Trust for the Future

Hello faithful family, friends, and followers. Thank you once again for your interest, encouragement, and support. It was another whirlwind week, sorting, organizing, decluttering, and repeat. In addition, Joy has continued her faithful progress in her plan to read through the Bible this year. I wish you could all share in hearing her read. It is truly a labor of love for her. Her reading is slow, deliberate, faltering, but careful and determined, and is so precious to listen to. She’s also finished all the books in the Laura Ingalls Wilder series and has started on “The Chronicles of Narnia.” And, she has continued to faithfully knit baby hats, trying out new patterns that are absolutely amazing. We were again for thankful for our sense of teamwork this week as we confronted the challenges, decisions, and tasks we faced.

As the week began, we were sorting through a mound of uncertainty with huge decisions to be made around major choices for where and in what setting we will live in the future. But throughout the myriad of choices and decisions to be made, I have to say there was an overwhelming sense of trust and peace, that by God’s grace and mercy, we were moving in the right direction. It felt familiar to the unexplainable peace I experienced in the sufficiency of God after the accident, which I wrote about in my post under Reflections. While the situation is totally different, having an almost unnatural, at least for me calm, in the face of countless uncertainties in major life altering areas, has been truly a blessing beyond description. It reminded me of a term coined by Brennan Manning, “Ruthless Trust.”

In his book, Ruthless Trust, Brennan Manning shares the following:

“When the brilliant ethicist John Kavanaugh went to work for three months at ‘the house of the dying’ in Calcutta, he was seeking a clear answer as to how best to spend the rest of his life. On the first morning there he met Mother Teresa. She asked, ‘And what can I do for you?’ Kavanaugh asked her to pray for him. ‘What do you want me to pray for?’ she asked. He voiced the request that he had borne thousands of miles from the United States: ‘Pray that I have clarity.’ She said firmly, ‘No, I will not do that.’ When he asked her why, she said, ‘Clarity is the last thing you are clinging to and must let go of.’ When Kavanaugh commented that she always seemed to have the clarity he longed for, she laughed and said, ‘I have never had clarity; what I have always had is trust. So I will pray that you trust God.’”

Manning goes on to observe:

“Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.”

And I believe his summary of “Ruthless Trust,” brings it all home:

“Ruthless trust is an unerring sense, way deep down, that beneath the surface agitation, boredom, and insecurity of life, it’s gonna be all right. Ill winds may blow, more character defects may surface, sickness may visit, and friends will surely die; but a stubborn, irrefutable certainty persists that God is with us and loves us in our struggle to be faithful. A non-rational, absolutely true intuition perdures that there is something unfathomably big in the universe, something that points to Someone who is filled with peace and power, love and undreamed of creativity - Someone who inevitably will reconcile all things in himself.”

So as we proceed with our whirlwind week, we’d invite you to join us in ruthless trust and prayers for our journey and your own. We continue to covet your prayers for healing of Joy’s eyesight to the right side and further healing of her aphasia. Please know that we hold you in our prayers daily and hope that we can be an encouragement to you as you are an encouragement to us. We wish you all Godspeed in the week ahead.