The Tension of Trust

“I am afflicted and needy; hurry to help me, God. You are my help and my deliverer; Lord, do not delay.”

When we come before the Lord in a crisis beyond our control and seek His help and His resolution to the issues we are facing, whether we say it or not our feeling is: Lord, please do not delay! A crisis hurts. We are in a state of disequilibrium. The order of our lives has been torpedoed, and we have this gaping hole where we’re “taking on water.” No delays, we pray! We’re going down, God! Hurry! In our American culture, that feeling is intensified by our demand and expectation of instant gratification. So, we find ourselves in a world of hurt, and we know that only the Lord can resolve our affliction.

What puzzles us is that sometimes even when our sense of urgency feels like we’ve been plugged into an electric socket God seems to delay His response. Removed from the crisis or somehow transported out of it, our minds can reason that God’s timing is always perfect and always according to His purposes, but during a crisis we cannot escape from we want resolution from the affliction. Yet, there is this delay that we cannot understand.

The impact of this is that in a crisis that has spun out of control, until we see a resolution from God, we may just have to live with the tension of trust. That is not a state of comfort. But it is where we sometimes find ourselves. Trust is more than just a noble ideal. For some folks that’s about all it is until they find themselves in the white hot crucible of crisis, and that’s when they learn all the ins and outs of the tension of trust. Trusting God simply produces a tension that we sometimes have to live with, as we wait for God’s resolution.

Lord, We confess to You that trusting You is sometimes one of our greatest tensions in life, but we trust You anyway because we know You are trustworthy, and that You will respond to what we see as our crises as You see best for us. So we trust You, and we commit to living with the tension that goes with that. Amen.