Do I trust a chair more than I trust God?

As I reflected on a training I participated with my church community over the weekend, and started preparations to facilitate a discussion on God's goodness, this thought came to me--Do I trust a chair more than I trust God?

Here's how the train of thought started: over the weekend I was hit hard with the idea that our actions reflect our beliefs. I've heard this idea before, but never used it as a lens to reflect on my life and my faith. I have no problem saying out loud that God is good. Or God is great. Or God is glorious. Or that God is gracious. I understand the concept behind these ideas. I see evidence of it in my friends lives and in the story of God reflected through writers like Moses, David, the apostle Paul, Luke. Then I thought, "If my actions really do reflect my beliefs, and I believe that God is great and ultimately in control, why do I worry so much?"

Then the chair thought hit me. I don't examine a chair before I sit down. I don't sit down, then worry if the chair is going to hold me. I sit in the chair because I believe it will hold me up the entire time I need to sit on it. I trust the chair to do the job that it was designed to do.

A friend mentioned the same idea later in the week during the discussion of God's goodness and my jaw dropped. This question was for real. But she used the analogy of a bike. After we've learned to ride a bike, we don't get on a bike and worry that the seat is going to fall off. We don't worry about the wheels turning right when we've turned the handle bars to go left. That would be exhausting! We wouldn't have much capacity to think about where we were headed or observe the scenery going by. But yet every single day I panic about something or I try to prove myself or I don't do something I know I should because of fear. All this despite my proclamations that God is great, and good, and glorious and gracious.

Now the question is, will I trust God to be who he has proven himself to be throughout time, so I don't have to spend all my time worrying?

I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Donald Miller in Through Painted Deserts:

And then it hit me that, amid the screaming noise, amid the messages that said buy this product and I will be made complete, I could hardly know the life that life was meant to be....Nobody stops to question whether they actually need the house and the car and the better job. And because of this there doesn't seem to be any peace; there isn't any serenity. We can't see the stars in Houston anymore, we can't go to the beach without stepping on a coke bottle, we can't hike in the woods, because they're aren't any more woods. We can only panic about the car we drive, sit stuck in traffic and panic about whether or not the guy who cut us off respects us. We want to kill him for crying out loud, and all the while we feel the need for new furniture and a new television and a bigger house in the right neighborhood. We drive around in a trance, salivating for Starbucks while that great heaven sits above us, and that beautiful sunrise is happening in the desert, and all those mountains out West are collecting snow on the limbs of their pines and all those leaves are changing colors out East....It makes you feel...that if you..stop caring about whether your car breaks down or whether you have fashionable clothes or whether or not people do or do not like you, that you have broken through, that you have shut your ear to the bombardment of lies that never, ever stop whispering in your ear...And maybe when a person doesn't buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long enough to realize the stuff that people say to get us to part with our money often isn't true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness of a Gulf breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent than a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall..wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun on the face of the moon, and know, This is what I was made to do. This is who I was made to be, that life is being given to me as a gift, that light is a metaphor and God is doing these things to dazzle us.