What Trust Looks Like

It is a story that should have made the news but for some reason didn’t.

A local man hired a stranger to assault his wife.

There are reliable reports that he arranged to pay tens of thousands of dollars for his wife to be attacked with a knife. He delivered his wife to a prearranged location and left her there to face her attacker.

Afterward, her wounds were so severe that she had to be hospitalized for several days to recover from her injuries.

The man actually met with his wife’s attacker after the incident to be sure the job had been completed satisfactorily.

Then he had the gall to visit his wife in her hospital room.

When she was released from the hospital, he took her home and began to care for her, as if he had played no part in her suffering.

I am that man.

Context is everything, of course.

My wife’s doctor recommended that she needed surgery. Later my wife met with the surgeon, where she agreed to undergo the procedure.

Then, all the rest is true: I arranged for my wife to come under the knife of a surgeon, and I arranged for payment to be made. On the day of the procedure I did drop her off at the door of the hospital (while I went to park the car).

And it’s true that I didn’t even meet the surgeon until after the procedure was completed, where I was assured that all went well.

Then I visited my wife in her room and took her home a few days later to begin caring for her at home.

Why tell the story this way?

Think of it: I trusted a total stranger to do severe damage to the body of my beloved wife. I trusted someone I had never met to do harm to the most precious person in my life.

I knew full well that my wife would be injured in the process, and yet I trusted this surgeon to such a remarkable extent that it didn’t even occur to me to question our decision to go forward with the procedure.

A friend once remarked how different surgery is from other medical procedures. Usually, he said, people go to the hospital feeling bad, then they come back feeling better. Surgery patients are different: they usually come home from the hospital feeling much worse than they did when they went in.

That’s because the role of surgeons is so unusual: surgeons deliberately inflict injury, in order to heal.

We trust them when they say we need surgery, and we trust them when our loved one lies unconscious on the table and they are wielding the knife.

This has all made me wonder why we have such trouble trusting that God has the capacity and the will to orchestrate our troubles with the same degree of skill.

A surgeon doesn’t use a pocket knife but a scalpel, an extremely sharp implement, so that the cuts are precise and exact. In the same way, I can trust that God engineers my suffering down to the tiniest detail.

This means that whatever harm comes my way has already been filtered through the fine mesh of His wisdom, His power, and His great love for me. Everything that touches my life serves His wise and good and loving purposes, so even if it isn’t good in the moment, I can be sure it is ultimately good for me, for His glory, and for the good of others.

This also means that if I could comprehend all that is involved in what He is doing in my life and the lives of people around me, I myself would enthusiastically approve whatever He allows, even if it is painful, even if it is heartbreaking.

Of course these are not the words we use to comfort someone who is grieving. In those moments, the one thing we must do is enter into lamentation with the sufferer. Words about God’s sovereignty mixed with words of comfort will come across as insensitive, no matter how well intentioned.

But these are words to absorb in the long, quiet moments in between crises, so that when the dreadful moment comes we will have the theological bandwidth to put our suffering into its proper context: God is in this, and I can trust Him even though this is painful.

What does trust look like?

I have often marveled at Job’s response at hearing the worst news of his life: he has just heard that his children are all dead, and how does he respond?

“The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord” (Job 1:21).

That was not a theology he manufactured in that awful moment. Those words were no doubt shrieked out between sobs.

Where did he get the wherewithal to respond that way in that moment? This was a truth that had sunk deep into his heart over many, many years beforehand.

In the same way, we must nourish our souls with the truth about God: His wisdom is fathomless; His power is beyond telling, and His love is unswerving, regardless of our deserts.

In other words, we need to constantly remind ourselves that God can be trusted. He will use every detail of our lives, including our heartaches, to bring about His own wise and good purposes.

We can trust this God.

Persevere,
Paul Pyle
Pastor of Discipleship