Tuesday's Trust - How Do We Trust When We Are the Least Trusting?

Tuesday's Trust

How Do We Trust When We Are the Least Trusting?

...because everyone who has been fathered by God conquers the world. This is the conquering power that has conquered the world: our faith. (1 John 5:4)

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At every turn in the road one can find something that will rob him of his victory and peace of mind, if he permits it. Satan is a long way from having retired from the business of deluding and ruining God’s children if he can.

~Streams in the Desert

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For we live by faith, not by sight. (2 Corinthians 5:7)

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The Bible talks about the "old man" having passed away when we come to know Jesus as Savior; the "new man" has come. After Child-Loss, many experience the confusion of the "old Christian that I was" having seemingly "passed away"; the faulty assumptions were exposed, but now we are left to wonder what is true and what did we inadvertently swallow that was not true. Many people have written to us, and have answered by survey that within this Child-Loss Grief and Trauma, they have struggled to some degree with their faith in God.  

There is a crisis of faith at some level when there is an extreme trauma such as the death of a child. It is to be expected that all former assumptions of anything about the world are now questioned. Everything has been thrown up into the air so that we don't know who we are on a number of dimensions, whether it is our mind, our body, our brain, our heart, our soul, our spirit, our psychological make-up, our friends, our family, our church, our community, our very identity ~ who are we now, and where do we fit in? Who are we now in relation to God and how are we grappling with the great confusion brought on by the death of our child? 

The saddest part of it is, when we most need God, we feel confused by so much about Him in relation to such a tragic death. 

And God has always made it clear, He has already won the victory over death for us, and for our children, yet we are to trust in such victory "by faith," and faith by its nature is defined by scripture as 

" the confidence in what we hope for, and the assurance about what we do not see." 

Yet the loss of a child has thrown us into confusion such that so much of what we held onto by faith before the death of our child is all having to be reprocessed now ~ when the very fabric of our existence has unraveled, at the very same time we most need our faith to be the one sure thing in our life. It is a quandary with which we all grapple. 

We are called to trust at a time perhaps when we are the least trusting. And yet we know our God is the only one who could defeat death, and God is the only one who could destroy the Evil One who only wants to kill us and our children. Jesus plainly said, 

"The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." (John 10:10)

God calls us to cry out to Him for comfort, and for help, and He will meet us where we are, even if its in the midst of our confusion and doubt. He understands our agony; He too is a Child-Loss parent. He also knows we need to hold onto our faith most when all that we can "see" right now is so very dark. 

Graphic, thanks to spiritualinspiration.tumblr (dot) com