You Can Trust Me

I always get up early hoping for a few quiet minutes before my children wake up. I’m usually successful at the waking up early part but rarely successful at getting ahead of my kids. They fully endorse Anna’s words in Frozen: “The sun’s awake so I’m awake.” And so they are, every morning at the crack of dawn.

Yesterday was one of those rare mornings when both kids slept in, and I had a few minutes to myself to curl up in a favorite corner. Sitting in the morning light, one thought settled on my heart and mind: You can trust me.

“Me” being God. And I, not being a trusting person at all.

I Can Do This

The last eighteen months have been unusually tumultuous for our family. Even before a pandemic rocked the world, we were wrestling with big questions about hard situations that could potentially change the course of our future. The answers to many of those questions came crashing down around us right in the middle of Covid.

A Sinking Ship

In looking back with the gift of hindsight, I see how desperately I’ve tried to hold everything together these last eighteen months. How firmly I’ve believed the course of our future is entirely up to me. I need to make the right decisions and show up in the right places. I need to have a plan worked out for every aspect of our lives. If I do everything right, everything will be ok.

Sure, I trust God. But I trust myself a lot more. Who, after all, could be more invested in my future and the future of my family than me? I can captain this ship. I can direct our fate. If I just get up early enough and work hard enough and make enough consecutive right choices, then everything will be ok…

Can you feel the exhaustion in those words? I can feel it right down to my bones. Yesterday’s “you can trust me” was a gentle nudge to stop spinning all those wheels and webs.

A Good Story

God whispered in my heart, yes: you can trust me. You can trust me to want good things for you. You can trust me to write a good story for your life. You can trust my heart in the middle chapters when the story is bumpy, confusing, and unresolved. You can rest…in me.

A Still, Small Voice

The day before, I was sorting through boxes of books bound for the thrift store and stumbled across one by Elisabeth Elliot called Keep a Quiet Heart. Elliot had been on my mind repeatedly throughout the week, so I scooped that book up and set it aside. Yesterday, after God whispered all those “you can trust me’s”, I opened Elliot’s book and read the following:

He taught us to work and watch but never to worry, to do gladly whatever we are given to do, and to leave all else with God.

Elisabeth Elliot

Do you ever have a moment with God where you’re like, okaaay…I hear you? I kept reading:

“Every assignment is measured and controlled for my eternal good. As I accept the given portion other options are cancelled. Decisions become much easier, directions clearer, and hence my heart becomes inexpressibly quieter.”

“The secret is Christ in me, not me in a different set of circumstances.”

“A quiet heart is content with what God gives. It is enough.”

Elisabeth Elliot

And that was all just in the first few pages. I understand now why God kept whispering Elisabeth’s name in my ear…and why I woke up that morning with such an urgency to sort through all those books in the attic. It was all orchestrated by a still, small voice that I can sometimes hear, but often drown out in my noise and bustling.

And, if God can direct me so specifically to words I so need to read, does he not also direct the much larger story of my life? Can he not make my path straight as promised (Proverbs 3:6)?

I believe he can. I trust he will. Now the hard part, to live like I mean it. To keep a quiet heart.