Do You Know What You’re Doing?

Trust is a massive concept.

It’s amazing seeing how that changes in the years of development of a baby to an infant to a teenager. The dependent baby has no questions. The infant may have a question. The teenager … I applaud the parents that have teenagers that don’t question whether overtly or otherwise. Well … I say I applaud them … maybe it’s not applause they deserve. It’s a contract to sell whatever it is they give to those teenagers …

Questions are not necessarily the evidence for a lack of trust. Questions can be good to give an opportunity for trust to be affirmed. Trusting as you grow in the world in which we live becomes an ever challenging act. The most interesting area where trust is challenged and sometimes diminished is when it comes to the first figure of authority – the parent. That veil of seeming omniscience is removed to highlight that they don’t everything after all. That then leads to questioning if they know anything at all. Then there comes that creeping feeling expressed in the question: Do you know what you’re doing?

You may very well end up in a job where it’s all working smoothly. There is the possibility, however, that you find yourself in an unpleasant environment or at least one in which a number of questionable decisions are made. With each failing and flaw the question crops up again: Do you know what you’re doing?

It’s no surprise then, that a problem people have with the concept of some divine authority is looking at the mess in the world. Blatant expressions of man’s inhumanity to man, explicit displays of injustice and depravity with little in the way of consequence. Questions naturally crop up if there is such a force in the world: Do you know what you’re doing?

Even for the believer that seeks to follow the good example go through the kind of troubling and challenging times which they cannot always equate to what they hoped they would experience following Jesus. With each setback and disappointment or seeming lack of progress there is that nagging feeling they have about their leader: Do you know what you’re doing?

I think this is a question worth asking and putting it to the right source. It’s worth asking to work out the answer with others in the course of history. Others who have learnt to trust God in the middle of disappointments, injustices, setbacks and great expressions of depravity. Others who have learnt to trust God who knows what is going on and knows what He is doing. Others who have learnt to ask God and trust Him – not in blind faith, but in a way that can take Him at His Word.

Taking Him at His word and experiencing those moments in life that affirm that what He says is true – that He is Lord of all and will bring everything under His feet defeating everything that is wrong. We get glimpses in our lives as we walk and trust. It does not stop the questions. It gives the questions the room to breath and the space for reasons to trust to enter even in the mystery of it all.

It’s among the reasons why trust is such a heavy concept. It’s heavy, but invested in the God who has no problems with the questions, it’s worthwhile.

For His Name’s Sake

Shalom

C. L. J. Dryden