Learning to trust God without needing to win

Pretend for a moment that you’re a tour guide for the North Shore. You’ve got a group of tourists who’ve come to Canada to experience the best of the outdoors North Vancouver has to offer. I wonder where you’ll take them first? Will you go mountain biking on Fromme? Skiing or snowboarding on Grouse? Maybe you’ll hike the BCMC or walk the Rice Lake loop? What about bouldering or climbing Quarry Rock? Or, a Takaya canoe trip with the Tsleil-Waututh at Cates Park? Or, how about the 90ft pool in Lynn Canyon?

You can imagine some of the questions you’ll get as you’re putting this tour together. What will the weather be like? What do I need to bring? How much is this going to cost? 

When Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, it’s kind of like the Spirit’s way of showing Jesus the best the human experience has to offer. The devil is the tour guide, obviously—he knows where all the fun stuff is. The devil knows how you can win at life, how you can accomplish your goals—fast, especially if it means cutting corners and stepping on others to get there. Best of all, the devil knows how to get you that piece of real estate you’ve always dreamed of. Not the real estate you need, the real estate that would comfortably secure your future and the future of your children—I’m talking about the real estate you want. Sure, it’ll mean the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, but you get control over your very own piece of paradise. 

So, what’s this tour of the so-called ‘best of the human experience’ going to cost? What does Jesus, what would anyone need to bring?

According to the devil, it’s going to cost you your freedom, but he won’t call it that in the brochure. He’ll call it an “apprenticeship” of sorts. You work for the devil until your debt is paid; the devil will let you know when that is. And, you actually don’t need to worry about bringing a thing. Just sign on the dotted line (ignore the fine print) and the devil will take care of everything. 

On the days when life isn’t going the way I was hoping it would go, and desperation sets in, this feels like a pretty realistic modern-day reading of Jesus’ temptation. It’s not wrong to have goals, or to want to live in a beautiful home. Desire was never the problem. We know that from the story of Adam and Eve. The issue wasn’t that they wanted a Honey Crisp when Granny Smith was all that was available; the issue was that their desire became greed. They wanted it all for themselves. They said to themselves, “We know this ain’t gonna be good for everybody, but we’re gonna go ahead and do it anyway.”

Jesus offers a different way, a different tour of the human experience. Jesus’ guide is maybe a little worse for wear, the brochure that’s wrinkled and stuffed down at the back of the pamphlet stand. Jesus says: follow your desire, come and see the best of what this life has to offer, but do it with the words of the prophets and the ancestors who have come before you in the back of your mind. Heed their warnings. Listen to what they learned. Jesus says: take delight, revel in being human, but my goodness look around you: no one, not even Donald Trump, is getting out of this thing alive! Human beings are made in the image of God, but we are not God. Our time on this earth is finite. To paraphrase the poet Mary Oliver, our lives are wild and precious and we have only this one. 

Finally, when it comes to a tour of the human experience, Jesus says: sure, you can accumulate all of the wealth and all of the power and all of the authority in the world, but life has no guarantees. Even celebrities get cancer. Movie stars get ALS. Real estate moguls get dementia. Leaders on the world stage lose their children to car accidents, and toxic drug supplies, and suicide. CEOs and bishops and priests and deacons and lay leaders and athletes and the popular kids at school—regardless of how good things appear on the outside, all of them experience human fragility. 

So, put your faith in what does not break down, in what thieves cannot break in and steal. Put your faith in Jesus and in him crucified. Put your faith in God who became human, who could have left the limits of the human experience behind, but chose instead to endure the pain of ridicule and abandonment, the humiliation of a state sanctioned death, the God who chose to know the experience of human fragility to its core, so that humanity might see, might believe that there is another way. That there is always another way.

Palestinian Christian Jack Nassar recently wrote an article for Premier Christianity, a magazine out of the UK. He wrote about what it’s like to have faith, when faith isn’t theoretical. He writes, 

My theology was not shaped in a seminary library. It was shaped on the way to church, under Israeli military occupation. Some Sundays that meant changing plans because a road was closed by Israeli soldiers. Other times it meant leaving much earlier than needed, knowing that delay was likely and explanation was not something you could expect. Sometimes it meant taking smaller roads, instead of the main one. . . . Life under Israeli military occupation is unpredictable. Plans are always temporary. Control is limited. A permit can be refused without explanation. A checkpoint can open or close at will. One day you can reach your home, university, workplace, or even your date. Another day you cannot.

“Living like this shapes how you understand God,” he continues. 

When people ask me how I learned to trust God, I think of those mornings when we left early for church, not knowing whether we would arrive or be turned back, and yet still chose to go. . . . When your world feels restricted, scripture sounds different. Stories about exile, waiting, love, and endurance stop feeling symbolic and instead sound familiar. You notice how often Jesus speaks to people with little power and no guarantees. You notice that He does not promise control, but presence.

In the wilderness, the devil promises control, but Jesus relies on God’s presence. I don’t know what wilderness season you might be heading into or what one you might already be living in. I can imagine that you feel like you don’t have everything or everyone you need to survive it. The future probably feels out of your control and faith, no longer something theoretical. Towards the end of his article, Jack Nassar writes this, and I’ll conclude with his words, on this First Sunday in Lent, when we contemplate Jesus’ temptation: “Prayer does not always change circumstances, but it changes how you stand inside them. Faithfulness is not measured by results. It is measured by whether you keep going. . . . Stay rooted. Do not panic. Let scripture shape how you react before it shapes how you argue. Learn to trust God without needing to win.” Amen.      

Photo by Tara Winstead: Pexel free images