Maximum Trust

During Covid, we’ve had some sweet opportunities to spend time with a handful of close friends who became our “quaranteam.” One Sunday morning, they were all gathered around our dining room table eating waffles when I came out of the bathroom crying. I had to confide in the group that we had been pregnant and it wasn’t looking hopeful. 

We ended up having a third miscarriage, and it knocked me speechless for a couple months. Recently, I’ve received emails from people who thought they lost my blog. You didn’t; I just didn’t have anything to say. 

And I still don’t have anything to say, except for this:  Maximum Trust. That’s become the theme of our family this year. I finally painted it and hung it on the kitchen wall. 

What do I mean by that?

Let me tell you a story. 

Over the long years before Erik and I met, he had four very serious long-term relationships. He would have married any one of those women, except for one problem: they all dumped him before he could propose (100% cut, overnight, each while saying he had treated her better than any guy she had ever known). The whole time, Satan was whispering in his ear, “Go get what you want. You know God’s not going to give it to you. He’s not good to you in this area of your life.” When we finally met, we joked that God had arranged our marriage because it was so perfect, and Erik still says that the fruit of having me in his life is that much sweeter for all the suffering and waiting he endured to get there. 

That’s a very brief version of an amazing story I’ll have to let him tell you sometime. But the bottom line is this: there is a cosmic wager between God and Satan for the hearts of people. Satan’s job, as the Accuser, is to try to convince us that God isn’t good. 

They speak of you with evil intent; your adversaries misuse your name.

Psalm 139:20

And our job is to trust God to decide what’s good and bad, instead of judging for ourselves like Eve and Adam did when they ate from the wrong tree. 

And God’s job, apparently, is to stack the deck against himself, hide in his cloak of divine invisibility, give us just enough breadcrumbs to take each next step, and leave a lot of room for faith so we have to make a legitimate choice between trusting him or trying to find our own way. His honor code is to allow a fair fight, so he will definitely get the glory at the end when Satan is thwarted and God is proven to be good. 

It seems like God really has a flair for the dramatic, at least in Erik’s and my lives. He milks every situation in order to give us maximum opportunity for trust. And why not? We’re learning that God really values our trust in him, and he’ll go to great lengths to train our trust muscles. Why would he come through for us in the morning when there’s a possibility for an eleventh-hour rescue? Why would he give us a smooth, easy road when he could write a dramatic story that will bring him glory and eventually bring us greater joy?

That’s what I mean by maximum trust. We repeat this to ourselves as a reminder that God isn’t ignoring us or tossing us to the wolves. He’s waiting, watching, allowing us to develop deeper trust in him as he comes through victoriously in more and more dramatic ways. 

The most current chapter of the maximum trust journey has been an emotional roller coaster, and there have been times I’ve been hesitant to blog about it because the grief gets too heavy. A year ago, Erik and I both felt that God was asking us to start trusting him for children. Since that day we have been pregnant four times. We have had four miscarriages. Some of them I have written about; some I haven’t been able to. The third one took the wind out of my sails and somehow the fourth one brought my hopeful spirit back by reminding me that God is in control and he is working. 

After we lost our third child, the doctor said “the month after a D&C is generally not a very fertile time,” so I wasn’t even planning on tracking or trying until the next cycle had rolled around. Then it never came, and I finally clued in: it was time to buy a pregnancy test. We were traveling high in the mountains of Colorado, though, and the closest town was a hippie village west of Boulder where there is no pharmacy– only about five marijuana dispensaries.

We tried the lone grocery store, which also had no pregnancy tests on the shelves. Finally in desperation I asked about pregnancy tests at the cash register, and was told, “Oh yeah, we have them! They’re over here behind the Courtesy Window” (where they sell tobacco products and lottery tickets). A man with an apron and a long beard hanging down under his mask unlocked the window for me, and the two of us had to have quite an awkward conversation about how many tests I thought I’d need. 

In the end I only needed one test. It was a yes, and we rejoiced to be expecting again. Even when we lost that fourth baby within the same week, my joy and hope in God’s sovereignty remained. He’s in control of the timing, and it was very kind of him to accelerate the story on this one. It was a loss, but a gentle one. I marvel daily at the idea that we have FOUR children we will get to worship with someday! 

[Just a note about the miscarriages: we are working with an excellent group of doctors who have run many, many tests. As far as they can tell, each of these miscarriages has been a one-off chromosomal abnormality. They can’t find anything else wrong with my body or the way it does pregnancy. We are just a statistical aberration (…but of course!) and we feel that God is choosing to write a dramatic story that will bring him glory in the end. We are praying for multiples now. 🙂 The path of trust that has been set before us, at least for now, is to keep trying naturally and not to pursue further medical intervention. When people try to give me medical advice, I’m grateful for their love but I feel a bit hurt that they want to “fix” the situation instead of walking through the valley with me. I also fear that they’ve missed what I’m trying to say: God is asking me for maximum trust and I know he is very involved in this story. Thanks for understanding that.] 

Sometimes it’s tempting to agree with the Accuser that God must be unkind to dangle the possibility of children so close in front of us and then keep taking it away. It feels like God is trying to hurt us. But when I think about it from a more eternal perspective, I realize how blessed we are to be hand-picked for a little bit of suffering. God doesn’t leave our pain unredeemed. We really believe that He is working for his glory and our future joy. 

In all this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

1 Peter 1:6-7

Let’s imagine that God had a desire to train up a bunch of people who would rule and judge alongside him for eternity. What kind of people would they need to be? I think the most important characteristics of those people would be closeness to God, absolute trust in him, humility, and understanding of God’s character. 

This is what the Lord says: “Let not the wise boast of their wisdom or the strong boast of their strength or the rich boast of their riches, but let the one who boasts boast about this: that they have the understanding to know me, that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness, justice and righteousness on earth, for in these I delight,” declares the Lord.

Jeremiah 9:23-24

What would God be willing to put people through if he knew it would get them to a place of humble dependence on him so they could sit beside him as his bride forever? (I think we have a precedent in Hebrews 12:2. Jesus was willing to go through crucifixion for that same future joy, and God asks us to run our own race with perseverance as we look to Jesus’s example.)

And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. 

Hebrews 12:1b-2

Now imagine God only had a limited time to work with each person, say maybe 75 years, in which he could allow them to go through suffering and test their faith. It makes sense to me that the people God especially wanted to train to be close to him might spend a great deal of their lives going through trials. 

For now, we are going to hang on. We believe God is allowing us to go through hard things very intentionally because he’s going to redeem them. 150 years from now, looking back, I believe I will specifically thank God for the events of this year because I will see what milestones they were in my faith journey. He may give us children on earth, and he may not–  but either way, he does not withhold good from us (Ps 84:11) and we will rest in the glorious promise that we have his maximum good… all while being trained for maximum trust. 

I’ve thrown a lot of scripture at you in this post, but I’m going to close out with one more passage. Thank you for being willing to walk this valley with me, because God is writing an amazing story. 

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18

Do you relate? Where do you see opportunities for maximum trust in your life? Please share your experiences and reflections in the comment box at the top or bottom of this post. I’d love to hear.