Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 3

Pet Trusts

Pet trusts...we all have 'em, even if we are not aware of them. They can be helpful in our growing in trusting God, but they can also potentially trip us up in that journey. No, they have nothing to do with our confidence in leaving meat to marinate on the counter with the canine family member lurking in the kitchen. But they are not unlike our pet dogs' easy and trusting reliance on us for their immediate needs and general well-being. Our pet trusts involve those areas of our lives where trusting God is not a struggle, or, at least, not a painful one. Because of how we are made, how we have grown up, our family patterns, structure, and experiences, there are certain areas in which we find it easy – or at least, easier – to trust God. We may have many of these pet trusts, or a few, but they can all be helpful in growing our trust in other areas.

Despite my atypical family upbringing, I never lacked for anything. We could be considered poor by some metrics, but we never felt poor. Mom was good with money as were my grandparents. We had a home with a mortgage that got paid in a timely manner. We always had enough food. There were toys and fun outings. We went to Catholic schools, and the tuition money always seemed to be there. As a result, as an adult, I never worried about money or financial matters in general. A pet trust...

I found out I was at risk for a certain cancer when I was in my early twenties. I had screenings and checkups for years until I did, in fact, develop that cancer, in my mid thirties, after having been told I was past the age when I was most likely to get it. Since then, CTs, MRIs, and blood tests have always been a cause for concern. Yes, scanxiety is a thing. By the time primary cancer #4 surfaced, I had little trust that scans and tests would ever be routine or normal. They had often proved to be a harbinger of another medical crisis. There were, in fact, normal scans and tests over the years, but they always took me by surprise, being a cause for anticipatory anxiety despite any eventual good result. I just had difficulty mustering any trust that the results would be normal. Not a pet trust...

We all have different experiences that form our ability to trust. We also have different experiences that lead to huge holes where trust should be but isn't. Some people might make the case that pet trusts – those easy places where we assume the best will eventually appear – isn't real trust at all. If it's easy, is it truly trust? Shouldn't we feel some spiritual effort as we lean into God at all times, in all areas of our lives, the easy places as well as the hard? If we look at our pet trust as OUR trust, something we have accomplished, achieved on our own, then, yes, it can be a potential problem. We can fall into a certain kind of pride that we, not God, are responsible for our trusting confidence in any particular area. But if we acknowledge God's part in bringing about the circumstances of our pet trust, then it can be a helpful tool in developing trust in other areas where trust does not come easy, in those places where we find huge holes devoid of trust.

As long as I didn't see my family's financial provision as something we were solely responsible for, that it was, in fact, a gift from God, then that pet trust would have the potential to encourage me to trust in areas where trust did not come easy. Yes, God encouraged godly character traits in me and my family that taught us to be good with money as well as showing us that He never left us unprovided for, but I think I always knew that my financial security had more to do with God than keeping track of my income and expenditures. I should come away with the belief that if God could be trusted in areas of financial provision, then He could be trusted as well in the area of ______. (Fill in the blank, Mary!) But easier said than done...

There are other pet trusts I've been blessed with – I can easily trust God for healthy church choices, wonderful friends, good experiences for my kids, wonderful neighborhood and housing situations – all of which have encouraged me to trust God in the tougher places. Like foot holds on climbing walls and rungs on monkey bars, pet trusts give me something to cling to and help me maneuver over those scary placed in between. I still struggle with trusting God in areas involving medical issues. My husband's diagnosis provided new opportunities to grow in trust for me as well as for him. Over all the years of my various medical journeys, one area where I have been growing in trust has been that God would provide excellent medical care. Since my first diagnosis, God has led me to amazing doctors, often in down right miraculous ways. Time and again, without much anxiety or intensive research, I have fallen into the hands of some of the best medical doctors and medical staff imaginable. In the past year of my husband's journey, again, God has led us on a direct and relatively easy path to great medical care. Yeah, I still get scanxiety for myself and my husband's labs and MRIs, but I am amazed at the ease with which I can now trust God to provide the necessary medical intervention for whatever lies ahead. A new pet trust in the making?

