Fairhaven Shorts 9-24-2023
Learning to Trust God in Life’s Wildernesses
Therefore, what we see happening in Exodus is our story too. And today, we now live in a wilderness, a modern day wilderness of confusion and mistrust and violence. But we, like the Israelites, are on a journey to the promised land of God’s kingdom. In our reading from Exodus, we see trust being tested.
Increasing trust is something we all have to do from time to time. We all kind of need to explore how we feel about certain people and situations. In this case, the people of Israel, after generations of slavery and abuse, they’ve developed some issues around trust, and understandably so. And they want to know, who is this God that Moses keeps talking about? Why does God care about us? And where has God been all this time when we were slaves.
Why God Wants to Trust Us
We’ve often been told through our lives to trust God, and we struggle with that sometimes because God is beyond our ability to understand. But do we ever stop and think that God wants to trust us because God created us to be in relationship with God, and our relationship, that needs trust in order to thrive. Real trust going in both directions is needed for love to be present. There are lots of relationships in this world that don’t require love, relationships that we build around mutual usefulness or a mutual desire for income or for a cause.
These things don’t necessarily require deep trust, just sort of a basic level of mutual agreement. But real love needs deep down honesty and openness. trust.
