I recently came across a passage from C.S. Lewis that I had read before but which spoke to me this time with greater clarity, since it applied to my own life more immediately. It’s one of those things we’re all supposed to know, but that we seem to need to be reminded of continually. It’s about giving God’s wisdom and providence the benefit of the doubt.
“There are times when we can do all that a fellow creature needs only if he will trust us. In getting a dog out of a trap, in extracting a thorn from a child’s finger, in teaching a boy to swim or rescuing one who can’t, in getting a frightened beginner over a nasty place on a mountain, the one fatal obstacle may be their distrust. We are asking them…to accept apparent impossibilities: that moving the paw farther back into the trap is the way to get it out—that hurting the finger very much more will stop the finger hurting—that water which is obviously permeable will resist and support the body—that holding onto the only support within reach is not the way to avoid sinking—that to go higher and onto a more exposed ledge is the way not to fall…
“We are to God, always, as that dog or child or bather or mountain climber was to us, only very much more so… If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that His operations will often appear to us far from being beneficent and far from wise…
“You are no longer faced with an argument which demands your assent, but with a Person who demands your confidence… the assent, of necessity, moves us from the logic of speculative thought into what might perhaps be called the logic of personal relations” (from The World’s Last Night and Other Essays).
I felt a little sheepish after reading this because it exposed my own lack of trust and my reliance on mere logic or the evidence of my immediate experience (which, of course, I interpret in my own peculiarly limited fashion). Why is it so hard for us to accept the fact that God knows things better than we do, that He sees more than we can see, and that He is actually trying to help us even as we challenge Him with our wrongheaded resistance? We somehow think He’s missing the obvious and we can’t imagine why He just doesn’t get right to the business of making our lives more pleasant or painless or stress-free.
What we don’t realize is that God is helping us, though He is doing so according to his superior eternal wisdom and not with our own quick-fix mentality. Another example that Lewis could have used, and that I’ve seen elsewhere, is that of a child with his mother in a doctor’s office being given a shot to cure or prevent some disease. The poor kid freaks out as the big monster in the white coat inflicts pain upon him with a sharp-pointed weapon, and his mother just stands there and doesn’t protect him! She even seems to approve of it! The kid certainly will have a few choice words for her in the aftermath. But again, if he could have trusted that what was momentarily painful was actually doing him a good beyond all proportion to the pain, he would have realized that his mother was allowing this only out of love for him.
I find myself all too often like the kid in the doctor’s office, the dog in the trap, the drowning boy, etc. I’m aware of the immediate predicament or pain, and I’d like to be instantly free from it. But I really only have a dog’s-eye view of things, for I do not know what my Master is about. I can apply a certain basic logic to the situation, and I present this to God as the way He should help me. But I forget that I mostly don’t know what I’m talking about, that I am blind to long-term solutions, and even that my own brand of logic may very well be fallacious. I forget that I’m supposed to be trusting in a Person, One who really does have my best interests at heart, and One who really is able to bring about the best results from any given situation or disaster. He wants me to realize not only that He is there and is able and willing to help, but also (and perhaps especially) that He requires my confidence if his help is to be effective. I have the power to make a self-fulfilling prophecy—I refuse to trust, nothing happens, so I then feel justified in my refusal to trust. But I thus become oblivious to the fact that if I did trust, something good would have happened!
Perhaps the reason we’re allowed to get into various jams and scrapes is so that we can practice trusting in God to get us out of them—in ways that we can’t figure out in advance, or that may even seem initially absurd or ineffectual to us. Somehow we have to finally accept that God indeed does see the big picture and is not interested in superficial solutions. Jesus came into the world to save us from sin and its eternal consequences, and everything He does for us is ordered, in one way or another, to our salvation, for that is all that ultimately matters. We know nothing more than the present moment (if that), and so we seek solutions to our problems that are usually only good for the present moment, but we have to start trusting that Someone is looking out for our eternal happiness and is working all things for the good—whether or not we understand or agree with his methods and timing.
Today is a new day. I have another chance to get out of the driver’s seat and let God be God. Maybe today I’ll trust Him to do things his way and thus discover that all manner of things shall be well.
Making All Things New 