Trust

Presbyterian pastor and writer Frederick Buechner once wrote about a particularly low time in his life. “I remember sitting parked by the roadside once,” Buechner wrote, “terribly depressed and afraid about my daughter’s illness and what was going on in our family.” As he was sitting and reflecting on his daughter’s illness, he noticed a car that seemed to come from nowhere. The license plate on that car “bore on it the one word out of all the words in the dictionary that I needed most to see exactly then,” Buechner wrote. “The word was TRUST.”

Sitting in his car on the side of the road, it was almost as if God spoke to him through a word on the license plate of a passing car. “Was the experience something to laugh off as the kind of joke life plays on us every once in a while?” Or was it the word of God? “I am willing to believe that maybe it was something of both,” Buechner wrote, “but for me, it was an epiphany.”

Trust. I wonder how many of us need to hear that word today. And, I wonder how many of us need to follow that advice. Trust.

My friend Roger Kunkel used to encourage us to pray Psalm 31:15: My times are in your hands, O God… My times are in your hands. Remembering that our situation and life are in God’s hands is the first step in being able to trust.

Our prayer today is one that Roger wrote. Let us pray: O Lord, our Shepherd, who leads us by still waters and into green pastures, we thank you for the times in our lives when life is strong and good. Teach us to remember, though, that you are with us at all times, even when the waters are not still and the pastures are not green, when the way is fraught with danger or difficulty. Your loving-kindness surpasses all our imagination, and your faithfulness is to all generations. Now let the joy of your presence break upon us like a gentle, cloudless sunrise with birds singing, that our spirits may soar to you in simple wonder. Through Christ our Redeemer. Amen.