Trust and faith - dealing with them

In chapter five of Philip Yancey’s book, Reaching for the Invisible God, he quotes Jean-Pierre de Caussade, an 18th century spiritual director: "A living faith is nothing else than a steadfast pursuit of God through all that disguises, disfigures, demolishes and seeks, so to speak, to abolish him."

Yancey adds, "In theory, if not in practice, I take everything without exception as God’s action in the sense of asking what I can learn from it and praying for God to redeem it by improving me. I take nothing as God’s action in the sense of judging God’s character, for I have learned to accept my puny status as a creature – which includes a limited point of view that obscure unseen forces in the present as well as a future known only to God. The sceptic may insist this unfairly lets God off the hook, but perhaps that’s what faith is: trusting God’s goodness despite any apparent evidence against it. as a soldier trusts his general’s orders; better, as a child trusts her loving parents."

One doesn’t have to be a sceptic to think about letting God off the hook: I’ve done it plenty of times myself. But in the end you either have to come back to the point Yancey talks about, or go down the plughole. I’d prefer not to do the latter.