Learning the Path of Trust: What Nature Trails Teach Us About Waiting on God
Nature trails fascinate me. A canopy of trees, wide open spaces, rustling brush, creaking branches, and wildlife pop-outs. A winding and curvy path that provides a surprise around each bend. As seasons change, the trail offers new sensory experiences. You find decay, death, and new life.
Colors, scents, and rhythms are the gifts from nature to your soul. Of all the uncontrollable features of a nature trail, one aspect remains the same. The path itself. Take it often enough, you learn it and you trust its direction and secure firmness beneath your feet.
Learning to trust God is like learning the way of the nature path.
A nature trail displays a diversity of color, patterns, textures, and a smorgasbord of aromas and sounds. It’s a feast for your senses, mind, and spirit. Some of the most incredible revelations of nature require waiting. The birth of an eaglet. Blooming of azaleas. A humpback breaching the water. Nature reveals in its own time.
To trust God, there will be waiting.
We have little patience for waiting but this crucial for developing trust in God. The waiting is not a stationary experience. The way of trust is a detour from emotional chaos and mental turmoil.
Because of humans need for immediacy, we believe waiting is unacceptable. Growth happens as you wait. You’re not only trusting God for some thing, you trust to deepen your relationship with God.
Romans 8:25 says, "But if we look forward to something we don’t yet have, we must wait patiently and confidently".
Your soul’s act of trusting God is also a time of communication with God. The Holy Spirit interprets the desires of your heart as you wait, a time when you are most vulnerable.
Romans 8:26 says, "And the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. For example, there are moments we don’t know what God wants us to pray for. But the Holy Spirit prays for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words".
This particular truth of the Bible is hard for me to comprehend because I can’t feel or hear the Holy Spirit interpreting and speaking for me. I have to apply the same belief as I do to gravity. I can’t see it. I believe it exists and keeps me grounded.
I think this has to be your mindset concerning the Holy Spirit. Though you can’t hear or see the Spirit in action, conveying to God your emotional burden, worries, desires, and hopes, you believe it’s happening. It helps if you have history with God in other trust experiences.
You learn the way of trusting God by choosing it. A repetitive choice to trust God in mind and spirit builds a deep neural path and a bridge.
A bridge to lift you above the other paths of worry, overthinking, planning or manipulating the outcome. The paths of “what if”, It will never” “why me”. These paths are shifting sand, ever-changing, and capricious. The opposite of firm and reliable. You stand on insecurity and fear, not trust.
Imagine a sign post with arrows, each one pointing a different direction. Some arrows directing you to the paths of anxiety, controlling, overthinking, or fretting. Learning the way of trust places a new arrow marker on that sign. It points you to, “The Way to Trust”
If you take an alternative path, like anxiety, it’s okay. You can backtrack and get back to the way of trust. I do it all the time. I plow forward with planning or controlling until I realize it’s a dead-end. There’s no way forward. I’m stuck with no relief. So, I hike to trust, remembering it’s never a dead end.
The way of trust leads you to waiting and communication. Now, you’re ready to rely on God to act and move in His timing. Reliance is based on a belief. A belief God’s motives and intent for you are rooted in love.
Do you know God’s intentions for you, his motives toward you?
1 Samuel 16:7b says, “The Lord doesn’t see things the way you see them. People judge by outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart”.
And in 2 Chronicles 16:9, “The eyes of the Lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him”.
The Lord’s eyes are like a radiology exam revealing every aspect of your heart. Your confusion and resentment born from questions like, Why now? Why me?
Your brokenness and discouragement lay bare before Him. He sees your shame and morose. God sees a complex story written on your heart.
Therefore, his intentions toward you are not based on religious performance. His eyes search for belief in Him. Dependence on Him. Anticipation in hope.
Belief, dependence, and anticipatory hope are the essential elements of trust and reliance on God.
Some of you might say, that’s fine for the person who trusted and got what they wanted, but I did not. My answer hasn’t come. I’m still waiting. Or, there’s someone who never got what they prayed for.
Yeah. Me too.
Because God does not rate us on our religious performance, for if He did, mercy, forgiveness, and grace would not exist if that were true), I believe you should not rate God on his performance.
You can’t know what God knows or see what God sees concerning your present and future. Trusting God keeps you from becoming undone by despondency, fear, and hopelessness.
As you travel the way of trust commit to returning to it day after day, moment after moment. Do what you can do to help yourself and those you love while relying on God’s loving intentions toward you. Trust in God sets you on a secure, firm footing. Each time you take the path of trust you create a history with God. A history that says God has been and is with you and for you.
Thank you for listening. Find more great content and resources at my website, anchorednotanxious.com. You can find me on the Anchored Not Anxious YouTube Channel, on Facebook at Terri Hutchinson or via email. Find the links in the episode description for details.
Until next time,
