Saturday, April 4, 2020

Different Kinds of Trusts

All my life I have heard people talk about trusting God, and how it is his main wish and expectation for us. It is most often the advice offered to help with anxiety, and I am currently learning to have more faith and less fear.  However, as someone who has had a lot of chronic burdens and ongoing threats of ruin, and as a person who has also had to manage my own bad tendencies with an exhausting vigilance, I just want to stick up for all the people who suffer with stress and say that doing what you know you are supposed to while feeling extreme stress and danger is also a way of trusting God.  Obedience anyway and doing what God wants while feeling scared to death is not only a form of trust but possibly the most important kind that yields the most long term peace.  Social work mindfulness practices often affect me in the same way as a lot of psychological encouragement to trust God, and those perspectives do sometimes provide temporary relief that can increase endurance for long-term challenges. But those difficulties that are in fact inherently stressful can also be where the real trust is. When there are things like keeping medical insurance, or for some people, working at their callings without medical insurance, or people taking care of kids who need a lot of supervision and monitoring, or life with tough budget requirements, or managing health conditions, or whatever else those anxiety provoking things are, the courage to go ahead and face it with literal responsibility is also a form of dependence on God. Anxiety is a difficult challenge of recent times, and people we will meet in heaven may not have had even a taste of that kind of stress in their lives. They had their own struggles, and I can really see a different world as I schedule out my groceries for the coronoravirus quarantine and think about old times. But I just want to say for anyone else who has sometimes felt pressure to just let it all go and leave all the responsibilities behind in the name of letting God handle everything, that going ahead and carrying a heavy cross, or really any cross or burden, can be the extreme trust that goes unrecognized as simple faith.

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