Trust is something that I have been thinking about a lot lately. Where do I place my trust?

All too often I seem to place my trust in the things around me, the things that I can actually see. My comfort lies there in those zones, with the tangible and the real. But in truth, anything “tangible” can slip through my hands and fall away at any given moment.

My car can be totaled in an accident.

My health can be shattered through illness or disease.

My job can fade away due to any number of reasons.

My house can go up in flames.

My money can be spent trying to recover from all the above mentioned modes of crisis.

And if all of those things go away, what do I have left? My family? My friends? While, I am certain that my family and friends will be around and won’t let me starve to death, I think their support would only take me so far. No, I don’t think they would purposefully let me down, but to solely rely on my friends and family isn’t even fair. My trust must reside in some other source, something solid and unwavering.

Since trust is not a passive word but an active one, the act of trusting must go beyond the purported security of tangibles, and of family and friends. For me to actively trust means to walk in faith and to believe that God’s promise to always take care of every need remains true even in times of uncertainty. Actively trusting also requires one to believe that God wants the best (His Best) for you.

Lately I feel that God has been asking me to trust him explicitly in many different areas. The problem I have struggled with in all of this is that every area he is asking me to trust him in is an unknown. Meaning, I don’t know what will happen once I commit to completely trusting him in those areas. Ironically, on a day-to-day basis, I don’t know what is going to happen anyway, and yet I feel that in some way I have control over daily events.

But what happens when you completely let go? What happens when you say, “Yes, God, I will relinquish control of everything, trust you, and follow you wherever you lead, even if I lose all of the “tangibles” in the process.”

Over the past few days, as I have been writing about this struggle with trust, these verses continued to surface in my thoughts. Psalm 37:23 – 24 (NIV) – “The Lord makes firm the steps of the one who delights in him; though he may stumble, he will not fall, for the Lord upholds him with his hand.”

The words of 2 Corinthians 4:18 (NIV) also kept ping ponging around in my head. “So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen; since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

In other words, all of the “tangibles” of this earth won’t last forever. Even my body will someday fade away. But there is one that is forever. This ONE has a name. His name is Jesus. And if I follow him, and place my trust in him, he will guide my footsteps and lead me through every aspect of life.

As I was typing this post, the lyrics to the 1984 Twila Paris tune, Do I Trust You Lord, rang out in my ears. It’s a song about trusting God even when life gets messy, and confusing, and things are not going as planned. Back in the day, I think I wore out my cassette deck by repeatedly playing this song, so I think it’s only fitting to include the music here. Besides, lyrically, this song states most of the thoughts regarding trust that have been stirring around in my head these past few days.

For me, the ending of the song reiterates my own decision that no matter what happens in life, I choose to place my trust in Jesus.