Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin's Path to God

The way of trust is a movement into obscurity, into the undefined, into ambiguity, not into some predetermined, clearly delineated plan for the future. The next step discloses itself only out of a discernment of God acting in the desert of the present moment. The reality of naked trust is the life of the pilgrim who leaves what is nailed down, obvious, and secure, and walks into the unknown without any rational explanation to justify the decision or guarantee the future. Why? Because God has signaled the movement and offered it his presence and his promise.

The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony”, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”, the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.

In explaining the growth of his faith, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, "I know that God is loving and that God’s loving is trustworthy. I know this directly, through the experience of my life. There have been plenty of times of doubt, especially when I used to believe that trusting God's goodness meant I would not be hurt. But having been hurt quite a bit, I know God's goodness goes deeper than all pleasure and pain it embraces them both." Ruthless Trust, pg 22

Henri Nouwen wrote of the spiritual work of gratitude: To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment. As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for. Let’s not be afraid to look at everything that has brought us to where we are now and trust that we will soon see in it the guiding hand of a loving God.

[Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity." (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning)

TO BE GRATEFUL for an unanswered prayer, to give thanks in a state of interior desolation, to trust in the love of God in the face of the marvels, cruel circumstances, obscenities, and commonplaces of life is to whisper a doxology in darkness.

Uncompromising trust in the love of God inspires us to thank God for the spiritual darkness that envelops us, for the loss of income, for the nagging arthritis that is so painful, and to pray from the heart, “Abba, into your hands I entrust my body, mind, and spirit and this entire day—morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Whatever you want of me, I want of me, falling into you and trusting in you in the midst of my life. Into your heart I entrust my heart, feeble, distracted, insecure, uncertain. Abba, unto you I abandon myself in Jesus our Lord. Amen.

On the last day, Jesus will look us over not for medals, diplomas, or honors, but for scars.

Wrong thinking about God and people often begins with a debased image of ourselves.

When we get waylaid from our walk with God by busyness, depression, family problems, or worse, God does not abandon us.

Like faith and hope, trust cannot be self-generated. I cannot simply will myself to trust. What outrageous irony: the one thing that I am responsible for throughout my life I cannot generate. The one thing I need to do I cannot do. But such is the meaning of radical dependence. It consists in theological virtues, in divinely ordained gifts. Why reproach myself for my lack of trust? Why waste time beating myself up for something I cannot affect? What does lie within my power is paying attention to the faithfulness of Jesus. That’s what I am asked to do: pay attention to Jesus throughout my journey, remembering his kindnesses (Ps. 103:2).

Be who you is, ‘cause if you ain’t who you is, you is who you ain’t.

Craving clarity, we attempt to eliminate the risk of trusting God. Fear of the unknown path stretching ahead of us destroys childlike trust in the Father’s active goodness and unrestricted love.

Alert to the manipulations and machinations of Pharisaical self-righteousness, ragamuffins refuse to surrender control of their lives to rules and regulations. They see that the stale religiosity of legalists, trapped in the fatal narcissism of spiritual perfectionism, obscures the face of the God of Jesus.

I can state unequivocally that childlike surrender in trust is the defining spirit of authentic discipleship. And I would add that the supreme need in most of our lives is often the most overlooked—namely, the need for an uncompromising trust in the love of God. Furthermore, I would say that, while there are times when it is good to go to God as might a ragged beggar to the King of kings, it is vastly superior to approach God as a little child would approach his or her papa.

When the farmer arises in the morning unreconciled to get out of bed, he feels no anxiety that he has wasted time through his sleep; au contraire, he is confident that the seed has continued to grow during the night. So, too, the spiritual woman does not fret and flap over opportunities missed, does not hammer herself for not working hard enough, and does not have a panic attack wondering whether she has received grace in vain. She lives in quiet confidence that God is working in her by day and by night. Like the farmer, she is not totally passive or presumptuous. The woman knows that she has her full measure of work to do, but she realizes that the outcome rests with God and that the decisive factor is unearned grace. Thus, she works as if everything depends on God and prays as if everything depends on her.

Against insurmountable obstacles and without a clue as to the outcome, the trusting heart says, 'Abba, I surrender my will and my life to you without any reservation and with boundless confidence, for you are my loving Father.

The most urgent need in your life is to trust what you have received.

Our culture says that ruthless competition is the key to success. Jesus says that ruthless compassion is the purpose of our journey.

the person with an abiding spirit of gratitude is the one who trusts God. The foremost quality of a trusting disciple is gratefulness.

We are all subject to forgetfulness of God’s faithfulness in the past, laziness to act on the divine promise, and postponing until tomorrow what Jesus is asking of us today: childlike abandonment in trust.

As long as we keep dividing our lives between events and people we would like to remember and those we would rather forget, we cannot claim the fullness of our beings as a gift of God to be grateful for.

The more guilt and shame that we have buried within ourselves, the more compelled we feel to seek relief through sin.

When we wander off the path, that trust pulls us back; and we do not flinch, hesitate, or worry about being unwelcome in the Father’s arms.

Wallowing in shame, remorse, self-hatred, and guilt over real or imagined failings in our past lives betrays a distrust in the love of God. It shows that we have not accepted the acceptance of Jesus Christ and thus have rejected the total sufficiency of his redeeming work. Preoccupation with our past sins, present weaknesses, and character defects gets our emotions churning in self-destructive ways, closes us within the mighty citadel of self, and preempts the presence of a compassionate God.

The religion of cheerfulness, as Father Brown reminds us, is a cruel religion, and maybe the best way not to go mad is not to mind too much if you do go mad.

The antithesis of giving thanks is grumbling. The grumblers live in a state of self-induced stress.

many Christians have been unable to cope with what they fear the most—the loneliness and absurdity of life.