JourneyOnline
Just as people must trust each other in order to live, trust in God is essential in order to grow in faith, says Rev Noel Kentish.
A woman waits on the Darwin hospital verandah, looking across Doctor’s Gully. The baby stirring within her will soon emerge into a hot tropical world. She trusts all will go well for the birth and that the child that will soon emerge will be whole.
At home, too, her husband waits, briefly consigning to the back of his mind the challenging cares of a demanding ministry, he wants to do something with his hands. He, too, trusts that all will go well with the birth. He takes a bucket of water, enjoys its coolness and wetness and washes their Triumph 7 in the cool embracing shade of a Poinciana tree, ensuring it will be ready to transport their newborn infant home in triumph.
Of all creatures, we humans are creatures of trust. We remain dependent on other humans before and after birth. Dependence is gradually replaced by independence. Trust in others grows. Among the significant others we trust is one whom we know as God, but we learn intuitively so much at the hands of parents.
I cannot speak of a concept like “trust” or a name like “God” without using concrete terms. Neither is an abstraction in my life. I can speak only in terms of those aspects of my life that are compelling and real to me. It may not be the same for others, I readily admit.
That is why “God” to me is not an abstraction but one whom we humans can see and relate to in the person of Jesus Christ, who walked the dusty roads and byways of this world with us and for us.
Because of trust in Jesus as a fact—a person—I know within myself that I am never alone, that divine guidance is available to me at all times. I know, too, that I am part of a fellowship without number, a huge support network of loving, caring souls on a similar journey. This inner knowing that sees God and knows God and trusts God in the whole of life is the foundation of faith.
Through Jesus Christ, guided by the Holy Spirit, I continue to trust God, supported by the loving companionship of a committed partner who shared with me the privilege, joy and pain of generating within our own physical being, new lives, very much as my own parents did on a hot Darwin November night in 1935.
