From One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp:
Without trust in the good news of Jesus, without trust in the good news of God’s saving work even in this moment, without an active, moment-by-moment trust in the good news of an all-sovereign , all-good God, how can we claim to fully believe? This is the trust I lack: to that if disaster strikes, he carries me even there. Trust in the wholeness of the gospel—including this moment, good news too—and be saved. Choose stress, worry, anxiety, reject what God has given now, which is good news too—refuse to trust—and be condemned. [Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Mark 16:16]
I’ve just begun to feel around the edges of it, here in crumbling economics, the fretfulness of parenting, the dizziness of the twenty-first century spin. Just begun to realize it, and it catches in the throat: if authentic, saving belief is the act of trusting, then to choose stress is an act of disbelief…atheism.
Anything less than gratitude and trust is practical atheism.
This isn’t easy for me think about, but I think she is onto something. I hate to think that I agree in my head that God is, but then live with stress as if He isn’t. I’ve struggled with this—making sure what I do now will make sure the future is good rather than trusting in God’s goodness in the present as well as the future. But during my mom’s 18 month battle with cancer I learned that God is here with me in the midst of all this. He gave me the grace to deal with mom’s cancer and death, with the terrible and sudden loss of Judy, with my dad’s insistent bad financial decisions that I’ve had to bear with since I was young, with the crashed car in my driveway. As I told the kids this week as they were all struggling with one thing or another—if God loved us enough to take care of our sins, will he not continue to carry us, no matter what happens in this broken, sin-filled, inconvenient, uncertain life we live? We can go ahead with decisions (new cars, new jobs) knowing that he loves us, no matter what, so long as our decision is made in faith and obedience to what he has told us in the Bible.
