Blood & Ink: Trust in God

“I need to heal my trust in God…”

Don’t get caught up by the language. Don’t do the passive shutdown closure because you don’t believe some Sky Daddy is secretly orchestrating your life and hasn’t chosen to shower you with blessings because you’re fundamentally broken or sinful.

Replace it with whatever word you want: Life, Source, Reality, Nature, Tao, Brahman.

While on my master plant diet, a woman at the center said this was what she was working on…

…and there’s something important for you here.

Do you trust Life?

At the most basic level of your existence, do you trust that what the future brings will be good?

The degree to which you lack this trust is the degree to which you feel the need to control.

Consider for a moment the best things that have happened to you. Bring to mind the most ecstatic moments you have experienced.

I’m willing to bet most of them had an element of being unplanned or unexpected.

They ‘surpassed even my wildest dreams’, or ‘were far beyond what I could have imagined’.

That’s right! That’s important.

If your life was solely up to you and the small locus of things you control, your life would be nowhere near as beautiful as it is here and now. Many of the greatest things in your life you played no real part in bringing to fruition.

You may as well say that they were a gift from God.

So then, why the lack of trust? Where is your faith?

The evidence implies that the most beautiful moments, the greatest challenges and victories, were orchestrated by something far more powerful than you, worked out far better than you could even imagine, and became the bedrock for the beauty that you experience here at this moment.

Sounds like a pretty good thing to trust in. It hasn’t let you down yet.

Indeed, it’s possible to take a bold step and say the moments that have let you down, where your suffering was greatest, were the events you tried to micro-manage, where the grips of your controlling need were the tightest, where your expectations were the most rigid.

Sometimes, the moments that are the hardest in life are those that we forced to happen, the ones that we expected, because we were living in a narrative of scarcity, opposition, fear, smallness, and disappointment—and the outcome matched the narrative.

Perhaps this year is the year you work to renew your Trust in God.

I have a lot of work to do here myself.

This is not a carte blanche excuse to ‘give up’ and stop doing anything. This is your opportunity to embed yourself in what the yogis call nishkama karma: investment in the input while relinquishing attachment to the outcome.

The outcome is not up to you—as much as you want to be. The outcome is in the flow of the Tao.

How you act is up to you.

Consider for a moment—and indeed try not to forget—that the Great Power that manifests all outcomes effortlessly might just be working in your favour. It might be cooking up something far greater than you can even imagine right now.

Trust in that. Trust in your trust in that.

And take a leap of faith,
EB.