It's About Trust

All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The lament of every teenager that is told they can't stay out late or they can't date a certain person or they can't stay by themselves while the parents are away for the weekend.... "You don't TRUST me!!"

Trust is something that doesn't usually happen immediately in any relationship except the trust a child has for a parent.  We have to get to know the person.  We have to experience their honesty and reliability.  And if they mess up... we may be able to forgive them, but there will be a trust issue there for a long, long time that might never get mended.  One time.  That's all it takes.  Building someone's trust is hard, but rebuilding it is 100 times harder.

God gives us the seen and the unseen.  Seen, is the world around us and how it works.  We see creation and relationships and events.  The unseen is the things of faith... God's existence and his love for us and a purpose to life.  The seen can be good or bad or even somewhere in between.  But if we look, we can always see God's hand in it; whether it is in the thing itself or in the goodness of the response to something not good.

It is our practice of gratitude that helps us see the beauty of the seen things, even if they don't seem so good at first glance.  And it is that gratitude that teaches us that God is good... ALL the time.  And we can trust God to be good no matter what.

In Ann VosKamps gratitude calendar that I am following, she asks one day a month to list three gifts that are "ugly/beautiful."  It's about finding joy in the mess... like a child's drawing on your freshly painted wall... ugly/beautiful.  Your spouse's battered and bruised - but not mortally injured - body after a car accident...ugly/beautiful.

Full trust in God is about finding the beautiful in the ugly.  No matter how ugly, it is there.  It's a matter of opening our eyes.  It's a matter of practiced gratitude.  It's a matter of trust in a God who is good... all the time.

Father,
Help us to see the beauty in something we would have thought to be ugly today.  Amen.