Trust?

Caribbean breeze

Enough light breached my darkness that I saw for the first time. God had run across the universe that I placed between us, stopped me in my tracks on Easter Sunday, 1987, and was now using the trauma of His creation to convey His heart to me.

I got back in my car and drove home. The emotion and distrust of the preceding years began to flow out of me and new gratitude and joy supplanted their vacated strongholds. It wasn’t just that my distrust in God was gone. I found Abba Father who is trustworthy.

What an Easter! I expected Him to be at churches around the world admiring all of the new clothes, but He met me on an asphalt street, in an unknown yard, with a four-legged emissary. At great expense He revealed His heart to me. When you and I meet one of these days, just inside the eastern gate, I’ll be the person with a pocketful of nuts and a gray squirrel sitting on his shoulder.

The Bible says the enemy accuses me before God on a regular basis. While I believe that to be true, I find that the enemy also accuses God before me day and night. Whatever circumstance presents itself, Satan has what seems to be a one-track mind: How can I make God look bad in this situation? As he rants and raves, pitching my little life boat around like a stick of wood, it appears as though God is less than He claims to be. It appears that He really did lose track and let me slip through some crack in heaven’s bureaucracy. It appears that Satan has found a loophole that God didn’t anticipate and that I am indeed adrift in a sea of isolation. My confidence in God—faith—appears to be without foundation.

But this is the arena where trust thrives and spars with the Deceiver and his deceptions. In this ring of testing so familiar to life, trust declares confidence in Father God even though it appears He has abandoned ship.

Trust stands at the bowsprit of life’s vessel, pitching though it is. The spray from Satan’s angry storm lashes, but with spray in his face the one who trusts declares confidence in God. How is this? Because the one who trusts sees through the mist and spray into Fathers’ heart.