Not Our Trust, But His

Every Sunday morning after Mass, the elderly woman who sits in the pew behind us pats my hand and praises my family. This week she told me that it was so nice to see a couple in this day and age who trust God enough to have a large family. I smiled and said thank you and hurried my children out of the pew.

I wanted to tell her that she has is all wrong. We didn’t trust God, especially in the beginning. In fact, we worked very hard to not have these children. We utilized almost every kind of contraception available in our quest to manage our fertility because we knew what was in our own best interest. We had a plan for our lives that was very different from the way it all turned out precisely because we didn’t trust God. To be completely honest, there were years there when I wasn’t even sure there was a God to trust. I was a nice agnostic girl at the time of our wedding. We got married in a church because it’s what one did, because it was important to my now husband that we married in that particular church (it has family significance), and because I never really thought about it all that much not because of anything to do with God. We were getting married to each other and I honestly could not have told you what God had to do with any of it.

You see, I’m uncomfortable with the praise because it’s not true at all. These children in my house are not a testament to how much we trust in God or how strong our faith has been. They are, instead, a testament to how much He has trusted us.

If things had worked according to our plans, I’d be the full-time-working mother of a 6-year-old and a 4-year-old right now instead of the stay-mostly-at-home mother of seven ranging in ages from 2-16. God in His wisdom rejected those plans and entrusted to us a much larger family than we were smart enough to dream of having.

He gave us that first unexpected baby way back in 1996 and trusted that we would accept her disruption in our lives and love her completely. And we did.

He trusted us that we would love the second child even when he came with a host of issues when he roared into this world 10 weeks to early. And we adjusted our plans and did.

He trusted us again barely a year later when the unthinkable happened and we were expecting that third child who had NEVER been a part of our plans. And we did.

He trusted us to accept that my plans of a big time career were never going to happen and that we were going to instead have to struggle to raise this ever-growing family in our house. And we learned to budget and changed our plans.

Again and again throughout our lives, our plans have been abruptly changed by the things which were out of our control – children were conceived, plans were made impossible, people died, cars died, moving became an imminent necessity – it doesn’t matter what form such things took, God always handed us these changes and trusted that we would accept them and do our best with whatever came our way. And somehow He was right, and we always did.

On Sunday morning when she patted my hand again to tell me how refreshing it was to see a family with such faith and trust in God, I wanted to cry that I have never had even close to the faith and trust in Him that He had in me. During the eventful times in my life, I would raise my eyes to Heaven, ask for strength, and hope that somehow it would all work out. My Heavenly Father would smile back at me and whisper “Don’t worry. You’ve got this. I trust you.”

That’s where I am today, completely humbled by the faith and trust that the Creator of the Universe has in someone as untrustworthy as me. And then I wonder what He sees that I don’t that makes him so sure that I can handle it all. And why I always question my ability to handle all the things He entrusts to me, when I know He’s always right.