Trusting God (Part One)

Not that long ago, I spent ten months abroad, as patrons of my last blog will already be aware. I’d been asked if I was interested in working with a church in West Norway and, having prayed about it, I felt that God had plans among those fjords that He wanted me to be involved in. So I crossed over the North Sea to Arna, a small town just the other side of the mountains from Bergen. Arna is, like Norway in general, a pretty good-looking place, especially to an Englishman's eyes. Granted, it will never be a dream holiday destination for the individual who doesn't appreciate constant rain, but - putting that to one side - the surroundings are stunning. They afford one of the great benefits of life among the mountains and fjords: the feeling of living in a scene from Lord of the Rings.

There was a lot of scenery to take in on my first day, as I was driven from the airport to meet the youth group, the church, the people I'd be living and working with, and the family who were giving me a place to live. There were thoughts flying around in my head and, beginning in a state of disorientation, I was steadily coming around to a pressing apprehension. Between leaving my home to fly to a foreign country, being introduced to endless new faces and considering with increasing frequency that maybe I wasn't called to or cut out for this, I was having serious doubts by the time I got back to my room. I saw a youth group with an incredibly talented and committed team leading them and I felt like it would be hard enough to make a significant contribution in such company, even if I spoke the native language. The feeling that I'd made a mistake was getting stronger the more I considered it, until I became near enough convinced that I needed to get right out of Norway as soon as the opportunity arose. I thought about friends back at home; one in particular, who I was sure would give me good, strong advice to return to London. It was a massive effort not to ring and receive that encouragement to go.

But there was one thing that made me decide to stay and give it a try; the reason I came to Arna in the first place was that God spoke to me. If He'd sent me to Norway, then He must have had a reason for sending me, and just because the reason hadn't become apparent in the first few hours of my being there, it didn't give me any good reason to doubt Him.

The Bible says that 'faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ', which means that once we've heard, our faith should have arrived. Hearing should be the hardest part; upon finding out what God is saying, what other option is a reasonable alternative to trusting Him? Too often, though, people like me take their eyes off the things God has told them and focus on their own circumstances. But circumstances have nothing to do with faith. In fact, 'faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.' Look at Abraham, one of the great Heroes of Faith: God made a promise to this wandering, childless, old man that his descendants would be countless. And even though his wife had long since exceeded her child-bearing date, even though the nature of the promise - one which could never be fulfilled in his lifetime - meant it was about as far away from the reality of his circumstances as could be, Abraham trusted God.

Of course, he never got to witness the full realisation of what God told him, but he did see the first fruits - his son, Isaac, who fathered Jacob, whose sons were the beginnings of the tribes of Israel. The Bible says that people like Abraham 'died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.'

While I may have felt like a a stranger when I arrived in Norway, I didn't have to wait a lifetime to see God prove His word to me. And that encourages me in times when I can't see clear purpose in my life; I know that if I just rest my weight on what Jesus is saying, then I will receive the promises, sooner or later.