Trust and Obey
by Rick Saenz

What I know about the nature of faith comes from many different learned sources. What I know about the practice of faith comes primarily from one source: my children. Five times now God has presented us with a blessing who for years to come will take no thought for the morrow, trusting instead that Mom and Dad will provide. It's a serene confidence that astonishes me and shames me. It also exhorts me to set my own worry aside and have confidence in the promises of a loving and faithful God.

I've also watched my children's trust weaken over the years. Some would argue this is a natural part of growing up. Maybe a helpless child needs to believe that his parents are trustworthy, but as he becomes his own man he needs to cast off that trust and realize that it was never true, that his parents were always just as frail and untrustworthy as he is. I don't believe it. I think that God equips us to merit the trust that our children place in us., and that He expects us to inspire them to be just as trustworthy to their own children.

So why does the trust of our children ebb away? Because we continually undermine it by our own untrusting behavior. Our children start out trusting in us so much that they model themselves after us—even in matters of trust. And so when we demonstrate a lack of trust in God's promises to us, our children follow suit; not only do they begin to question whether God will really provide for them, but they wonder about the means of provision—namely, us.

How do we as parents fail to show trust in God? Mostly by trusting in ourselves. Our plans for the future are elaborate and ambitious. We specify them down to the smallest detail, we figure out exactly what sequence of steps will lead us to our goal, and then we work hard to implement each step. If we succeed, any glory we give to God is mere lip service, because we did it all ourselves. If we fail, we seethe with frustration, or maybe we sign and begin again, but we rarely stop to think that failure may in fact have been God's purpose for us—because He was never part of the plan.

If we escape this trap, we proceed to fall of the other side of the donkey by confusing trust with wishful thinking. We imagine some eventuality that would be good for us (and therefore surely pleasing to God) and begin to live into the wish, praying and hoping that it might come about, while not being so presumptuous that we actually do anything that might make it real. If it comes to pass, well, we've hit the jackpot in the cosmic lottery and we didn't even have to buy a ticket. If it doesn't, we assume that God never wanted such a thing for us anyway, and we pat ourselves on the back for our piety in not presuming.

And sometimes we don't bother to climb on the donkey at all. Rather than working to make something good happen, or at least wishing for something good to happen, we devote ourselves to making sure that nothing bad can possibly happen, and if it does, that it can't be blamed on us. We insure that our cares, our homes, our vacations, our health, our very lives will not be taken from us—at least not without adequate compensation. We keep our heads down at work, in public, at church. Not trusting that God has arranged all things pleasant and unpleasant for the good of his children, we arrange tings so that we can always say, in truth and with confidence, "It's not my fault!"

We are at our worst in this when it comes to raising our children. If God gives us a covenant child to raise, we should undertake that duty with confidence, knowing that He will also equip us for the task. Instead, we seize every available opportunity to shift the burden elsewhere—a school, a curriculum, a youth program, a pastor, a trained expert. We buy into the lie that an American child can grow up to be whatever he wants to be, because it shifts the responsibility of choosing a path through life away from us and onto him. We enrich our child's life by having him trained in random assortments of skills and knowledge we ourselves don't have and don't value—chemistry, classical music, soccer, dead languages, ballet, ancient writing—so that we don't risk hearing that dreaded accusation, "I could have been a world-class something-or-other, if only you had forced me to take lessons when I was young!"

This is not delegating responsibility, it is ducking it. For better or worse, we are the experts and role models that God chose for our children. We should be teaching our children to behave as we behave, to know what we know, to love what we love—to be just like us. To do otherwise is to teach our children that God can't be trusted to choose for us, to provide for us, and to equip us, that we must satisfy these needs ourselves or find others to satisfy them for us.

Let us invest in God the same unwavering trust that our children naturally invest in us, and let our children see us do it. Let us proceed as if we believe that God has equipped us to do the work he has given us to do. Let us work to mold our children in our image, passing on to them as a heritage our habits, our knowledge, our wisdom, our values, and our traditions. Let us seek to make that heritage as precious as possible, working to become smarter, wiser, kinder, and more generous, striving to love better things and to love things better. And let us exhort our children to be bolder than us, building upon the foundation we give them with a trust that eclipses our own.