More from Thinking About God . . .

     Trust puts feet to faith.  If we can't trust, we can't have faith.  Trust empowers faith; it makes faith blossom and grow.  When we trust, we let what faith opens us to see nourish richer perceptions of life and spirit in us.

     In addition, when we trust, we let go.  We let go of our fear of what we don't know, our fear of what we can't understand, let go of thinking that unless we have all the facts we cannot be comfortable with where we are.  Even though we do not fully understand, and even though we do not completely see, we are content and unafraid.  We decide that we don't need to know everything in order to move ahead.  We give up control, relinquish our anxieties and fears.  We begin to activate our faith.
     Faith as trust also involves relationship.  When we trust in a way of seeing, we establish a relationship with it.  When Abraham trusted in how God saw the world, he entered into a new relationship with God.  He would not see God as a bucket of empty promises.  God was really real, really real in a profoundly new way.  When we trust how our faith sees, we create a relationship with a part of reality we did not have before, establish an intimacy with it that we did not previously possess.  We have a new relationship with what is true.
     "As iron sharpens iron," the Hebrew book of Proverbs says, "so one person sharpens another."  Being in a relationship changes those who participate in it.        And how much the more with the trust relationship of faith!  When we put our trust in how our faith sees, we change.  We open our hearts to something else, someone new.  We enlarge our perceptions, broaden our ken.  We go beyond the moment, step past the line of visible evidence, walk a path of fresh openness to what someone else, not us, determines what is true.
     When we trust, faith becomes more than how and what we see.  It becomes the way we live.  The faith that Abraham had in God became the center of his life, the foundation of all his decisions, the prism through which he thought and acted and understood himself and the world.  His faith became the guiding light of his life, the basis for his most profound meaningfulness and understanding.
     When faith defines how we live, faith becomes that which makes us who we are.  When I was in high school, I knew a girl who practiced what she called chanting.  "Every day I chant," she told me.  "I chant for good grades, good friends, happiness.  When I get older, I'll chant for other things, like a good husband and a big house.  I really believe it works."
     Monica's faith in chanting shaped how she saw and interacted with the world.  It grounded everything she did.  Chanting was her life.  It made her who she was.  When everyone else was out partying, Monica stayed home, chanting, chanting before her altar, her faith shaping her into a person very different from the rest of us.
     In January of 1956 a group of Huaroani (or Auca) Indians in the jungles of Ecuador ambushed and killed five American missionaries who for several months had been attempting to evangelize them.  Though the news reverberated throughout the secular press of the Western world, those in the know, particularly the wives and children (along with one unborn) whom the missionaries left behind, were not surprised.  The Aucas had a longstanding distrust of outsiders and a well-earned reputation for savagery.  The five men knew they were treading on thin water.
     Some years before he died, one of the missionaries, Jim Elliot, wrote in his journal, "No man is a fool who gives up what he cannot keep for what he cannot lose."[2]
     Mr. Elliot knew in whom he believed.  He knew in whom his faith rested.  He knew he believed in a real God.  And it was this faith that made him who he was; it fueled and guided everything that he did.  Because he unhesitatingly trusted in this real God, Mr. Elliot was willing to risk his life to bring the gospel of Jesus in which he believed to a tribe of Indians deep in the Ecuadorian jungle.  His faith in God was his life.  Just as Monica allowed her faith in chanting to transform her and define how she lived, so did Jim Elliot's faith transform him and determine the course of his life.  He went forth without fear, completely confident in what his faith had shown and built into him.
     Mr. Elliot had a relationship of trust with God that transcended the facts of his situation.  He trusted in God more than he trusted in himself.  His faith was the definitive shaper of his reality.

     (Thinking About God:  Meditations on a Considered Life, 2007, William E. Marsh)

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