The difficulty of letting go and just trust

I believe that I have enough reasons to just let go and trust God in whatever is happening in my life. It has at the core something to do with an inner change that I’ve been going through the past few years, that has been so remarkable that it should leave little doubt. I’ll leave it at that. Maybe I’ll talk about why in the future.

But no matter what happens on a spiritual level, I seem to be dragged down by everyday life. I still worry about finances, bills, debts (yeah, all my worries can basically be boiled down to money). 

I know that there is a divine plan. And I’m starting to suspect that everything that happens in my life, happens for a reason. That everything is just as it should be. That I don’t have to worry about getting old and realise that my life has just passed me by. Because when I think about it, even though some parts of my life are a mess and I’m living a fairly dull life on the outside, there is so much going on that is nothing short of miraculous. So miraculous that I should be content if life happens to just pass me by and I die with all my dreams unfulfilled. Because I know that in one form and another, eternity awaits me after death, even though I’m not sure what it entails.

But when I’m not present, I don’t see. When I’m not present, I tend to forget, because my thoughts drift into worries and things that my ego wishes to be different. And even when I am present, I have a hard time not making things important, which should only be important if they are part of God’s plan.

I remember reading or hearing somewhere, that Mother Teresa had her religious experiences when she was young and then had to go through life, with all her acts of selflessness, trusting in what she experienced in her youth, without any new experiences to add fuel to what once happened to her. Whether this is true or not, I don’t know. It’s not important in the context.

The thing is that, in my naiveté, I thought: If you’ve once had them, how can you start doubting. Now, I’m no Mother Teresa ;). I’m a huge sinner that has mostly lived a selfish life. And I’m not saying this in the humble way that saints do, once they become aware of their shortcomings. I’ve done some truly crappy things in my life. Things that most people would not do.

But you can of course go back to the bible and see all the places where doubt is mentioned, to see that even those that lived closest to Jesus had doubts about incredible miracles that they had seen with their own eyes. 

I now understand that this is how it is. Memories fade. It doesn’t take more than a year for doubts to creep in. What once was so real, gets questioned. Did it really happen the way I remember it? I don’t remember all the details, so how can I be as sure as I was then? What I most have to lean on, is my former certainty. 

But it’s not just that memories fade. It seems as if the ego cannot comprehend anything spiritual. It doesn’t matter how many amazing things that happen. After a while, I’m drawn back into my trivial everyday-life worries. No matter how much God reassures me that he exists and that everything is as it should be, I cannot trust when I’m overwhelmed with financial worries and other issues that tend to bog me down. Why is it so hard to trust God, when he has since way back removed all my doubts about his existence? Why does it seem as if there is a thick wall between my spiritual and my material life? 

Starting with what I know

I know that God exists. I cannot say that I exactly know who God is, or the nature of God. I believe that I can be fairly certain in ascribing certain attributes to God. These would be: “intelligent”, “personal” and “having a will”. 

I can also be certain of that there is some kind of unseen spiritual reality. What this reality is exactly, I again cannot know.

These things I’ve seen enough evidence of in my own life, to be certain of. I know that I can’t prove them to anyone. Or that God exists at all. But from personal experience, I can know this for myself. I’m not asking anyone to take my word for it. But with a bit of openness, I believe that anyone can find proof that God exists. Just not the kind of proof that can be tested in a laboratory or be objectively verified in any other way. 

I can also see the truth of what Jesus taught. I have no idea when it comes to historical claims. I simply wasn’t there. It doesn’t mean that they are unimportant or that there is no way of at least determine probability. The resurrection, for example, is believed in by many scholars, because of the amount of witnesses, and certain circumstances around how it was told and who the witnesses were. 

I’ll might look more closely into this and other claims in the Bible later in my life. Probably. 

But what I want to get at, is that the more I look into what Jesus taught, the more struck I become by how hard it is to live by, not because of what it demands of our bodies or intellects, but because of the humility it demands. And also how easy life would be if we could live by it. All we have to do is to swallow our pride.

So why is this so hard? As an example: I’ve been tricked into buying crappy cars three times in my life. Once for me. Once for me and my wife and once for my wife’s son (sidenote: when writing this, I realised that all three times, I wanted something to happen fast. Don’t ever let your decisions be governed by wanting something to happen fast!). If I want to seriously follow Christ, I need to pray for these sellers and do my best to feel no grudge towards them. 

Or, me and my wife were tricked into a rental contract of five year for a machine for our company, that had a forced insurance that made the monthly payment twice as expensive. Also in this case, I will need to do my best to love my enemy and turn the other cheek. At the times when this happened I didn’t think this way though. In fact, I said loads of angry things about these people. I can even still get angry sometimes, since we’re still paying the penalty fee for breaking the contract with the company. And at the fact that there are dishonest people in the world in general. And so on. But none of this changes the facts of my life or of the world. 

I could give more examples. But what this amounts to is to a large extent acceptance. Lack thereof. And pride. “These things happen, but they shouldn’t happen to me, because I’m so great…” 

Jesus taught humility and acceptance. And looking at these examples and numerous others, it’s easy to see ho much easier life would be if we practiced these things. And that we really have nothing to lose from doing so. But we don’t. If we did, our lives would be very different. We would feel different. A huge burden would lift from our shoulders. But we prefer to be angry because circumstances aren’t the way that we think that they ought to be.

These are some of the things that I do know. Things that I think that I could work with.