When You Trust God with Some Things, But Not Everything

by Hanna Seymour

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Dear Hanna,

Last night was a big night for you. It’s taken years for you to get to this point and it finally happened.

You love God. You genuinely desire to seek His will for your life. You try to obey Him, you want to be more like His Son, Jesus. You’re doing all the things you know to do to live a life that pleases Him.

But last night you finally identified a lie that Satan has been feeding to you for years. A lie that he has been working into your heart and mind since you were a young girl. A lie that the enemy must have been convinced would slowly but surely break each chain of trust you and God have pieced together over the years.

You haven’t quite realized the depth of this lie, nor do you even know that it’s a lie straight from the enemy, but you’ve finally grasped it. You finally named it, said it out loud, and confessed it to your Creator.

You thought you fully trusted God. You trust Him in almost every area of your life: your friendships, career, family, your health. But there is one area where you don’t trust Him and you finally realized it.

“I don’t trust You,” you muttered under your breath.

“I don’t trust You,” you repeated a little louder, a little stronger.

“Oh my gosh, I don’t trust You!” you practically shout at the heavens as if your eyes looked up for the first time, becoming aware of the dark, foreboding cloud of doubt hovering over you.

“I trust you in every area of my life. But a husband ? That you would actually provide a man who meets my hopes and expectations? That you actually have a good plan for me? That it will actually be what’s best for me? I don’t trust You.”

First, I want you to know, you are exactly where God wants you. I know you woke up a little shaky this morning. You’re not exactly sure where you stand with God and how you’re supposed to proceed. What does it mean when you realize you don’t trust God and where do you even go from there?

But God has been waiting for you to arrive at this moment. He’s not surprised. He’s always known that you didn’t trust Him with this and he’s been carefully pursuing you, whispering to you, waiting for the moment you see the lie Satan has been feeding you. And that lie is this: God is not trustworthy. It’s his oldest lie in the book, all the way back to his conversation with Eve. You can’t trust God. He’s not trustworthy.

But you know in your head that He is. And you’ve come to realize it’s not He who is untrustworthy, but you who needs to learn how to trust Him completely. And God is pleased. Because now He can finally lead you down a path of trusting Him more and believing in His goodness.

And that’s why I’m writing to you today. If I can impart only one thing to you from your future to your past, it is this:

God is good.

He is eternally good. In every circumstance of your life: in the joys, the sorrows, the disappointments, the hurt, the laughter, the love, the successes, the failures, in all of it, God is always good.

He is always the same level of perfect goodness. He cannot be less good to you in some areas or seasons than others.

Paige Brown said, “Can God be any less good to me on the average Tuesday morning than he was on that monumental Friday afternoon when he hung on a cross in my place? The answer is a resounding no. God will not be less good to me tomorrow either, because God cannot be less good to me. His goodness is not the effect of his disposition but the essence of his person—not an attitude but an attribute. …God will not be less good to me because God cannot be less good to me. It is a cosmic impossibility for God to shortchange any of his children.”

It doesn’t matter whether God brings you a husband or not. The point is that He cannot and will not shortchange you. It may not look how you want or think it should look, but His ways are higher. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

This area of doubt you’ve identified, this is just the beginning. God will gently and kindly bring area after area of doubt that you’ve been hiding in the crevices of your heart before Himself. He will show you where you don’t trust Him. He will show you where you don’t believe in His goodness.

He is not mad at you. He is not disappointed in you. He is eager to take you to a deeper place of faith and trust in Him, where your confidence will not be shaken and where you can proclaim–even amidst the darkest times–that God is always, and perfectly good.

Love and Hugs,

Your Future Self

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Hanna is a friend from Nashville. We are both preacher’s kids and writers and so, you know, we get each other. I’ve loved following Hanna’s work on her blog and elsewhere for the last few years. Her voice is encouraging and so many of her posts, like this one, speak directly to what I’m going through. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. And be sure to check out her blog today where she is giving away copies of English Lessons!