Trusting the whole story

I recently listened to an author, Dr. Henry Cloud, talking about his new book on “trust”. It sounded interesting and I was thinking about how I agreed with him that the basic, indisputable thing present in every successful relationship, is trust. He talked about how trust gets broken, and how it is necessary to fix trust, if a relationship is to succeed.

Interestingly enough, he also says that there are some people, who should not be trusted, and even though they present all the right things to our face, it is a mistake to trust them.

I was thinking about that recently when I was at church…about how when we trust God, we can then trust ourselves because we are responding to the messages God is giving us. I do not think of God as a “person” and feel God is completely trustworthy.

On this particular Sunday, the thought about trust happened, when we were told to turn to a certain page for a specific hymn to sing.

Usually I do not use the hymnal because, I either know the song, or I don’t, but I cannot read music, so I do not bother to open the book. But this day, I decided to read the words of the song along in the hymnal and since the hymn was one of the last ones so I opened from the back of the book.

The book said that it had hymns from 430 to 603 and the hymn was 600 so I “trusted” what was printed on the cover, and just went to the back of the book. I saw hymn 595, but it seemed to be the very last hymn. After that were just reference pages at the end of the book.

I wet my fingers and tried to unstick the pages in the back, because I knew that there must be another hymn there, as other people were on page 600 and were singing. Finally I got tired of trying to figure out that stuck page and handed the book to an usher and said that it was missing the pages for the last hymns.

“No, they are all there” she said.
“Don’t worry about it” she added.

Now I was just a bit miffed as I had JUST looked at that book with my own two perfectly good eyes, trusting the cover, and there was no hymn 600. But she was a very nice lady, and I also trusted her, but trusting her after trusting the book cover, just made me confused. But I trusted her enough to believe that there was indeed a hymn 600.

So I just put that book down on the chair and reached beside me to get a different hymnal. This time I opened the book from the front, and leafed through all the pages and easily found hymn 600. So then I got the first hymnal I had put down, and did the same thing, and there was the hymn in that book as well. I had not found it before, because I was starting from the back of the book, instead of from the front of the book.

I wonder if trusting God is like that for us a lot of times. We are told one thing, (that we are spiritual and made in the image of God, who is eternal), but the evidence we see with our own two eyes, contradicts what we are supposed to believe. Is trusting in God a misplaced trust, like the author of Trust warns us about?

Or are we safe when we trust God, because maybe, like the hymnal at church, God can see the whole story in the book, even when we seem to be stuck looking at just one page, with our limited perspective.

Jesus says that we should be like little children. Little children and babies have the ability to trust, better than any other group of people. Are they safe in this trust?

That is where parents come in…Babies get two parents, to defend and protect and care for them, the same way baby Jesus had two human parents to care for him. But the baby Jesus, in his innocence, was Christ the King as well.

Was he King, because of his innocence, which gave him the ability to trust completely in the care of God the father?

Jesus trusted God, and his innocence allowed him to only see good.
If God is only good, and yet allows himself a view of evil, how would that be a good God, to see evil and do nothing about it?

I am convinced that God wants us to be like little children because innocence does not see evil, and only sees good. And good is like the pages in the hymnal that seem to sometimes not exist but when we trust, the pages of good, do in fact exist, and always have existed.

To be like Jesus, we are supposed to be like innocent children, which means we also have to see the good, even when it does not make sense, and trust God to fight our battles for us. The bible says that Jesus brings the sword, and not peace, and I believe that this means that the war God is fighting is with non believers, not with innocent children.
When we know something is true and good, we do not deny it. Jesus was able to be shoulder to shoulder with sinners, prostitutes and even lepers and death, and he did not see any of these things because of his innocence and goodness. He only saw good and that good view is what healed. For those who witnessed that profound innocence, they were compelled to follow him.
It would seem that to look upon evil, is to accept it, which allows it to destroy us. That is why Lot and his family were told to not look back at Sodom. But Lots wife turned to look, and she perished and turned into a pile of salt as a consequence. What does the bible say about this I wondered?
My daily randomly chosen bible verse today was “Then he said unto me, Son of man, hast thou seen what the ancients of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the chambers of his imagery, for they say, the Lord seeth us not, the Lord hath forsaken the earth.
Based on my understanding of my job as holding on to innocence and trust, my answer to this bible verse is no, I have not turned to look and have not seen. I will not look at evil and I will not speak of it and do not accept it.

God has not forsaken anyone who believes in him… and I am trusting in good. I am trusting that God is fighting the battles with the non believers finding every lost sheep.
The news media keeps speaking of all that is evil, and I turn it off. Instead I am watching Bringing up Bates. When I turn on music, if it is negative I put on Escape music on Sirius. When I hear about friends or family or government people doing things that are detrimental or evil, I ask God what it is that he sees and I look for the good.
In this way, I am putting into practice, my understanding, which is to be innocent like a little child, as Jesus asked us to do. What we see, becomes what we believe, and only God can see the whole story, and that story is always good.