Trust is valuable. We want people we trust and aspire to being trustworthy.
Yet, like so many precious things, it’s fragile. Once broken, it’s challenging to reassemble.
Such a valuable commodity predictably requires delicacy. Yet when we speak of building trust, we forget that it can also be a pretty messy and graceless process.
Let’s go back to Exodus. God impressed the Hebrews with the miraculous sea-parting escape from the rampaging Egyptians, but the Lord knew that one, albeit huge, favor wasn’t going solidify their faith.
Happy one moment, Israel ends up cursing God and Moses the next. Getting released from slavery is a good thing: being stranded in the desert – not so much. Do they sound ungrateful? Of course. Must we blame them, however?
Trust has to sprout in the feeble soil of our vulnerability. It’s hard for humans to continually acknowledge our need for help. An outsized, miracle gift reminds us, appropriately, that we’re undeserving. Without a trusting relationship, the shame of unworthiness usually translates to belligerence toward the giver. The Hebrews’ complaining makes just one example.
So God brings Israel into the desert where they can feel justified in both their grumbling and dependence simultaneously. The Lord provides “manna.” It’s boring food, but it keeps them alive. The Lord provides water where they would die of thirst. They learn they won’t survive without divine aid, but they aren’t so “lavishly” cared for that they feel unworthy.
When God brings us into a wilderness patch in our lives, it’s not going to be fun. The work of building trust is slow, and sometimes tedious. By reducing the pace of our thoughts to, “How can I get through this day?” God reorders our priorities. We know longer have the luxury of thinking so much about what we wish might happen. Even winning the lottery won’t solve the problems the desert presents.
With our heads down, and our minds focused on soldiering through the days, we begin to pick up the rhythm of God’s daily concern for us. The divine love refuses to spoil us, and willingly tolerates our grousing, so that we can end up with a healthy recognition of our need for God and a growing trust that the Lord provides for those needs.
God waits as eagerly as we do to have us wake up one morning and find something more interesting than manna on the menu.
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