Radical Trust and Anxiety

Today in my spiritual direction session, we were reflecting on a book I'm reading for one of my theology classes. It's Alan Kreider's Journey Towards Holiness. It's been hitting a few sores spots in me so that alerted me to the need to reflect. First of all, let me say that I think the book is wonderful and worth reading. I'm currently on page 102 of 270 so I have quite a bit more to go. It resonates with me on many levels.

The thing that is making me think is the basic proposition of the book, which is, God has created humanity to be in a relationship with God, a relationship that ideally is characterized by our radical trust and dependency on God for provision and protection. God then is faithful to love us and shows us that through providing and protecting us. In principle, that's all fine and good and I actually agree. But let me tell you about my experience of that...

It all started with my first foray into missions back in 1989. I felt called to missions, even though my own faith was shaky at best, and needed to raise $6000 to go to Honduras. I had no idea where I would get $6000! My parents certainly couldn't fork that kind of money over and my earning power as a high school senior wasn't that great either. One night lying in bed I told God that I had no way of coming up with the money so if He wanted me to do this trip, He would have to provide somehow. To make a long story short, my anxiety subsided and I did indeed raise the money. It took courage and humility to ask people for donations, but most were happy to support me.

So fast forward a few years and it was time for my husband and me to go to Germany to help plant churches.  Instead of just $6000, we now had to raise tons of money.  We both worked "regular" jobs in Germany to offset the cost, but after 3 kids, I needed to stay home and we needed to be on full support through donations.  So now with a family and a long-term vision for being in Germany, our amount of money to raise was immense.  For a brief time in there we got some support from the general fund of the mission board, then the bombshell came. We had 8 months to transition to full donation-based funding.

So let me tell you about radical trust in God for provision... it's hard!!!  We couldn't even get a "missionary-support-team" in place!   So it may sound like no big deal, but to us, it was a huge deal.  We had tons of vision, and no cash.  We had a fledgling church which likely wasn't ready for its founding parents to pull out.  We had just signed a contract to purchase land to build our own home.  There were months of intense anxiety, wondering if this was God saying it was time to leave or if we should stay and fight for what we we thought we were called to.  We did everything we knew how to do and it wasn't enough.  So what do you do when you're out of resources?  Well, we basically gave up our efforts and told God, again, hey, if this is Your thing, You're going to have to do something here.
And guess what- God did.  The MST fell into place, we got funding through unexpected sources and were able to stay in Germany.
If only that were the end of the anxiety and trust stories in my life... stayed tuned for more later.