Growing Through Challenge - The Eternal Adventure Of Trust

                     YOU MAY NOT NEED THIS... NOW!

I am writing this for the person who is in a special place in their “Earthly Pilgrimage”...

Perhaps an uncomfortably vulnerable place.

Maybe a place with more questions than answers.

A place where the easy solutions and old formulas are coming into serious question in your thinking.

If you are not at such a juncture in your life, just click on the next brochure. Someday, if life throws you an unexpected and unexplained curve, then you may revisit this brochure and hopefully find in it something useful upon which to ponder.

                     PHYSICAL OR SPIRITUAL BEING?

This might be a good place to begin. Do you see yourself mainly as a physical being, sometimes having a spiritual experience… or could you actually be a spiritual being, having a temporary physical experience? I personally have come to believe very strongly in the latter; however, since this physical world is all we have really ever seen, I can't find fault if you believe the former.

               AN 'EARTH-SUIT' THAT IS WEARING OUT

Suspend judgment with me for a moment and just consider the possibility that you really are mainly a spiritual being living a temporary physical experience. The idea of a temporary physical experience actually isn’t such a stretch when you remember that for all of human history, the “mortality rate” has been pretty much 100%. Our exit will also someday arrive. Life here in this “earth-suit” really can be viewed as a “Temporary Assignment”. The “Permanent Assignment” is the Eternal Adventure that lies somewhere else… not on this earth!

           THE ILLUSION OF PERMANENCE & CONTROL

For 13 years I was a consultant and seminar leader for management level people from many of America’s largest companies. In the process of counseling thousands through career transitions I learned a few things about perceived “control” and its illusion. Over those years I met with countless people who woke up that morning as important people of influence, power, and what they thought was “control” in their lives.

Unfortunately, it was my job to meet with them moments after they had received the illusion-shattering news that they had just lost their job. No more office; no more important title; no more people to manage; no more large salary. They discovered that their “permanent” job wasn’t actually permanent after all. It may have lasted 20 months or 20 years, but in the end it was in fact, a “temporary” assignment.

Life on this planet is a lot like that. We may get caught up in the “illusion of permanence”, but in reality, it finally is all temporary.

                     THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE

While our life on earth may be transient, we indeed are part of something that is absolutely enduring and timeless! To begin to understand more of this truth is to begin to let go of the “illusion” and to see your life from a much better vantage point! The Apostle Paul captured its essence in his second letter to the church at Corinth;

“We do not lose heart; though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day, because we focus our vision not on what can be seen, but on what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is only temporary, but that which cannot be seen is ETERNAL!”

                        MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

That word from a tired, harassed, and persecuted old Apostle of Jesus Christ has become for me the cornerstone of a philosophy of life that works, even when everything else about my life may seem to be falling apart. Paul did not preach a “health, wealth and prosperity” gospel. He had felt the sting of too many whips; seen too many martyrs and the dismal inside of too many dungeons to believe in the illusion of control and ease during our temporary stay on this small world.

                       WHAT'S BEHIND THE SCENES?

Paul was no grim fatalist either. He kept urging us to look beyond the fleeting moment to embrace the joy of something much larger which is always going on behind the scenes, just out of view of purely human vision.

The Infinite, Eternal Creator has been, and continues to work on an everlasting plan of such scope and grandeur that human limitations allow us to catch only glimpses of some of it… and then only once in awhile.

Give up trying to figure it all out and begin to simply rejoice in this Grand Adventure of Trust! Our need for some semblance of control causes us to want to totally understand it all; to systematize, standardize, organize and categorize the workings of the unimaginably INFINITE CREATOR GOD. Understandable… but I believe a mistake.

Just when we think we’ve got it all figured out… That is just when we miss the great truth! Our minds are finite…He is INFINITE!!! Expect lots of surprises!

FAITH, not UNDERSTANDING will always be the most integral part of the journey! That is why I call it the “Grand Adventure of Trust”. Our God is TRUSTWORTHY… it just takes us an eternity to plumb the depths of just how trustworthy He really is!!! I personally believe that even throughout eternity we will continue to be staggered by new understandings of His Person, His Plans, and His Trustworthiness!

                                     WHY TRUST?

Of all the lessons our Creator would like for us to really learn during this earthly part of our journey, I have come to believe that the most important thing to Him is that we finally, truly, deeply come to totally believe in Him to the point that we can trust Him with anything… and everything! Trust when the news is good… and when it is bad. Trust when your heart to soaring… and when it is breaking. Absolute trust in our Father’s unseen loving care… even when life’s worst threatens to crush everything you hold dear!

                            ETERNAL PERSPECTIVE

There is no way I could overemphasize the importance of developing a “long-distance” view, an “eternal perspective” of our existence. Otherwise the ragged edges of daily life will often cloud our vision and drain our trust.

As I have mentioned in some of my other writings, the famed British scholar C.S. Lewis had a wonderful analogy in which he likened the story of our existence to a grand book of which, during our short earthly life we “only get through the Preface.” “But,” said Lewis, “someday we will get to step into Chapter One… and then each succeeding chapter only keeps getting better.”

Why would it keep getting better, even in Eternity? I believe it is because we will continue to discover new and unexpected dimensions of just how far and how completely we can actually trust our Heavenly Father! Dimensions we have not yet even begun to imagine!

                   PERSPECTIVE IN THE HARD TIMES

That kind of perspective will work wonders in helping you with the difficult circumstances we all face sooner or later. An eternal perspective of a "Journey of Trust” will greatly assist you in overlooking the trivial and petty, freeing you to live by faith, to gradually develop an unexplainably deep and abiding trust in a glorious final outworking of all life’s temporary problems by a loving Almighty God and Father who really is totally trustworthy!

It will lead you to a strong, unshakable faith (like Paul’s in II Corinthians 4:18) that, though unseen, our Creator and Father is always working behind the scenes on your behalf, for your eternal good.