Do you have trouble with trust?

Straight Road (CREDIT: hirotomo t via Flickr)

When I was a young boy, I remember receiving a Bible from my grandma as a gift.

In the front of the book she wrote in beautiful handwriting this verse from the book of Proverbs:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. (Proverbs 3:5-6)

It is only now, as a much-older adult, that these words seem to really make sense.

As a child, I was working hard to grow up into a man, and that meant that I needed to be able to develop skills and knowledge that I could depend upon.

But now that I’m older, I understand that no matter what I’m able to do as an adult, I need more than ever to trust in the Lord with all my heart.

It can be very hard to trust in others when you’ve been hurt or when you’ve become reliant on your own abilities.

But God makes it clear to all of us, young and old, that no matter how good our understanding of life, we still need to rest fully on God, to trust him in every single way.

And when we’re told to trust God, it means that we need to submit to him, following his loving rule over us.

We long to be the “self-made” person who can play “I did it my way” at our funeral, but God tells us that we need to throw ourselves on Jesus, to put our full faith in him.

And the great news is that when we do that, he will make our paths straight: he will smooth out the bends in life, even when it sometimes feels a bit bumpy on the road.

Because when we trust in Jesus as Lord, he will lead us in the road to Heaven, taking us safely home.

Jodie.