Sometimes I have the sense of being torn between moments, not fully in any. It’s a  restless, kind of scattered feeling that doesn’t lend itself to peace. Then, from the outside somewhere, comes the relentless onslaught of media-born warnings about the economy in shambles, rising crime, failing schools, cancer-causing food and a hundred fears. They rush against my heart like waves against the foundation of a house; not crashing, powerful, wind-driven waves, but stealthy and persistent waves, washing the foundation away grain by grain.

The times call for trust.

Perhaps that is the issue at the core of those scattered feelings. What would it feel like to trust Father? Laziness? Would it be like earnestness, intentional and intense? Would it be a moment by moment choice, ever at the front of my thought, always determined and insistent?

I imagine trust in Father to be a quiet thing, like a cool grey mist among slender trees, but that takes deliberate thought, imagining does.

By reflex, trust seems like inviting uncertainty; as though to trust was to drive in an unfamiliar city, not knowing which lanes lead to a labyrinth of one-way streets and freeway entrances; to drive without a map or only one scrawled on a napkin.

To thnk of trust that way makes me feel weak and faithless, which only adds to my ambivalence. It comes to this: I can trust with faith or with fear. The first it the still water, green pasture trust of the Psalms; the second is like a lost child, trusting his parents, but not knowing where they are, helplessly wailing for the ones who are trusted.

I expect that everyone, at one time or another, is the lost child wailing for the trusted One…for the One he yearns to trust–wants to learn to trust.

And that is the key, isn’t it? Trust is learned. Or not. And learning to trust comes from trusting. It comes by choosing one of a dozen competing moments and investing in that moment whatever feeble confidence I have that it is THE moment and that all others are unimportant until their time comes.