Broken Trust
When Trust Feels Broken
We recently had to take my daughter to the emergency room. Every time a doctor or nurse takes her vitals, my little daughter gets extremely disturbed in her emotions. It makes me want to help her, but sometimes I cannot.
I prayed, “Oh God, how do I help her?”
I believe God impressed upon me that I should simply support her when I can. So I watched her go through it.
When My Daughter Looked to Me for Help
While watching her, I realized that much of her distress seemed to come from the sudden removal of her freedom of physical movement. For example, the nurse would hold down her arm to check her temperature underneath her armpit with a probe thermometer.
Though she was physically safe during the temperature reading, she was deeply disturbed emotionally. The evidence was obvious from the look on her face and the screams from her vocal cords.
It was in those moments that she looked at me with eyes that seemed to say, “I trusted you, Daddy! Why aren't you helping me?”
For a moment, I believe she experienced a sense of broken trust.
She normally trusts her parents to protect her. Yet in those moments, from her perspective, we seemed to fail to protect her from the doctors and nurses who were restraining her, looking in her ears, placing a stethoscope against her chest, and wrapping a black blood pressure cuff around her arm.
Have we done anything wrong as parents by allowing the doctors to do things that disturb her emotionally?
Absolutely not.
We understand something that she does not yet understand. We know why the examination is necessary. We know the doctors and nurses are trying to help her. We can see beyond those frightening few minutes to what she cannot yet see.
But she cannot understand all of that yet.
All she knows in that moment is that something frightening is happening, her parents could seemingly stop it, and we are allowing it to continue.
That realization caused me to think about my own relationship with God.
When God Allows What I Wanted Him to Prevent
I could not help but remember the times when God allowed horrible things to happen to me.
In those moments, I have prayed like Job:
“Why is life given to a man whose way is hidden, whom God has hedged in? For sighing has become my daily food; my groans pour out like water. What I feared has come upon me; what I dreaded has happened to me. I have no peace, no quietness; I have no rest, but only turmoil.”
Job 3:23–26, NIV
My prayers during suffering have sometimes reflected a sense of broken trust in God's care toward me.
That seemed similar to what I saw in my daughter.
I trust my heavenly Father to care for me just as my daughter trusts me to care for her. When something happens that I believed God would prevent, I can find myself asking the same basic question that I imagined in my daughter's eyes:
“Father, I trusted You. Why didn't You stop this?”
What Does God's Protection Mean?
One Scripture that has caused me to wrestle with this question is Psalm 91:
“If you say, ‘The LORD is my refuge,’ and you make the Most High your dwelling, no harm will overtake you, no disaster will come near your tent. For he will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”
Psalm 91:9–12, NIV
Before bad things happened to me—such as being stolen from by a dishonest company or having someone at work swing at me and try to punch me—I believed that I had made God my dwelling place.
So naturally I expected Him to keep those things from happening.
When they happened anyway, I struggled.
But Scripture has helped me understand that God's protection does not necessarily mean that His people will never experience injury, injustice, persecution, fear, loss, or suffering.
Job suffered. David suffered. Jeremiah suffered. The apostles suffered. Jesus Himself suffered.
In the New Testament, Jesus even encountered Psalm 91 during His temptation in the wilderness. The devil quoted from this very psalm and challenged Jesus to throw Himself from the temple because God had promised to command His angels concerning Him. Jesus refused to turn God's promise of protection into a demand that God prevent physical harm on command. Instead, Jesus answered that we must not put the Lord our God to the test (Matthew 4:5–7).
This helped me see something important.
Trusting God's protection is not the same thing as demanding that God prevent every painful event I encounter.
Jesus told His disciples that they would have trouble in this world, while also telling them to take heart because He had overcome the world (John 16:33).
Sometimes God prevents the danger.
Sometimes God delivers us from the danger.
Sometimes God walks beside us through the danger.
And sometimes our final deliverance comes beyond this earthly life.
That does not make Him unfaithful.
When Trust Feels Broken
Does this mean that God has done anything wrong when He allows something terrible to happen?
Absolutely not.
Even if I die in a terrible calamity, I believe that I will still be with Him in eternity.
But knowing that does not mean that the painful moment feels easy.
There are times when my trust feels shaken because God allowed something that I sincerely expected Him to prevent. There is an important difference between saying that God has become untrustworthy and admitting that I am experiencing a painful sense that my trust has been broken.
Scripture gives us room to admit the second.
God already knows what is happening inside of us. We do not need to pretend before Him.
In the same way that my daughter still runs to me for help after the “mean” doctor, from her perspective, has finished examining her, I too run back to my heavenly Father after people hurt or harass me.
I look to Him to restore my trust when it has been shaken.
Will God allow more bad things to happen to me than I expected Him to?
I have found that sometimes He will.
But I have also found that God's love for me is not determined by whether my circumstances are pleasant.
