To trust... or not?

My latest devotional book is "Reasons for Hope" by Jose Luis Martin Descalzo. Having just started it, I cannot comment on the frame of the book as a whole, or on its real suitability for devotional reading. However, today I came across a single paragraph that drew me up short. Today, we read about trust:

"I have always maintained that trust is an integral part of human life, that rather than live with an armor-plated soul, it would be better not to live at all. If I cannot trust those around me, if I put up a barrier of barbed wire around my life and around my heart, I am not hurting the people who come close to me. I am hurting myself. An untrusting heart gets old quickly. A heart that is shut up tight is deader than a heart whose owner has already passed away." (6)

Trust is a strange, intriguing, difficult facet of life. We learn trust - at least theoretically - as infants and children, having strong adults around us who help us interpret the world and know what to expect. For so many children, when they learn trust in this way, their first instinct becomes to trust with reckless abandon. They offer life and love and freedom to everyone they meet. When I meet such children, I feel their joy in life; I too experience their trust that in the end, all will be OK.

But the world we live in is not a fundamentally trustworthy place. Sinful people inhabit a broken world. Terrible things happen to the earth - like earthquakes and blizzards and tsunamis. Terrible things happen to people - like kidnapping and burglary and rape. As children grow, responsible parents carefully teach them about the dangers in the world, ideas of how to keep safe-r. And the challenge becomes sharing the reality of danger, without crushing the necessity of trust.

Over and over again, the Bible tells us "Do not be afraid." God hopes for us, God desires for us, a sense of safety, of trust, of love. God reminds us that fear and despair do not get to win. God's very presence in the world is a presence of trust and of peace. Yet, even though the angels preach this message again and again, fear exists. The angels do not extinguish all danger. God does not break into the world and suddenly wipe away all things bad or painful or tragic. Rather, God invites us into a journey to the kin-dom. A journey begun in the Bible stories we've collected. A journey in which this broken and sinful world (and this broken and sinful generation) finds healing, mending, care, peace... and trust. As we join this journey, as we take part in the healing to be done, as we begin to trust again - even with reckless abandon - we begin to discover God's peace. We begin to discover that, with God's community, we can trust in spite of the danger. We begin to discover that our trusting hearts are open hearts - hearts open to our neighbors, hearts open to our world, hearts open to God's peace.

Lent comes quickly; on Wednesday this 40-day journey will begin again. Are you ready? Am I ready? May we use this time, this journey, to take the journey toward the kin-dom. May we use it to recognize the places our hearts have become hardened or deadened. May we use it to repent from these places. May we use it to ever so slowly learn again how to trust. And may we allow our transformed hearts to take part in the coming kin-dom... as together, we journey on.