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“On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul … The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.” –– Psalm 138:3,8
There is a trust in God’s future, it’s the time until then that worries and wakes us from our fitful and fretful sleep. While we can affirm the notion that “all things work together for good for those who love God,” it’s the not-so-good stuff we must wade through in the interim that gives us heartburn. The test result that raises more question than clues. The unbearable awkwardness of strained friendships. Making a choice when all the options look bad. The actuarial roulette of income versus lifespan during retirement. Worries over a child’s well-being.
We can trust God to be God, but we’re also personally, and often painfully, familiar with whom God has to work with, and looking in the mirror gives us pause about our prospects. In the psalm quoted above, the author voices gratitude and praise for God’s faithfulness: “On the day I called, you answered me.” Yet, the psalmist betrays some very human and understandable anxiety as the writer ponders how God’s faithfulness will intersect with our flaws. In fact, the uncertainty of the original Hebrew in one verse leaves the reader hanging between the assurance of answered prayer and the fear of false confidence –– “you increased my strength of my soul” could possibly also be translated, “you made me arrogant in my soul with strength.” It reveals much the same tension of ambivalent trust expressed by the father with a sick child in Mark’s gospel, “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief!” It’s that little voice in your head when you’re about to take the leap of faith: “Are you sure about this?” Taking the leap doesn’t come with a guarantee of wings, but a promise that you’ll never fall farther than God’s embrace.
In C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, the devil’s marketing manager counsels a junior tempter, “[God] wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.” Thus, the challenge is not so much casting off our fears, but whether we’ll take the leap, or at least step forward, in spite of those fears, trusting in God’s strength to sustain us and God’s light to show us where to aim our feet. And so, the psalmist prays, “The Lord will fulfill his purpose for me; your steadfast love, O Lord, endures forever. Do not forsake the work of your hands.” It is an honest prayer of trust in an uncertain world –– O Lord, I trust in you, though I’m not as confident in myself; so don’t forget me back here.
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