What Trust Looks Like

I once heard a friend remark that surgery is unlike other kinds of medicine. Normally, he explained, someone goes to the hospital feeling bad, gets treatment, and comes home feeling better. Not so with surgery. Someone who goes to the hospital for surgery usually comes home feeling significant pain and needing some time for the wounds to heal.

The simple fact is that surgeons injure their patients; they wound in order to heal. This means that when I entrust myself into the hands of a surgeon, I am trusting a medical expert to do harm to my body with great skill and precision.

That is what trust looks like with surgery: Because surgery is so routinely successful, it has become commonplace for us to submit our bodies to knife-wielded strangers, with a high degree of confidence that the injuries they will inflict will be good for us.

So why is so hard to muster that kind of trust when it is God who brings suffering into our lives?

We have spoken before in these pages about the disciple’s “settled life posture of trust” in God and His promises. This is the singular question that determines not only the trajectory of our life here on earth but also our eternal destiny: Do I actually trust God?

And never is that question more pressing than when we are suffering, when we find ourselves wondering about God and His wisdom and His purposes and power.

Could it be that we might be able to trust God and His purposes the same way we trust a surgeon?

Could it be that the God who made us, the God who redeemed us at the cost of His Son’s life, could it be that He has earned the right to claim our unwavering trust, even when He brings pain and suffering into our lives?

If I can trust a stranger to wound my body, why would I hesitate to trust in God’s wisdom, power, and love when my life gets turned upside down?

Sidebar: These are not words to say or hear in the middle of suffering.

When we are in the worst moments of our suffering, emotions are raw, and our pain has a way of warping our outlook, bending it toward cynicism and despair. And in that emotional context this kind of talk can seem hollow. So if you are in the middle of the testing fire, this word might not be for you. Not right now.

These words about trusting God are words to contemplate in the quiet moments, when the situation isn’t desperate. The deeper our understanding of God and His love and sovereignty, the greater our calm when the storm arrives. And we cannot cultivate that kind of deep understanding in the middle of the crisis.

Think of Job, how he spoke about God on the worst day of his life. Almost everything that was precious to him had been taken away in one catastrophic moment. And yet in the middle of his lamentation he responded with a benediction: “The Lord gives, and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

Surely those words were not muttered in a quiet whisper; surely those three sentences were punctuated with wracking sobs. What came out of his mouth in that moment was raw emotion, not a carefully constructed theological statement but an unfiltered outpouring of what was in his heart.

For those words to come out of Job’s mouth in that moment, they must have been words he had thought about deeply for a long time, words he had rehearsed through many quiet days, for many years.

In other words, for Job this trust in God had become his settled life posture, and the calamities of that day didn’t warp his outlook, even when he was in unspeakable pain.

So what does trusting God look like?

Trusting God in the middle of trouble looks much the same as trusting the surgeon, with one significant difference.

Why do we trust surgeons even though we know they will injure us? Because we know that surgeons have a track record for success, and we can have a high degree of confidence in our surgeon’s wisdom and skill.

In the same way, when God has us in the middle of trouble and difficulty, we must remind ourselves of His track record, what we know about His wisdom and power.

Of course, we cultivate that level of trust not in the middle of the crisis but long beforehand, in the ordinary habits that shape our lives: engaging with Scripture day by day, drinking in the stories and teachings about how God is faithful to keep His promises; sharing my life of faith with other believers, being encouraged by my brothers and sisters in Christ.

But there is one important difference between trusting the surgeon and trusting God. We trust the surgeon’s head and hand, but with God we also trust His heart.

It is not essential that the surgeon care for me personally so long as he is good at his craft. But the God who brings difficulty into my life is not just an expert: He is the Good Shepherd. Even more, He is the Father who has displayed the depth of His love by giving up His Son to make a place for me at His table.

This is my good and gracious Father, who can be trusted, even when my pain is disorienting and overwhelming.

Yes, I know that He could have spared me these wounds, but I know that He only wounds to heal.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Discipleship Pastor