When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.  
In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I shall not be afraid.  
What can flesh do to me?   - Psalm 56:3,4 ESV

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 2

The BIG TRUST

My dad died suddenly when I was a year old, leaving me and my pregnant mother to figure out life going forward. Me, being a one-year-old and having no memory of that time, I didn't have a lot of say in what that life would look like. But my mom was a woman of faith and she trusted God to help her do the figuring out. Her parents moved in with us, she had my brother, and life did go forward. My brother and I were taken care of during the day by Grandma and Grandpa, both doing an exceptional job, having practiced on five kids of their own. We spent time with our working mom in the evenings and on weekends. On the whole, I think my brother and I would agree, we had a good childhood. Mom had trusted God and He had provided. It was a big trust, but it wasn't The BIG TRUST...

The BIG TRUST is the trust we each have to grapple with personally. We also most likely will have to grapple with it vicariously as those close to us personally deal with it. It revolves around our common end and the fact, like my father, we all die. We may die far too young and suddenly, like my dad, or we may live to a ripe old age and slowly fade out. Whatever the means of our demise, the end is the same. We die. And then, what? This is where The BIG TRUST enters in.

Somewhere in my youth, probably during my teen years, my mother showed me a note and a card she had saved from the time of my father's death. At that time there was a neighbor who lived down the street that my father enjoyed talking to. He had told my mother that he had interesting spiritual conversations with this neighbor who was a Baptist pastor. When my dad died, this neighbor wrote a comforting note to my mom and in it were some verses from the Bible. As my mom showed me the card, she recited the verses without looking at them, saying she had taken such comfort from them that she had committed them to memory. This struck me as a not-so-typical thing for my Catholic mother to have done, and it made an impression on me. The verses she quoted were from the gospel of John -

Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.

-John 14:1-3

My memory of that conversation with my mother made me think that she had grappled with the BIG TRUST, that that scripture in the note card had given her both hope and comfort as to where my suddenly departed dad had gone off to. My father was in the Father's house, in a “room” prepared by Jesus Himself. And, if the scripture is to be believed, Jesus came and took Dad to Himself just so Dad could be with Jesus. No wonder the verses start with the words “Let not your hearts be troubled”! How could one's heart be troubled with such a great promise for eternity?

Having survived four primary cancers, the BIG TRUST has always loomed large for me, though in my case at the time, perhaps it was more like The BIG ACQUIESCENCE or The BIG RESIGNATION. But in the time since my epiphany regarding true trust, I like to think I have grown in my ability to trust God for everything, including The BIG TRUST, and, at the moment, I really, really need to lean into that trust...

Six months ago, my husband was diagnosed with an extremely aggressive brain tumor. The prognosis is grim. Three weeks from first symptoms to brain biopsy, followed by brain surgery, radiation, biologic infusions and oral chemo, he has gone from miles of daily walks outdoors to moving about the house with wheelchair and walker. There have been a myriad of opportunities to trust God – for good doctors, for effective treatments with minimal side effects, for practical support and prayer support, for good weather for medical appointments. When my husband could no longer walk by himself, our son moved in with us to take on the physical day to day needs of his dad. Our daughters have provided all manner of practical and emotional support. Friends have come around us and prayed us through it all. At this moment, the tumor has been declared “stable” by those who know enough to make such a declaration. We are thankful for all the ways God has responded to our trusting Him, and I am grateful that I've had the opportunity to exercise some of my newly acquired trust muscles.

Right now, my husband and I are looking at the BIG TRUST up close, he facing it personally, me looking at it vicariously as he grapples with it. And it really does feel like...The...BIG...TRUST. It is huge for me, and I can only image what it is like for my husband. But as I dwell in those verses from the gospel of John, there is a fleshing out of The BIG TRUST. Can we trust God and receive from Him whatever we need to not let our hearts be troubled? That's a big one. Do we believe in Him; believe in Jesus; really believe? Can we imagine the rooms in the Father's house, the ones that are prepared for us – for me, for my husband? Do we believe and trust Jesus that He has prepared a place for us and will see to it personally that we get there? And, oh, do we trust that Jesus wants us to be where He is for all eternity in the same way that He wants us to be with Him now, in our present daily life? Yeah, that's a really BIG TRUST...but not too big a trust for the size of our God.

