My neighbor had a cat named Gomer. He was an aloof, indifferent killer who slept on the roof of Joe’s Toyota. Occasionally, when Joe and I stood in the front yard talking, Gomer would lie in the grass six feet away, but that was only occasionally.

I didn’t think about it until later, but my inability to trust mirrored Gomer’s: wary and hyper-vigilant—with everyone, but none more than God.

Both Joe and his cat are dead now, but one summer before they passed, I fell into a habit of going out front and sitting on the steps in the evening. Gomer eyed me from the roof of Joe’s truck. Then one evening, Gomer came halfway over to me. He had a live mouse in his mouth that he laid in the grass and played with—tortured actually—while I sat nearby. He would let the mouse go and pay it no mind while he stared at me. Then, he would catch the mouse again, bring it a bit closer to me, lie down, mouth the soggy rodent, then let it go and turn his attention back to me.

Night after night, not every night, but most, Gomer would trouble himself to jump off Joe’s truck and approach me sitting on the steps. This went on for perhaps a month, and night-by-night Gomer edged closer.

Then came the night when Gomer approached, not in a straight line, and not all at once, and made his way over the final distance between us to rub against my back. It was several more nights before Gomer trusted me enough to let me touch him while he rubbed against my legs.

I know next-to-nothing about cats, but Ashley Bates who is a cat expert says Gomer rubbed against me to transfer his scent onto me, thus claiming me as his own. Oorah. I belong.

What I do know is that each night as I observed Gomer’s reticence, God made certain I understood that I was observing a demonstration of my distrust of Him as I watched Gomer’s labor to trust me. In Gomer I saw my caution, question, speculation, and hyper-vigilance.

But then I saw the heart of God in myself.

God wove a tapestry of trust.

I knew my heart toward Gomer. I meant him no harm. I simply wanted to be his friend. But Gomer didn’t know this, and even though I spoke words of reassurance, I couldn’t explain it to him. All I could do was show up each evening, behave consistently, and afford Gomer the space to work through his distrust.

It wasn’t clear to me the first night, or even the second or third, what God was doing via this feline critter. But as the nights unfolded, the Spirit of God carefully began healing my wounded concept of Him. Once this dawned on me, I anticipated going to my reverie on the steps to meet Gomer and be cared for by the Spirit of God. As I watched Gomer’s distrust become trust, the Spirit coached, and counseled, and ultimately closed the gaping wound of distrust from which my soul had suffered a lifetime.

Like any significant wound that isn’t clean, its healing is ragged and imperfect. Screaming out in distrust is only a spasming flash of pain away. While healed over, I still guard the scarring around this wound. Trust, for me, remains tender to the touch. I wonder sometimes if this means distrust still infects my soul, but then I also wonder if my diligent care is simply wisdom to properly treasure the vitality of trust Father has built between us.

Today, my default disposition with God is trust. But this didn’t resolve overnight. Slowly, with time, bit-by-bit, closer and closer, Father God finally enabled me to experientially get close enough to touch. And with that, He wove healing threads into my soul that are resilient to doubt and duress. God wove a tapestry of trust, beautiful at face value, but knotted, and hemmed, and with loose ends from behind. Such is Father’s mercy.

Personalizing this Psalm then, when 37:3 opens and God says, “Trust me, son,” it gives me pause. What could easily be a throwaway line is impetus to reflect. Thoughtfully, I rub my fingers of faith over the scar of distrust and assess the condition of my soul’s determination to trust.

“Trust me, son.”

Trust and faith are often used synonymously in Christian circles. I heard this interchanging of theological talk from my earliest days and it created consternation. I had faith in God… but I didn’t trust God any farther than I could throw Him. Like Lewis, I never feared I would stop believing in God, but what I believed about God terrified me.

There are some struggles it’s okay to have in the Christian life, and a few struggles you don’t mention, given their degree of egregiousness. The mentionables and unmentionables differ from church to church, but in all of them, confessing you don’t trust God is simply not permissible. So, I suffered my shame in isolation. In time, ironically, the only person I could talk to about my distrust was the One whom I distrusted.

Along about 1981, my distrust in God had reached a boiling point in the cauldron of my soul. No one knew this, and I covered the raging infection within my inner man with a lifelong proficiency of smiles and denials. Dad and I had already formed what is today Lifetime.org and our ministry work was rocking and rolling, but I needed a respite.

Trust is irrational.

I contacted a friend who farmed and raised pigs and asked if I could come help on the farm for a while. Bob (Warren) was welcoming and the farm was a good antidote for the poison in my soul.

One day, Bob and I were invited to speak to a group of students in a Christian school close to Nashville, TN. I have no recollection of what the question was or why my reasoning took me where it did, but while answering a kid’s question, I turned to the white board and wrote: “You will never learn to trust God until your faith in God has been challenged.”