Paul asked what could separate believers from the love of Christ and then listed trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, danger, and even death. His conclusion was that none of these things can separate God's people from His love (Romans 8:35–39).
That is an important kind of protection too.
God Can Use Our Trials
My daughter still trusts me today.
As a parent, I have begun to understand that sometimes we allow our children to experience something unpleasant because we know something they do not yet understand.
Sometimes difficult experiences can even make them stronger.
I have seen something similar in my own life.
God has used many of my trials to shape my character and strengthen my will. The New Testament teaches that God's discipline and training can eventually produce a harvest of righteousness and peace in those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:10–11).
My daughter gets a little stronger too.
Little does she know it, but after getting through her examinations at the hospital, she will return to her comfortable little home. Soon she will enjoy her little television shows and snacks again with a renewed sense of joy.
The frightening examination was real.
Her tears were real.
But those few minutes were not the whole story.
That reminds me that my suffering is not the whole story either.
Scripture Gives Us Permission to Cry Out
This is not to say that we should refuse to cry out to God when things go wrong.
Quite the opposite.
Many of the Psalms contain desperate cries for God's help during horrible circumstances.
Psalm 102 says:
“Hear my prayer, Lord; let my cry for help come to you. Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress. Turn your ear to me; when I call, answer me quickly. For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. In my distress I groan aloud and am reduced to skin and bones.”
Psalm 102:1–5, NIV
That is not weak faith.
That is a suffering person bringing his pain directly to God.
Yet later in that same psalm, despair begins to give way to hope:
“But you, Lord, sit enthroned forever; your renown endures through all generations. You will arise and have compassion on Zion.”
Psalm 102:12–13, NIV
The suffering person still hurts.
But God is still on His throne.
Let This Be Written for a Future Generation
Then Psalm 102 says something that has become especially important to me:
“Let this be written for a future generation, that a people not yet created may praise the Lord: ‘The Lord looked down from his sanctuary on high, from heaven he viewed the earth, to hear the groans of the prisoners and release those condemned to death.’”
Psalm 102:18–20, NIV
Let this be written for a future generation.
That is one reason I am writing this today.
Someday my daughters may read these words. Perhaps grandchildren or other people who have not even been born yet will read them.
I want them to know that faith does not mean that nothing terrible will ever happen to you.
I want them to know that there may be moments when you cry, “God, why did You allow this?”
I want them to know that Scripture gives them permission to cry out to Him.
But I also want them to know what I have learned:
Keep running back to God.
Do not mistake a painful chapter for the end of the story.
Paul wrote that even while our outward bodies are wasting away, God can renew us inwardly day by day. He taught believers to look beyond what is temporarily seen toward what is eternal (2 Corinthians 4:16–18).
There is more happening than what we can presently see.
My daughter could see the thermometer, the blood pressure cuff, the nurse holding her arm, and her father apparently doing nothing to stop it.
She could not see everything that I could see.
And I know that there are times when I cannot see everything my heavenly Father sees.
Tell the Next Generation
This is also why Psalm 78 is so important to the mission of Anointed for Christ.
Psalm 78 commands God's people to tell the next generation about the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord, His power, and His wonders so that future generations will put their trust in God and keep His commands.
We should tell the next generation about God's miraculous deliverances.
But I believe we should also tell them what we learned when deliverance did not happen in the way or at the time we expected.
Our children need to know how to trust God in both places.
They need to know how to praise Him after victory.
And they need to know how to cry out to Him while they are still waiting for victory.
God Will Have the Final Word
If you are in despair, cry out to God.
Ask Him to save you.
If the situation does not immediately change, ask Him for strength, wisdom, endurance, and peace while you walk through it.
God's final victory is greater than the painful moment we are experiencing now.
That is part of our peace.
God knows what is happening.
He cares about us while it happens.
He is beside us through it.
And for those who belong to Christ, even death cannot have the final word.
So remember this:
- When you suffer, cry out to God honestly.
- When you do not understand what He has allowed, remember what Scripture teaches about His character.
- And when He brings you through the trial, tell the next generation what He has done and what He taught you.
Let it be written down so that people not yet created may praise the Lord.
Our Help Is in the Name of the Lord
Let me end with a short but sweet psalm about making it through to the other side.
I pray that you too, my reader, will make it through to the other side. In the meantime, may God strengthen you and give peace to your spirit.
“If the Lord had not been on our side— let Israel say— if the Lord had not been on our side when people attacked us, they would have swallowed us alive when their anger flared against us; the flood would have engulfed us, the torrent would have swept over us, the raging waters would have swept us away. Praise be to the Lord, who has not let us be torn by their teeth. We have escaped like a bird from the fowler’s snare; the snare has been broken, and we have escaped.
Our help is in the name of the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.”
Psalm 124, NIV
Don't give up,
Christopher Comer