Trusting God Together

Nick and Nora have an attractive home, two cats (one who hides from his shadow, another who is, as Nora says, "an uppity princess"), two often-frustrating jobs, two trucks, and two hard, one-hour commutes. In their five years of marriage they’ve had many opportunities to feel isolated in their personal struggles. Though they love each other, they have often felt disconnected. Both of them were frustrated, but didn’t know how to break the cycle. It took a mission trip to Honduras to do that.

With twenty-eight others, they journeyed into a remote area of the Honduran mountains to simply do anything they could to help. They built houses, taught children, fed the hungry– all the while hoping for something to happen to them and to their marriage.

It happened on the last night they were on the mountain. The whole team met for several hours to pray, and to cement the lessons they learned while they were away from the familiar. That night Nick and Nora experienced a breakthrough.

Let me interrupt their story to do a little explaining. There are breakthrough moments in our lives. They can come gently and gradually, like the dawn, or with the intensity of a sudden thunderstorm. But they come. When they do, change begins. We’re like one of those "before and after" commercials, except that our "before and after" is real, not a made-up story or an imaginary change.

Breakthroughs are always somewhat emotional, and sometimes very emotional. It seems that emotional spirituality scares some people. To them, feelings are great, just not in our relationship to God and His Word. Personally, I would question the reality of any spirituality that was so cerebral that it could not stimulate our emotions. For how can we have any experience in life without emotion? How, when God is the most intense of persons, and His Word the most powerful of truths, can we deny that He wants us to experience Him, without emotional sterility?

People in the Bible, both Old Testament and New, wept, laughed, jumped for joy, and fell down on their faces . . . all in response to God and his Word. It's an emotional book, this Bible of ours.

Even so, emotion is the catalyst, not the core of a breakthrough. The core is a change of heart and a change of direction. That’s why breakthroughs are wasted without "follow through." When we see God’s truth it can stun us, unsettle us, bring us to repentance and new resolution, but we have to continue living in the truth to experience real and lasting transformation.

Now back to Nick and Nora. That night on the Honduran mountain, Nora began weeping. Nick crossed the room and put his strong arms around her. In that one moment, Nick stepped out of an emotional and spiritual isolation that had lasted since his youth. Breakthrough? You can count on it. Both of them will tell you that they are radically different . . . closer, together in ways they never before experienced.

Best of all, they’re trusting God together. Before the breakthrough they attended church, but they had little spiritual intimacy. Now they pray together and are believing God together for their future. They hope that future includes more trips to Spanish-speaking countries. But they know that whatever God has in their future, they will embrace it together.

Trusting God together has some great benefits:

We learn to submit to one another’s wisdom without defensiveness. Isolated in our own separate worlds, we defend our positions, and are not very open to our partner’s opinions or concerns. Trusting God together, we can hear each other and respond in positive ways.

We learn to help one another when one of us feels down. When we aren’t trusting God together, we become unsupportive. Isolation, again. Here’s one of Nick’s recent insights: "I discovered that when Nora has a low day my job is not to walk away, or yank her out of the problem, but come near and help her up. I have a long way to go, but I am learning."

We learn to trust God patiently, through the process, through the questions, through the doubts. Trusting God together doesn’t always bring quick solutions. It does mean we can discover the right way to go, and go that way in step. Like Brother Andrew and his wife said, "We don’t know where we are going, but we are going there together."

So, where are you right now? Are you, as a couple, trusting God together? If so, keep it up, and spread the joy. Perhaps you once trusted God together, but you let some disappointment or irritation break that link. Now, you’re full of tension and isolated. Why not restore that broken link? Joy awaits!

Maybe you have never trusted God together. It’s possible. Lots of couples, some of them even longtime followers of Jesus, have never become a spiritual team. They’re like two kids in the same sandbox, but building separate castles. Lots of competition, lots of comparisons, but no cooperation, only an underlying desire to make their castle the biggest. God didn’t call you to such separation. He called you together, to serve Him together, to trust Him together. If you never have, you know little true joy in your marriage.

In Amos 3:3, the prophet asks this question: "Do two walk together unless they have agreed to do so?" Nick and Nora have a life of challenges ahead of them, but they have resolved to trust God together. Let’s follow their example and watch for the positive results.