Trust

I have been dealing with some worry in recent months. My husband Jim works for a renewal group that has been fixated on by theologically liberal factions in the greater church as the root of all that they consider wrong in the mainline denominations today. They have built up a mythology about his group (IRD) that has taken firm hold among mainline denominational leaders, seminary faculty, the National Council of Churches, etc., and these people believe that Jim and his colleagues are actually not really Christian activists, but instead are ultra-right-wing political operatives bent on destroying the mainline denominations in order to silence their liberal social witness. These false ideas are spreading more and more widely. See www.talk2action.org for many examples.

This has worried me in many ways. I'm afraid that these untrue things will become widely believed and that it will become impossible to refute them. I'm afraid that my friends who are politically liberal will hear about it and will start looking at us askance. I'm afraid that if Jim ever wanted to leave IRD and do something else, such as return to pastoral ministry, he would be unhireable, because working for IRD would attach a stigma to him and everyone would be suspicious of him. And my worries go on.

Yesterday I was thinking about it more intensely due to a letter sent to all SMU faculty in which some other website had been falsely attributed to IRD. We had been to Maundy Thursday service, and I was getting to bed late. I usually read the Bible every night before bed, but last night I thought I might skip it, since I'd read Scripture during the Maundy Thursday service. But I kept getting this nudge feeling that I ought to read it anyway. So I decided that if God was telling me to read the Bible, I would. And here's what I found: I'm currently reading through the Psalms, and in the Psalm I had gotten to last night, the Psalmist was writing about people lying about him, and how God would eventually make sure that justice would be done about that, and that meanwhile God would bless those who had been lied about. Wow! How appropriate was that? I was very grateful to God for nudging me into reading that Psalm and showing me that he cared about our situation.

However, today I was still in worry mode. Tonight, though, during our Good Friday service, during the last of the seven meditations on the seven last words of Christ, our senior pastor was speaking about "Into your hands I commit my spirit." He talked about how Jesus was trusting God, and about how God could be trusted even when the situation felt the least like God was trustworthy. And I started remembering how trustworthy God has always shown himself in my life. He has seen me through breast cancer in a wonderful way, and has done many other good things for me all throughout my life.

I realized that I have been being very inconsistent. All my life, I have always trusted God that I would never lack for anything I really needed, and so I have never really worried about money or jobs. So why didn't I trust him in this situation? And when I started thinking of it that way, the burden lifted. I realized that I can trust him to be with us in this just as much as I have trusted him in any other situation. He's big enough for this problem, too. What a great feeling that was! It's still going to be hard to deal with all these slanders and lies that are being told about IRD. God isn't going to make it easier all of a sudden. There may be rough times in store for us. But I know that I can trust that he is in control, so that it will all come right in the end, and that means I don't have to worry.

Thanks be to God for his great mercy in showing us how he cares for us!