Fariza

I don’t always trust God as much as I would like to. There are some areas of my life where I have more trust than others. Most of the areas where I struggle to trust God are areas I have had control over for most of my life. So if it’s something I can’t control — I don’t trust.

I know that sounds terrible, considering how long I have known Him and how much I love Him. But I also know that the process of Him undoing the sinful nature that I was born into will take a lifetime.

As long as I live, I will be learning how to renew my trust in Him. And He knows that, and I’m eternally grateful for His grace.

But here’s where it gets frustrating. We are constantly told by the church that we must trust God fully, no matter what, and our distrust might be due to a lack of faith in Him. But I don’t think it’s as simple as that.

We are constantly told that we must trust, but rarely told how. “Well, the Bible says so” — well, the Bible says a lot of things I don’t fully understand.

So I stopped waiting for someone else to explain it to me and started paying attention to my own life.

I’m going to attempt to explain what trusting God looks like. I’m not going to pretend I fully understand it. I think I have only gotten a glimpse of grasping this cosmic, esoteric, almost mystical phenomenon of trusting Someone invisible to me for most of my day.

So here it goes:

Trusting is tied to trauma — childhood, mostly.

The way you learned to trust as a child set the blueprint for how you trust everything and everyone around you, including God. If the people who were supposed to protect you let you down, your nervous system learned early that depending on someone else is dangerous. That wiring doesn’t disappear the moment you give your life to Christ. You carry it into your Christian life, into your waiting seasons, into every moment where God asks you to let go. And because you never saw God show up tangibly when you were small and scared, trusting an invincible Father can feel like the most unnatural thing in the world. Healing that trust begins with being honest about where it was first broken, and giving yourself permission to let God show you that He is different.

Trusting is tied to your previous failures.

Every time you stepped out in faith and things didn’t go the way you expected, a small voice recorded it. And that voice plays back at full volume the next time God asks you to trust Him again. Your brain saved a new program into the machine — the nervous system.

But here’s what’s important to understand: your past failures were not evidence that God failed you. They were part of the pattern that you automatically operate from. The familiar programming led you to make decisions based on your past. If you have dealt with rejection your entire life, you will subconsciously put yourself in a position to be rejected again because it feels familiar — because the machine knows its way too well and presents it as fact.

Don’t be hard on yourself.

After all, you haven’t programmed your brain to believe something new. And how could you, if you have never experienced anything different? Your brain needs evidence that it can lean on.

The good news is that, every time you failed, like any good teacher and a perfect Father, God wasn’t waiting to judge you. He was waiting to let you see and recognize the dysfunctional cycle of your behavioral pattern so He could begin to heal you.

Trusting God has nothing to do with you.

Doubt has never stopped God from moving in people’s lives. He made sure that the story of doubting Thomas was included in the Gospels.

God has never once waited for your faith to be perfect before He acted on your behalf. Think about every time He came through when you were full of doubt, fear, or outright disbelief — He moved anyway.

He even helped Peter to help Him believe in Jesus when He was right in front of Him. In the flesh! Talk about doubt. Every time you feel slightly insecure about your faith, think about Thomas and Peter. It will help, I promise.

And if I’m being honest, some of my greatest testimonies came out of season where I was barely holding on. Trust is not a performance you give God to earn His action. It is a posture you grow into over time, and He is patient with the process. Your doubting is not a wall to Him; it is simply the next thing He is working on.

When you have doubt and unbelief, you allow God to show up and imprint that moment in your mind. That builds not only faith but also trust in Him. When someone shows up when you least expect it, you will remember that for the rest of your life.

And ironically, doubt makes that possible.

And here’s how God begins to heal you…

You might not want to hear it, but it is through suffering.

God allows you to suffer to teach you to trust Him by rewiring your brain through repetition. Human beings learn by repetition. That is why it took the Israelites forty years to make a journey that should have taken eleven days. When you fail to learn the lesson, God will lovingly walk you around the same mountain again and again — not as punishment, but out of love, for your own good.

He is not trying to wear you out. He is trying to walk something out of you.

And He will not stop until you get to the other side!