This is a featured post by Julia D’Amico. She’s a freshman from Boulder, Colorado. She loves good conversation, a good cup of tea, good music, going on adventures, goats, and the mountains. And Colorado of course! Check out what else she has to say on her personal blog, Just Your Basic.
[Editor’s note: This post is a reflection based on the sermon at Thursday Night Worship this past week.Check out the sermon podcast here.]
Logan gave a great talk about trusting the Lord, a foundational part of faith and something that I constantly wrestle with. It is a massive topic and Logan’s talk got me thinking about so many different things, so here’s a few of the things that were stirred up in my heart. Thanks to Logan for a great talk!
Do I trust God? I am constantly challenged by this question. Do I really trust God? I wish I could say yes, absolutely, all the time, every day. But when I am honest with myself about how tight my grip is on my own plans and expectations, I realize how far I am from complete surrender to God and His will.
Logan spoke about what it looks like to trust God, trust His will, His heart, and His process, and I started realizing how much I am still crippled by fear and discomfort that so often keeps me from stepping into what it looks like to walk fearlessly in His path.
It always confuses me why fear is such an obstacle in my walk. The Bible says “do not fear” over and over again, and the Lord promises that He is for us in all things, yet I can’t help but be afraid about what the future holds, if He can really heal me, and if He really wants my heart and my life. Do I really trust His timing?
The slow, difficult, and beautiful lesson that Logan explored on Thursday keeps bringing me back to two truths about God that I so often forget. First that He is good. It’s so elementary right? But for some reason I need to be constantly reminded of Romans 8:28. That in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. That He works all things for our greater good, not necessarily our immediate good. I always forget that my definition of “good” is synonymous with comfort and ease, while His definition of “good” is intimacy and unity with Him, being formed into His image.
What I am starting to realize the more and more I think about the topic of trusting the Lord, the more I am reminded that His call isn’t a call into an easy life. It will be challenging and uncomfortable but so fruitful. He doesn’t promise us that trusting Him and His plan will be easy. But He does promise it will be good. The one quote that I constantly remind myself of when I am fearful and frustrated with the challenges of walking with Him, is by CS Lewis from the Chronicles of Narnia. Edmund, Lucy, Peter, and Susan are talking to Mr. Beaver about Aslan, asking him questions about the great Lion they are about to meet. (Spoiler Alert: Aslan is supposed to be Jesus in the story…..) The kids ask if Aslan is safe, to which Mr. Beaver replies,
“Safe?” Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
I love this quote, because it reminds us that trusting the Lord isn’t easy, it isn’t safe , and it certainly isn’t comfortable. But I am learning that while it might be uncomfortable at first to step outside of our comfort zone, He redefines what comfort means to us. Instead of friends and family and our hometown and financial security and a good reputation, he defines comfort as His presence. A very wise pastor reminded me once that we are called out of our comfort zone into the comfort of being called His beloved.
Now this all sounds great and wonderful to me until I realized what it took to really trust Him. Like Logan said, it isn’t just a passive thing. Trusting requires submission, requires us to trade our idea of good for His great plan. I keep thinking of the verse that Logan used, Matthew 4:18-22. Simon and Andrew put down their nets, James and John left their boat. The talk made me question what my net is, what is my boat that I would have to leave behind? What would Jesus call me to set down to follow Him?
It is something I am still thinking through, but one thing I am sure of is that Jesus is calling me to set down the tremendous weight of guilt and shame for being an insufficient witness to Him. I cannot get up and follow Him with that kind of weight on my shoulders. But as some of you may know, shedding layers and layers of our past, breaking down walls that have protected old wounds in our hearts for so long is an incredibly difficult, vulnerable, and sometimes painful process.
Once again, CS Lewis sums this up much better than I ever could. A passage that I hold onto when I struggle with trying to walk away from old pain is this one:
It’s from Voyage of the Dawn Treader. A boy named Eustace finds himself covered in a dragon-like skin which is incredibly painful. He tries to take it off himself, but it keeps growing back.
“Then the lion said–but I don’t know if it spoke–’You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt…Then he caught hold of me–I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on–and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone…”
I love this passage because it reminds me that all we can do is kneel in submission to the Lord, and trust Him that even if it hurts, and even if He has to cut to our very core, that He is the only one who can really help us shed our old skin, lay down our nets, and trust Him and know him enough to surrender whatever it takes to follow Him.
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