The other night I was praying as I drove home. I know – how pious of me. Earlier, I’d heard some news that caused me to feel hope over something I’d been praying about the last few months (could I be any more vague?). My prayer to the Lord as I drove home was “Please don’t set me up the bomb.”
Some of you may remember a funny video that went around in the early 2000’s. It started with the opening scene from a video game. The game was originally in Japanese and the translation to English was terrible. The most quoted line from the video was “All Your Base Are Belong to Us,” which also became the basis of a techno song that followed the footage from the video game. One of the other classic awkwardly worded phrases is “He set us up the bomb!” (See link below for the video).
So, back to my prayer. I felt hope over this situation, but almost immediately, my next response was fear. “What if I have hope about this situation and it doesn’t work out?” I’m somewhat of an intuitive person. Sometimes my intuitions are right. Sometimes they’re wrong. And sometimes they are right and things still don’t work out how I expected/planned. As I consider this, the real issue for me is trust. It is hard for me to trust God. It is hard for me to believe that even if I don’t get what I want, that He is still at work, that He loves me, that He knows what He is about. This is nothing new to me. Trusting others, trusting God, has been such a scary place for me to step into. The Lord has definitely brought healing in these areas and I can see that. But, my trust issues are as layered as an onion. So, there are many more levels to go.
In Ignatian spirituality there is the concept of indifference. Essentially, one is grown by the Lord in being able to hold anything that passes through one’s hands openly, neither refusing, nor grasping. In this season in which I find myself, I have had many “opportunities” to grow in indifference.
For me, the trust and indifference must be tied together. I cannot be truly indifferent if I cannot trust God. My prayer revealed that this remains a hard place for me to trust. I’m ok with that. The fact that I can see this speaks to God’s work in these scary places in my heart. But it’s still scary and risky and frightening.
And these are some words from one very much in process.