After saying I would write on the subject of “Trusting God” I quickly found I was not sure where to begin. To me one of the greatest gifts of my faith has been the freedom to “let go and let God” as the saying goes and experience a certain amount of freedom from worry, glimpses of what it must be like to live as a lily of the field. When I see a friend without a spiritual path struggling with the weight of the world on their shoulders, my heart goes out to them while I thank God I am on a different journey. Yet I find myself just as often being humbled by my failure to trust God, and thanking God for being more persistent than I am obstinate.
As a child it seemed obvious and easy to turn to God for the big stuff, a favorite relative dying, moving 500 miles away, getting my own room etc…As a teenager it seemed that God was there but as distant and disconnected from the daily details of my life as the societies of biblical times were from modern America. If one were careful one might catch glimpses of God during Holy Week but certainly not when trying to decide what’s for dinner. However in college as I did crazy things like do a junior year abroad and still finish a Mechanical Engineering degree from MIT in the 3 years remaining, a series of blessings came to me, and I became convinced that the Holy Spirit had to be looking out for me. There is something about being perpetually short on sleep that makes it easier to believe that the little voice might be divinely inspired. It is a belief that has continued to serve me well, however imperfectly I listen. It was then that I fell in love with Lent, as a time to make changes and clean my spiritual house, so that I could hear that little voice from my heart over the din of the many voices in my head.
Fast forward to Epiphany 2010. Our family was without a church home. I had the naïve idea that we didn’t require all that much. A church that would accept all of us as we were; my loving passionate 6-year-old who wanted her communion her way, my precocious 9-year-old who had out grown the concept of God as a Santa Claus figure and wanted more than pretty pictures from Sunday School, my husband the musician, and me the cradle Episcopalian with a preference of congregations that are prepared to embrace change and grow. I went online and made a list. Something about Calvary’s Website that caught my attention, but it was SO far away. We spent Lent going to the closest fit of those that were close but that little voice was hesitant to declare the search over and after a most unsatisfying Easter service, we started anew. We gradually started increasing the distance but didn’t find anything we liked better. I was rather mad at that little voice and thoroughly discouraged by this point. I can remember telling God “IS IT REALLY TOO MUCH TO ASK!!"
Then one day when I was already late to work but needed that one thing from the grocery store, I parked next to a white car with a Calvary bumper sticker. The first time I saw it, it merely reminded me of how mad I was at God so I went in and got what I needed. The second time I saw it I was “too busy” and Danvers too far away so I threw my bag in the car and started on my way. As I was leaving, my eyes were drawn to the bumper sticker a third time and finally I decided to trust one more time and I turned around and went back and left a note for the owner of the car and it felt good. And so we found ourselves at Calvary for the first time at Pentecost, celebrating the gift of Holy Spirit, as present in our lives today as in the lives of the disciples 2,000 years ago.
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