***

I thought about writing and posting this for Good Friday - Death, then Resurrection, Eternal Life – themes all ultimately caught up in The BIG TRUST. But as I thought more about it, all the posts after this will make the other trusts look easier if we look at The BIG TRUST first. And that TRUST has eternal significance. So I decided this was the week to write and post it. To paraphrase a quote from the movie, When Harry Met Sally, when you realize you are going to spend the rest of eternity with Somebody, you want to start thinking about the rest of eternity as soon as possible.

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

“Oh,Sweetie...”

Part 2

How long does it take for the dirt to settle in a trench that had been twelve feet deep? Estimates vary, but two to five years seems to be the average numbers we saw in our research. I considered these numbers as we went about our plans to put our house on the market. Our realtor suggested an “as is” clause when we finally listed our property. We also had mounded and seeded and watered the filled dirt to show some attempt at reclaiming our front lawn.

In the weeks between the trench digging and the meeting with the realtor, I threw myself a spiritual pity party, one of those “Woe is me! God, You just don't get what we need here.” I've been in places of spiritual despondency before, and I still prayed. Because I've always seen prayer as talking to God, my praying now resembled the difficult conversation one might have with someone close to you that you are in conflict with at the moment. I grumbled and I cried and I sulked and, finally, after a few weeks, I felt spent enough to pray “Oh, Lord, I just want to be able to trust you again.” I immediately felt a peace I had not had for awhile and I “heard” the Lord say to me, “Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...”

Now, I should probably explain that when I say I “heard” the Lord, I don't mean an audible voice. Usually, when I “hear” the Lord, there is a sense of someone - not me - putting words in my mind that I recognize as being too wise for me to have come up with on my own. Often it happens when I am reading scripture and the words jump off the page and take on a wisdom and meaning that I had not seen before. Sometimes there is a new insight and a sense of peace regarding something I'm praying about and I know God is present at that time. And sometimes, like in this instance, there are very clear and surprising words that pop into my head that cause me to say, “God, is that you?”

“Oh, Sweetie, you've never trusted me...”

When I heard those words I was immediately struck by three things almost simultaneously. One was that I knew what I had heard was absolutely true, that I didn't know how to trust God. There was absolutely no feeling of condemnation in the words I heard, only love and tenderness. I really did, at that moment, feel like God's Sweetie, and He was just telling me something that I was finally able to hear, something that I had really needed to know for some time, and now the right time had come for me to receive it. Secondly, I had a glimpse of what true trust in God was for perhaps the first time in my spiritual life. And thirdly – and this took the form of a question to God – what was that thing I had been doing all those years when I thought I had been trusting God?

I started to examine that third thing first. I asked the Lord to show me what I had confused as trust for all those years I thought I had been trusting. What I began to see was that in all the times of my life when I knew I needed to look to God, when I needed to depend upon Him in health crises, relational issues and practical issues, I could only see the passive side of “trust”. I was good at being resigned. I was good at being submitted. I was good at being compliant. I was good at being acquiescent. Acquiescent is defined as accepting something reluctantly but without protest. Yes, I was especially good at that. On the whole, I had seen “trust” as something passive that was put upon me, that I had no choice in, something I reluctantly accepted. And I think God blessed my compliance, my incomplete “trust”, knowing that was all I knew how to give during those times. But was any of this true trust? Now, I had had a glimpse of the active side of trust, true trust as being a joyful movement toward God, an expectation of His hand over my life and an expectation of His working in whatever my situation. Trust now looked like an interesting mix of actively leaning into God and resting in a place of joyful peace rather than passivity.

In the weeks that followed the sewer fiasco, I immersed myself in scriptures about trust and asked God to transition me from the purely passive acquiescent side of trust to the fully active, often joyous side of trust. I was somewhat amused, definitely humbled, and a little embarrassed to be such a latecomer to true trust. I had just celebrated my fiftieth year as a Believer and one of the first scriptures I had ever memorized was Proverbs 3:5, Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. I guess I was trusting the Lord with only part of my heart and leaning on my own understanding to shoulder the rest.

