Ruthless Trust

I was reminded this weekend of Brennan Manning’s book Ruthless Trust. If you haven’t ever heard of Brennan Manning, he is an amazing author and you need to go look up his book Ragamuffin Gospel immediately. One of the comments he makes in his book Ruthless Trust is about a friend of his who tells him, “Brennan, you don’t need any more deep theological insights about God. I think you just need to trust the ones you have.” (paraphrase) While obviously, we should forever be in a process of seeking out and learning new things about the wonderful, deep, mysterious God who loves us, I resonate with his words of learning to trust the experiences and the knowledge that we have had of God’s love. I sometimes wonder what the church, the world, would look like if we really began to let those truths of God’s love, grace, mercy, and justice, settle into our beings? We can talk about amazing grace, but what does it look like spending the rest of your life letting the truth of that grace seep into every nook and cranny of your being? Do I really live my life on a day to day basis like someone who is seeped in grace? What does it look like to live into the knowledge that we are fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of God? Would it change how we view ourselves? How we treat others? If we truly heeded Jesus’s words to love God and love others, and really asked ourselves what it means on a day to day, even hour by hour, basis to love one another, even (and maybe especially) in the smallest, seemingly insignificant details of our lives, how different would our world be? How would our lives be changed and open up floodgates of healing and transformation?

Something in me has to wonder why it is indeed so difficult for us to continually grasp onto these truths about ourselves and God. What causes us to doubt, to fear, to mistrust that which we have experienced in the past of God’s grace and love? Why do we hear powerful words on Sunday mornings or in a quiet moment with God and then so quickly forget them? I was recently re-reading journals from 5 years ago. I save my journals as dates, so I was actually reading a journal entry that was written 5 years ago to the exact date. The ironic part was that I was asking the same basic questions then as I am now. Struggling with many of the same issues (albeit in maybe a different form, or with a different name or set of circumstances) I suddenly realized the answers to the questions I was asking 5 years ago were essentially the same answers I am getting today when I fire off questions to God about my future (or my present). “Trust me. Follow me. The story isn’t over yet. Keep going. I will provide for you. You are mine. Experience the tension and the struggle in all of this and learn from it. This is going to be hard but I will be with you. Never let fear prevent you from moving forward (or cause you to move backward). Trust your heart. Keep loving as if your life depended on it. One day you will look back and you might find a bit more understanding and reason to all this, but until that day (if that day does in fact come), just trust me. I have never let you down in the past, and I won’t start now.” 

My prayer is that 5 years from now, I might trust God a little bit more with my questions and my answers. My prayer is that we would all be overwhelmed by the amount of grace and love in our lives and that it would transform us. That it would change how we treat others. That our knowledge of the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ’s love, would not just be an academic knowledge or a theoretical knowledge, but may be that which fills us with all the fullness of God. May we cease from being visionaries who know every street in town and can’t find our way home. May we all learn to live into a ruthless trust of God’s promises. May it change who we are. May it change who we want to be. May it cause us to move forward without fear and may it bring us peace. Amen.