When You Don’t Know the HOW, Trust the WHO

Over the next few days I want to break down how I approach walking by faith as a child of God into some little bite-sized chunks. The first chunk is “when you don’t know the HOW, trust the WHO.

Every day we face challenges and decisions that are beyond the ability of our minds to come up with proof positive iron clad answers. Our minds are useful tools, but they can only go so far. Most if not all our decisions have too many variables and too much unknown information for our minds to know exactly and certainly HOW things will turn out. From which home is really the best one for me (can I be sure?) or should I change to a new career (what if it doesn’t work out?) to which way should I drive home from work (what if there’s an accident I don’t know about on the interstate?)

And then there are the big decisions where our minds just come up stumped— how am I going to ever find that special someone for me?  how am I going to deal with the death of my loved one?  how am I going to survive this cancer?

Again, our minds are useful tools, but they can’t give us all the answers and guidance for life.  To live life, we have to take one of three options:

1- Try to use our minds for everything and remain endlessly frustrated (what I call the Sheldon Cooper approach)

2- just shrug our shoulders and weakly hope that things somehow turn out

3- make a choice to actively place our trust in our WHO, the God who loves us.

The Bible is full of examples of people who were confronted with situations where they could not figure out the HOW, and they made a choice to trust their WHO:

Joshua did not know HOW he could defeat the city of Jericho by simply marching around it, but he trusted his WHO.

David did not know HOW he could defeat Goliath, but he trusted his WHO.

Peter did not know HOW he could walk on water, but he trusted his WHO.

Now we may never be asked to defeat a giant or walk on water, but just like them we can trust our WHO. We can choose to live a life of faith. We can choose to go beyond our minds and trust God. And I have found that a life of faith is a rich life indeed.

So, how do we actually walk this life of faith? Stay tuned tomorrow, and we will explore more.