Nuggets from Seeking and Finding God—Trusting God

True faith is absolute, unquestioning trust in God and in His love, wisdom, and will. Nor is such total trust foreign to man. It is a necessity. Trusting in another’s wisdom, ability, and integrity is something that all of us, whether atheist, agnostic, or religionist, must do many times each day. We go to a doctor, who makes a diagnosis that we couldn’t understand even if he explained it. He writes out a prescription in a hand we can’t decipher and couldn’t comprehend even if we could read it. We take that to a pharmacist, who puts together compounds with mysterious names totally foreign to our understanding. Yet we ingest the medicine because we trust our doctor and pharmacist for the promised results. In fact, we must trust them in order to benefit from an expertise that we lack.

We don’t force our way into the cockpit of the commercial aircraft in which we’re flying to look over the pilots’ shoulders to make certain they are doing their job. We don’t know how to fly that aircraft, and we have no choice but to trust the flying to them. Nor do we look over the mechanic’s shoulder as he tunes our engine, or stay up all night to make certain that the baker puts the right ingredients into the bread we’ll purchase the next day. Clearly, in the progress of daily affairs, we must constantly rely upon experts who know what we don’t know and can do what we can’t do.

Such trust is essential, because we can’t know everything we need to know to be even moderately successful in life on this earth, much less to surmount every difficulty and solve every problem we will face in our threescore years and ten. Unfortunately, all of us at times have been hurt one way or another by reliance upon a supposed expert who made a costly mistake either because he or she was incompetent or was only human, and to err is human. Fortunately, no matter how serious such mishaps may be, we can usually recover—though often with great cost and difficulty and only after much time. When it comes to eternal matters, however, such recovery is not possible once we have passed through death’s door.