A Fog of Trust

I snuck into my office on Monday last week.

Normally there's no one around. Being a church, the Staff generally takes Mondays as a day off to recover from the demands of Sunday before heading back into the thick of it. And because I knew it would be quiet and because I needed that kind of quiet to still my heart and bring some focus to the events of the past month, I came in, turned on the lamps and sat in the crying chair.

They called it that, not me. Apparently there's something about sitting in my office in that chair in the corner that makes people cry. There's a box of kleenex at the ready at all times, just because of this strange phenomenon. And true enough, for most people, the chair, or whatever it is they are talking about while sitting in it, more often than not involves some crying. Mostly good crying, release crying, honest understandings and deep moving kind of crying.

So, on Monday, I sat in my chair. And cried.

Not right at first. I had sat with my Bible in my lap and my journal open for a bit, just being. I'm usually more of a human doing than a human being, so in that moment I was just being. Quiet. Not thinking too much. Not feeling too much. Not yet.

I picked up a book from the stack on my desk that will inform and shape the summer series of sermons for Highview (Restoring Weary Souls, all about soul rest, I'm sure you'll hear more about it in future blogs). The book was Ruthless Trust by Brennan Manning.

I didn't get too far, only to page 5. Manning writes....

When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at the "house of the dying" in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, "And what can I do for you?" Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him.

"What do you want me to pray for?" she asked. he voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States. "Pray that I have clarity"

She said firmly, "No, I will not do that." When he asked her why, she said, "Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of." When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, "I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God."

Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God.

I'm not sure if it's the anxieties of the past month, or the enormities of this past year, but in all of it at every step of the way, I have craved clarity. The sheer volume of decisions that I've been involved in making, both as a church and as a family, hang with the dead weight of implication around my neck. The opinions expressed, the criticisms, the bombardment of grief and anger, confusion and pain, understandable but tsunami-like in its collective form, sometimes threaten to suck me away and bash me against the rocks of personal and professional disgrace. So much is expected of me, every day, all the time. All that was and in many ways still is at stake, in so many ways it seems it all demands clarity.

Doesn't it? I've prayed for it. Sure I have. And in a certain way, when needed for the sake of love, God has provided good ideas, stable minds, level heads, workable strategies. When I keep thinking biblically, remain cognitively prioritized, and work the plan, I see God's power unleashed to make His people strong in the midst of what should destroy us.

But standing by the bedside of a gasping child, not know each day what tricks her little lung will play on us, myself senselessly removed from being part of where my presence is apparently not so essential - for a whole month not so essential - hours and hours of not knowing, not going anywhere.....not doing anything and doing everything all at the same time....there was no clarity in that. Still isn't. I don't get it.

And I came home from London and for a while I let God have it. Because I didn't understand. I had no clarity.

So on Monday, I snuck into my office and sat in my chair and cried. I cried for sheer beauty of abandoning myself to Him all over again. I cried because I suddenly understood that for God to explain it all would ruin everything. I cried because, while it's okay to be mad at God, when I do it, I sure miss Him. And it was deep and sweet and musical to sit there and let Him be tender with me again.

The rest of the week was good. A few not so nice surprises, and some news and the sharing of both pain and joy that comes with walking this way with a community of faith. April is proving to have it's own version of craziness as I attempt to catch up from being away in London, prepare for going away to Thailand, and all the while do some major shifting in family living arrangements, all before the 25th.

Still, I get to Sunday afternoon (my "end of week") and have a sense of quiet trust. No clarity. Not really. Just resting in the midst of the chaos, in the arms of a God I definitely do not understand.

But then again, if I understood Him, He's be too simple and too ordinary to worship.