I climbed up to the top of the monkey bars. I was ready. Extended out a few feet on either side of me were the wings that would soon be catching the air as easily as any bird’s. Made from an old refrigerator box, shaped into glorious cardboard-feathered limbs, the wings jostled lightly as I steadied myself. I’d seen the handles on the back of a warrior’s shield in movies and had expertly added, from strips of cardboard and duct tape, similar straps for my arms to attach to the underside of these wings. I probably wouldn’t need to, but it would be nice to have the option to flap them occasionally, or better steer, as I threaded the pine tree trunks swift and smooth and silent as an owl.
I don’t think I tried jumping more than once or twice. The hard ground of misplaced trust taught me pretty quickly that, if I repeated this without learning the lesson very soon, I might not be able to walk, much less fly.
Over time, I learned that trust requires seasons of testing and patience as we get to know the actual state of reality. There’s so much we take for granted, and what a gift when we are fortunate enough to feel the lift as we take the leap. Other times, we may wish we’d given ourselves a little more space for observation. A little more space for the clues to accumulate enough that they might begin to cohere into something like a wisdom we can work with.
I don’t think even God expects us to trust Him for no reason. Just yesterday I was talking with a friend about a pattern it took me decades of reading the Gospels to notice. When does Jesus ask the disciples to make a decision about Him? It’s pretty late in the story, really. In fact, it’s getting right down to the line as He’s setting out for Jerusalem where He knows He’ll be crucified—a devastating experience for His closest friends, likely to shatter anyone banking on Him being the Messiah. He lets these guys hang out with Him for nearly three years before He calls them to clarify their opinion regarding who He really is. “Who do you say that I am?” is a line in the sand, calling them each to consider everything they’ve seen and heard of Jesus over the last few years, and make up their minds whether they’re all in or not. But it’s not a blind leap. Not at all. By now, they’ve got a lot to go on.
But the thing that struck me was this simple fact: Something like three years’ worth of discipleship preceded the disciples’ conversion, when they definitively confess who Jesus ultimately is. There was no demand at the outset to make that kind of decision. Instead, they were invited to follow Jesus, to get to know Him, that they might find, test, and observe for a while before eventually coming to a conclusion. The Lord is so patient and wise. You might even say that it wasn’t until Pentecost that they were fully converted. Heck, you might even say we’re being further converted over and over again, all along the way as intimacy with God proves Him more and more trustworthy across our lives. Further up, further in, as C.S. Lewis says. Death is another conversion, isn’t it? Another line of decision crossed, as we give ourselves over even more fully to the care of Jesus. The Christian is always becoming more. As more of God enters our field of vision, the wings that have been our refuge bear us up to greater heights like an eagle’s. By then, we’ll know those wings are not flimsy like cardboard, but strong and eternal as the Breath of God Himself.
“Dependable” shares the same root as the word “pendulum.” A pendulum hangs from a little hook inside of a grandfather clock. It depends on that little hook to hold it as it swings back and forth, tick and tock. Time passes and, if we learn anything, we learn either that we can depend on this person or that we can’t depend on that person. Some people will hold us, others will drop us. If we’re honest, we will learn that none of us are wholly dependable. I know I am not—you can depend on that!
The nature of relationality for us, then, is bound up with time-based processes. Relationships unfold across time, and knowledge about trustworthiness accumulates one way or the other. “Knowledge about trustworthiness” really amounts to an experience of love or not-love, which gives us reasonable grounds to hope or not, as we “imagine-forward” about what’s likely to come next in a given relationship.
If that’s how this kind of thing works, then the hurt we’ve experienced will color the way we conceive of reality. We may have a gut sense that nothing and no one can be relied upon, even ourselves. Life may, therefore, feel fundamentally dangerous.
But there is a funny little verse, John 2.24, that offers a surprising, if not ironic, occasion for comfort, because in it, even Jesus is having to deal with this issue. The scene follows Jesus’s first miracle in Cana at the wedding, the cleansing of the Temple, and apparently more works that aren’t recorded that led to many getting excited and believing in Him. Then comes this little verse about how Jesus doesn’t “entrust Himself to them,” because He knows what people are like.
He doesn’t trust them. Why not? Because He’s tested and observed them long enough to know better. He’s under no illusions about their dependability, and the same goes for you and me. But it doesn’t slow Him down any with regard to His loving mission to die for and redeem us. Saving us never did have much, if anything, to do with whether or not we were trustworthy. God doesn’t trust us. He trusts His own ability to save us. Funnily enough, the bad news of our untrustworthiness leads to good news; it’s one of the reasons this salvation Jesus offers is so dependable—why you can hang your whole life on Him. It’s also one of the reasons I can relax into the hands of God—precisely because there is no unforeseen failure in me that’s going to take Him by surprise such that He might drop me. So, what have I learned? That time after time, tick after tock, I can depend on Him to carry me through this age, through death, and into the age to come.
I have a friend who suffered a shocking relational loss. Out of nowhere, at a young age, her husband of nearly two decades died. I know other people whose closest relationships have suffered scorching betrayals or the withering of closeness that comes with not being able to imagine ways to move toward someone you’ve disappointed or been disappointed by. The world is crammed with this stuff. We’ve all been dropped so many times, our heads are dizzy from it. Staying hopeful, which is to say vulnerable, feels like trying to walk a straight line after taking twenty spins bent over an upright baseball bat.
If trust is about a meaningful relationship between experience and choice, there’s so much observational evidence to add up to hopelessness, isn’t there? Then, what is this thing in me that, even as it finds hopelessness reasonable, presses on in desiring to hope? Why keep looking for someone to trust? Why make any effort at all to work toward becoming a trustworthy person? As I’ve watched my widowed friend grieve even while holding space for hope, as I’ve watched my married friends cling to one another even after betrayal, as I’ve watched others I know fight for connection even though they can’t imagine how to get there after disappointment, I think a good word for that thing that presses on may just be love.
Love hopes all things. It keeps no record of wrongs. It’s not naive about them—no, it fights to stay tender in spite of them. Love feels the descent of darkness upon the imagination as human hope blacks out from the sucker-punches of sorrow. Love Himself knows best all the death, betrayals, and disappointments of life. God has weighed all the evidence, counted the cost, and right where my arms would fold in like vault doors over my wounded heart, the arms of Christ fling wide, like wings in flight, or wings spanning the space He holds open in hope on our behalf. Even as He breathes His last, the loving imagination of God for good things to come leaves infinite room for hope to breathe.
Whether I trust myself, or you, or anyone for that matter, I have come to depend on the beauty of God’s love in Jesus Christ as the one thing that can lift me up from the hard ground of disappointment and despair—as the one thing that gives me a reason to risk trusting again.
The featured image, “Teach Me To Fly,” is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Matthew Clark is a singer/songwriter and storyteller from Mississippi. He has recorded several full length albums, including Matthew’s latest project, “The Well Trilogy,” 3 full-length album/book combos released over three years. Each installment—Only the Lover Sings, A Tale of Two Trees, and Where the River Goes—is made up of 11 songs and a companion book of 13 essays written by a variety of contributors exploring themes around encountering Jesus, faith-keeping, and the return of Christ. You can find the books on Amazon and the albums on Spotify and Apple Music.
A founding member of The Maker’s Project and a columnist for Cultivating, Matthew’s essays reflect on faith-keeping and pilgrimage. Matthew travels as a touring musician and speaker sharing songs and stories in a van called Vandalf.
Matthew,
You had me smiling, pondering, nodding in full agreement and near tears thru your hopefilled winsome words!
Thank you!
Denise