Lenten Reflection Week 1: Trust

"To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you; let me not be humiliated, nor let my enemies triumph over me."

Trust is hard to fully possess. How do I trust that what I want, even what I need, will come to me? Do I really have control? The answer is, bluntly, no.

What I have is knowing a God who is trustworthy. A God to whom I may pray that I not be humiliated, that my enemies and personal demons not defeat me. We are the ones who remind God, in the Psalm, how God has acted to saved God's people throughout history. Noah and his family. The Israelites out of Egyptian slavery. And God's people today from the ways our actions separate us from the work God is doing in the world today to establish God's Kingdom. God is faithful.

When we struggle to trust God in the hard times, we are reminded that in Christ Jesus, even God has suffered. God suffered the loss of God's own son. This was no metaphysical trick, a cosmic "gotcha." When Jesus died, he experienced what we will all experience one day. And when he was raised from the dead, he showed us that even death does not have the final word. Only God does.

So we follow together, trusting that the God who meets us in the exciting and mundane, the joyous and mournful, the excited and the anxious, will never leave us alone. Not because of some hope that we can trust in God. We trust because our Lord is trustworthy, and has been so throughout our faith history.

-Micah Kurtz