Trust must be purified

The last three months could very easily be described as being characterized by trials. The unexpected rough terrain of returning back to campus from support raising, starting a new job on staff with a church, changing support systems and saying goodbye to several roommates and several girls who have become my best friends in the last couple of years since the last mass exodus of girlfriends in my life, starting several new mentoring relationships and pursuing students on campus, moving, new house, new set of roommates, starting a relationship, juggling the demands of leadership, managing teams, running meetings, leading a home group and creating a family with an entirely new group of people, working with and developing leaders, working through conflict within my teams, starting a seminary class, and grieving the change that has transpired in the last 6 months. It has been a time mixed with many emotions, nearly everything from the highest most exhilarating highs to the lowest, most crushing lows.

Without cutting any corners, I’ve come to the conclusion that this semester has totally kicked my butt. There is no other way to put it. Nothing has been easy. Yet it has thrown me back onto the unfailing and limitless mercy of the one I call my Savior and stripping me away and cleansing me from my idols so I can trust in the one true God. "Sorrowful yet rejoicing..." My Father has been calling me into deeper areas of His heart and forcing me to relinquish the weapons of false security I cling to, and to trust in His unseen hand. Yet again.

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"THE BASIC PREMISE of biblical trust is the conviction that God wants us to grow, to unfold, and to experience fullness of life. However, this kind of trust is acquired only gradually and most often through a series of crises and trials. Through the indescribable anguish on Mount Moriah with his son Isaac, Abraham learned that the God who had called him to hope against hope was eminently reliable and that the only thing expected of him was unconditional trust. The great old man models the essence of trust in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures: to be convinced of the reliability of God.

The story of salvation-history indicates that without exception trust must be purified in the crucible of trial. David, the most beloved figure of Jewish history, was no stranger to terror, loneliness, failure, and even sinister plots to destroy him; yet he ravished the heart of God with his unwavering trust."

- excerpt from Brennan Manning’s Ruthless Trust