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.