My first time in the wilderness

After giving up on God, I wandered the wilderness for a while. I’m not sure how long – maybe 3 months, maybe six or more…?  

I remember walking across campus to the Registrar’s office at the beginning of a semester to tell them I couldn’t afford tuition. I expected them to say, “too bad”. That assumption led to a cascade of fears about me dropping out of school and living the rest of my life making minimum wage with anyone who would hire a looser like me. That’s when I saw a squirrel hanging from the side of a large tree.  The squirrel and I made eye contact and held one another’s’ gaze. In that fragment of time, a clear feeling of peace came over me and a “voice” (not audible but clear nonetheless) said, “You will be okay.”

I stopped and continued staring at the squirrel. I knew the squirrel had not spoken, and yet something about the squirrel's stare communicated that message to me. As I stood still and marveled, I realized the message had come from God. My internal “truth meter” or gut confirmed it.  I didn’t know what to make if the experience, so I continued on my way and went into the office. There I explained my situation to the staff who greeted me.

Instead, being told I “too bad, you’re on your own”, the people I met were compassionate and happy to help me find solutions. While my imagination had turned the university into some kind of cruel machine, my experience showed me that it was actually run by compassionate people who saw me as someone they could serve. I realized that my expectations had been shaped by assumptions I didn’t even know I’d had. It was my willingness to risk humiliation and failure that allowed me to challenge and ultimately let go of those assumptions.

I walked home that day with a spring in my step, excited to tell Rick that I could stay in school and that everything was going to work out. What I didn’t tell him, was how God showed up in the twinkle of a squirrel’s eye. Instead, I pondered this encounter in my heart filled with both wonder and skepticism. In the end, I chose to trust that God had actually spoken to me through the squirrel. Allowing for that possibility opened the door to other ways that God might speak with me. I didn’t need to prove it was God or be certain it was God. I realized that faith was really just a decision to trust. Contrary to my previous understanding, faith was not a warm fuzzy feeling of certainty, nor was it the blind acceptance of church doctrine. Faith is wobbly and skeptical at times. It is never fully formed but ever evolving. I realized that if there were no doubt, there would be no need for faith. Likewise, if there is no trust, then there is not a relationship. God doesn’t call us to faith as a test of our beliefs, God calls us to trust so that we may be in relationship with God.

Faith = trust in the face of doubt.

Trust isn’t something we need when there are data to show what is true. When there are data we call the information they point to “facts”. Faith is only necessary when we do not have clear facts or obvious truth. That is when we must decide what to trust.  For me, the decision to trust what I “heard” from the squirrel altered the course of my life.