My hyper-vigilance and situational awareness went quiet. The classroom of kids was outside the cloister of space occupied by only the Holy Spirit and me. God had begun addressing the root cause of my distrust by bringing into question my faith in Him, the fundamental core of my belief. I knew the declaration on the board was His: “You will never learn to trust God until your faith in God has been challenged.”

Faith is a decision. Trust is a visceral conviction. They are not synonyms.

When you consider God, and Jesus, and Christianity, and all the other components of the standard statement of belief, faith makes sense. It’s not a leap into the dark. It’s not blind, or weak-minded, or a crutch. Faith is undergirded with sound reason and rationale. Given the parameters spelled out by history and the Gospel, faith makes sense. The eternal gamble is unbelief.

Trust, on the other hand, is irrational. When faith appears questionable; when it appears God is not who He claims to be, will not honor what He says He will do, and that faith is misplaced; when the loving God of faith appears in actuality a capricious, vindictive, petty tyrant; when the veracity of your faith is challenged, this is when your spiritually reasonable response is to declare unreserved trust in God.

Faith may be reasonable, but trust makes no sense until your faith appears flawed and your only options are abandonment of belief or tenuous reliance upon the One who appears untrustworthy.

Trust is a visceral conviction that feels risky.

I tried to trust God. I didn’t like my reservations about Him, didn’t want them lurking in my psyche, and hated the vulnerability of accusation about God I suffered when circumstance became onerous. One day, it occurred to me: distrust is not my problem, its God’s.

With trepidation and as much respect as I could summon, I said, “Lord God, I may be consumed with hubris and self-righteousness, and if so, I apologize in advance and await your conviction, but it seems to me that my distrust is something that only you can remedy. After all, it’s a question of your character that seems reasonable and that I can’t resolve. I know this can’t be—hope this can’t be—but I can’t see anything else. From where I live, it appears I need to know more about you from your vantage point. Further, I need to grasp why I should trust you when my faith seems questionable. Thank you, Amen.”

Now we are back to Gomer-the-cat. Slowly, carefully God introduced Himself. Thoughtfully, His Spirit coached and counseled as I cautiously contemplated my circumstances. My Older Brother, Jesus, consistently sat with me and spoke to me about what He knows of our Father. In time, during glories and griefs, drought and torrent, the Trinity of God forged a fresh faith in me and built a resilient trust.

So when God says, “Trust me,” as His opening line in verse 3, He is inviting us to pause and consider what trust means.

Trust is not a Sunday word. While faith is a pillar of Christianity, sola fide, you don’t live your life on pillars. You rest on pillars and live in the house built upon the pillars. It is here, in the living of life, where trust is declared, tested, and forged. Life is where trust seems late, you are acquainted with failure, and life is where the Spirit of God seizes challenge, capitalizes, and re-forms trust with clearer conviction. It is one thing to stand in church and declare trust in God. It is another to stand at a grave, or holding a dark diagnosis, or looking down on a stillborn child, or an ugly P&L, or a vision-gone-silent, or with tears dripping from your chin—or for that matter, with 21% growth, strong cash flow, a healthy child, a big promotion, a loyal love… in whatever circumstance, it is a visceral conviction that feels risky to say from Monday to Saturday, “I trust you, Father God.”

God demonstrated His heart toward me through the antics of a wiry tomcat with a mouse in his mouth.

The opening line of Psalm 37:3 is three words and a definite article: “Trust in the Lord.” The closing of the passage we are considering, 37:3-5, states again: “Trust also in Him [the Lord].” We wouldn’t be exhorted twice to trust if trust were easy, plentiful, or optional. 

My labor with trust is not yours. But I can’t help but believe if you are thoughtful, and have lived much of life at all, then you also have labored to some degree to trust God. I’ve told you a smidgeon of my story… in hopes it will birth in you words, and images, and conclusive convictions about your journey with trust. I’ve done this because it’s important. A pithy platitude of churchy trust will not serve you well when we get to the next phrase of verse 3: “and do good.”

So, I encourage you: Do the work of going to a quiet place—like I did when I pulled away to Colorado for a few days—and pray something like this: “Father, I’ve heard it said I will never learn to trust you until my faith in you—my confidence in you—is challenged by life’s demands. Assuming this is the case, and given the challenges I’m facing, I humbly ask that you help me examine my faith and forge my trust in you. In the first place, this is simply too important to pass over as a religious platitude. But more than anything else, I want to know you so well that trust isn’t even a question. Father, I trust you will honor my prayer, Amen.”

Sitting on the steps those many nights ago, I knew my heart toward Gomer-the-cat. Sitting in heaven, God knew His heart toward me. Sitting on the front steps, God demonstrated His heart toward me through the antics of a wiry tomcat with a mouse in his mouth. In time, as Gomer claimed me for himself, I discovered God’s heart toward me, his son. I believed by faith I belonged to Him, but He summoned Gomer to demonstrate His trustworthiness.