest in the silence, trusting that He is good, His plans are good, and His promises are faithful, am I really trusting Him?

Or what happens when the roller coaster of updates begins to take off and the news bounces between good and bad at every turn?

If I immediately begin to analyze and overanalyze until my chest is physically aching in pain due to the anxiety I have stirred up, am I really trusting?

True real trust means being able to sit in the silence. It means being able to sit in the mess of the unknown without needing a task or allowing your brain to run through the curated list of worst case scenarios.

Trust means that even though you have no idea what the outcome will be, or what will come from the messy situation that seems to keep getting messier, you can rest in peace anyway.

When God asks us to trust him, it usually requires us to take action. The action most commonly associated is probably a brave, valiant hero we've conjured from a movie. But I think the greatest and bravest action that God requires us to take when trusting Him is to rest. To sit in his presence, to not be encumbered by lists and tasks, to do nothing except lean into Him and trust that He has it all under control.