Trusting

When I was contemplating my One Word for 2011 I came up with two words. Help, which is the word I settled on, and Trust.

Just thinking about having to work on trusting more leaves me breathless. Because I don't do it.

I want to believe you when you say you love me.
I want to believe you when you say you'll be around.
But experience tells me over and over again that it's not true and I would be a fool to believe you.

I want to believe that you are who you say that you are, who you mostly show me that you are. But I don't.
Because you are an imperfect and flawed person (like me) and when I see your cracks it makes me all jumpy and anxious and leaves me feeling unsafe.
Which is just silly, because I'm that person too.

I'm trying not to be bitter and stiff with unforgiveness, I'm trying to trust you, anyone at all really. But the relational ground feels unstable and threatening.

I fear I have no real life tools to deal with the complete dropping out of my ability to trust people that happened.
Which is why I chose help instead of trust.
Because I need help trusting people again.
I need to stop being so afraid of every single damn thing and person around me.
It's stifling and paralyzing folding yourself in as tightly as I have.

But worse still is the trust I'm having to desperately hang on to in God.
My heart is battling every day to remind me that just because I don't feel like I can trust Him doesn't mean I can't. My memory of the last years with Him yowls as loudly as possible reminding me that His promise is true and His Grace and Mercy is true with or without my trust in them.
I'm just foolish enough to believe I can hold my breath and disappear from even Him.

Yet still there is hope. Hope that every morning His mercies are new. That every morning I have a chance to ask Him for help. That every morning I am being refined by this desert place I find myself wandering in again. Some mornings it's all I can do to say, "I'm still here, are you still here?" and wait for the whispered reply, "of course"

All of my life
In every season
You are still God
I have a reason to sing
I have a reason to worship

- Hillsong: Desert Song