I prayed about and contemplated true trust during that time we were preparing to sell our old home and buy a new one near Minneapolis. I trusted the Lord to bring a buyer that could overlook the mound of now newly greened grass in the front yard. I trusted the Lord to find us a townhome that would meet our needs as we grew older. He sent us twelve viewers on day one of our house listing. He sent us five offers on day two, all above asking price. The one we accepted was high enough to almost fully cover the cost of the sewer replacement, and the new buyer graciously accepted the front lawn in progress. On the Minneapolis end, we found our almost perfect townhome and were able to schedule two closings within a few days of each other. I came
to know that God is good and completely to be trusted. How sweet to be His Sweetie...

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,

and do not lean on your own understanding.

In all your ways acknowledge him,

and he will make straight your paths.

- Proverbs 3:5,6

 

Not So Light Lenten Reflections

Week 1

God's Sovereignty Problem – An Opportunity to Trust

Part 1

The puddle around the drain in our unfinished basement was small, barely a foot in diameter, and no larger than the one that appeared in the same place six months earlier. It didn't look like a big deal, and it certainly didn't look like a opportunity to learn a whole new level of trusting God. But it was a big deal, and what I learned about trust was even a bigger deal.

* * *

I thought I'd write a series of Lenten reflections this year about trusting God, what I thought it was and what it probably actually is and why I need it more now than ever. Someone reading this might benefit from my sharing, but, honestly, I really need to write this down for me, to remind myself of how big God is and how worthy He is of my trust. I usually call this series “Light Lenten Reflections” but some of these reflections will be not so light. But back to the puddle in the basement...

* * *

We called the rooter people we had contacted six months previously and told them the puddle was back. This shouldn't be, they said. Something is going on that a simple rooting out won't fix. Within 24 hours, they had dug a trench in our front yard, from front porch, across the lawn, through the road in front of our house and into our neighbor's yard. The trench was twelve feet deep and almost as wide. The sewer pipe running from our basement no longer sloped down to the main sewer line in our neighbor's yard. Over the years, the pipe had settled in such a way that it now sloped from the main sewer line into our basement. The village engineers and various consultants were called in and together with the rooter people came up with a plan to remedy the problem – just redo the entire sewer outlet in our basement, put in 50 feet of large sewer piping that wasn't there previously, knock a hole in the foundation to raise the outlet of the pipe four feet higher than what it was previously. Oh, and because all of the needed work was on our pipe and our property, we'd get to pay for it all!

Now this story might seem like a run-of-the-mill crisis that all homeowner face now and then, though maybe a slightly bigger one than usual. But for me, it was devastating and for a short time seriously affected my relationship with God in what I've come to call His sovereignty problem. If I believe God is sovereign - and I do – then He knew all about this sewer pipe and the gigantic hole in the front lawn and He let it all happen anyway. He knew about the five years leading up to this crisis and how our life had been put on hold so many times in those years. I was not shy about telling God how really, really upset I was that this was happening now, again. Five years earlier, when my husband and I retired, we had made plans to move to the Minneapolis area to be closer to our kids and grandchildren. We started to get rid of stuff and paint rooms. Then I had a cancer diagnosis and subsequent surgery. On the road to recovery, but before I could get painting again, I had another cancer diagnosis unrelated to the previous one, and this time it was six months of chemo followed by major surgery and a year's recovery. But recover I did, and as soon as I could climb ladders again, I was back to painting. Then the pandemic hit. In addition to dealing with the problem of showing our house and looking for a new one in the midst of high Covid numbers, did we really want to make the dozen trips to Menards and Home Depot that everyone moving into a new place seems required to make? We decided to put off our move one more time.

Now, with Covid numbers dwindling, we were finally ready to sell our house. In the days before the puddle reappeared, we had started organizing our stuff in the basement in preparation for packing. We were looking at towns in the Minneapolis area we though we might want to move to. We had a realtor picked out and we were ready to put our house on the market...the house with the 50 feet of new sewer pipe in the basement that now had displaced our carefully organized pre-move packing...the house that now had a twelve foot hole in the front lawn...

...I was not happy with God...

Tomorrow

Part 2

Oh, Sweetie...