Trusting God isn’t trusting that he will make life more pleasant, or that he will do any of the many things we want him to do for us. The true difficulty in trusting God is when he does those things we do not understand. He does not always deliver us from harm. For some reason, in America especially, we think God owes us a pleasant life, but he never promises that. In fact, he promises the opposite; he promises trials, hardship, and persecution.
Truly trusting God isn’t clinging to the hope that he will make it all better. It is something more than that. It is clinging to the very nature of God, who he is, and believing that even the trials we endure are orchestrated by him for greater reasons. They are difficult and painful, but they are never outside of his active will, never beyond his control. Look at Job. God did that. God is the one who suggested Job to Satan. God said, “take a look at this guy and torment him, and watch what happens.” So Satan did. All of Job’s friends came to him with all the pat answers, the “theological” explanations for what he was enduring. Things like calling it a judgement from God, saying he had a sin to confess. They brought explanations to him, simple, seemingly logical answers–the kinds of answers we so often give to our own friends or ourselves–but none of them satisfied, none of them really explained what was going on.
Only when Job was humbled before the Lord, did he understand. Only when God reminded him who was God, who knows better than any of us how to hurl the lightning, steer the storms, how to speak a world from nothing- only then did Job realize he was nothing to question God’s methods. That what matters to God is that we know him. Not that we are happy or comfortable. A love that only provides happiness and comfort–at the cost of leaving one ignorant–is a shallow love. Yet God’s love is not shallow. It is profoundly more deep than we will ever know. He would rather we suffer in order to understand him, to suffer and ask the only important questions in life, than to leave us comfortable fools, with our naive view of the world and its creator.
And this is love. Not because is makes us comfortable, or gives us what we want. But because it satisfies our souls. We were made to know God. And we can only be truly satisfied in knowing him. And this comes through the experiences of life, both joy and pain. These give us the understanding that we long for, the understanding that will open our eyes to a larger view of life and the world and the creator that made both.
Therefore, trusting God is not trusting him to remove suffering, at least not in this life. Trusting him, then, is believing that his intentions are good. That he will bring suffering–as a refining tool of love–and that suffering is never an out of control torment from the enemy. It is always for a good, and God is the one in control of it. Trusting God means believing that he alone can satisfy us, and submitting ourself to the trials that come in order to obtain that end, which is far more valuable than any other.