What next, Papa?

How cool is this...

You may recall from my posting on Why I started calling Dad "Papa" that I sought to turn the "Abba" portion of Romans 8:15-16 into something personally meaningful. I settled on "Papa."

The verses read like this: "For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children."

I visited my sister Jan in Oregon a few weekends ago. She has long recognized where I'm missing the boat in my trust of God; she was once there herself and is now so far from it--so deeply trusting in God, even as her strength rises and falls while dealing with cancer and chemo. She printed out all of Romans 8 for me in two translations: New International Version and The Message. (What a fascinating presentation of the concepts in this second version of that passage...read it, would you?)

With all that background, we arrive at what stunned me. Look how The Message translated the Abba verse: "This resurrection life you received from God is not a timid, grave-tending life. It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike 'What's next, Papa?' God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are. We know who he is, and we know who we are: Father and children."

What a response to my squirmy, discontent, fearful pleas in my No trust post. What a beautiful opportunity for me to view life with such a perspective of trust: "What next, Papa?"

No trust

Something happened at work that, as innocuous as it was, led to my feeling so completely disheartened. It added to my perception of diminished work opportunity, of questions about how relationships might be strained. My emotions careened to anger, hopelessness, apathy. A kind coworker asked how I was doing. I offered a few responses and then slipped out to stare at the fountain from a bench and mull over seasons of challenges and pains.

Then I had an "aha" moment. "Trust" came to mind, and several areas of my life flashed through my mind. I could vaguely make out the strong connection between my ongoing pains and areas in which I am just not trusting God. Distrust of God is one of those things that has pride as its root. Pride, pride, pride. So this was one of the forms pride had taken hold in my life, a form I'd embraced. I've struggled for so long to repair things in my life that I deem broken, to wrestle them back to some form that I think will make life more pleasant for me. That has most certainly not worked out to be true.

Ya know, I'm inclined to think that I know how things should be, that successes or joys I once experienced or wish for now should play out as I might hope for--as if I know what's best, as if what I see as a better way for things to go is the way things should go.

And so I trust in myself and displace God. Several key losses in my life in the last couple of years... Some devestating stuff for me. How ugly this world has become to me at times. I wonder, Are these the words of one still grieving, or have I nurtured a root of bitterness, built a wall of distrust of God? What is the path out of this darkness, and why have I felt so utterly alone and abandoned, perhaps even especially when I am even seeking and asking for the path out?

This was a day of feeling at the ends of yet more ropes I'm hanging onto...and suspecting I need to let go of them all, and that's a miserable thought, too, when I don't have any light to reveal what kind of safety net there might be.

But that's not how it works, huh. Abraham and Isaac...an inspiring story when things are going better. Abraham has this greatness of faith to go along with a God who has told him to sacrifice his beloved son. Yet when I'm faced with my own crisis and struggling, how incapable I feel! I'm supposed to have faith to let go of my dreams, my ideas of what will satisfy me?

The aloneness can be intensified if I see others seeming to have great ease in their walk through life, especially when even my greatest, heartfelt attempts at faith result in nothing, it seems.

That's how gloomy distrust can look. This blog is both an admission of failure (distrusting) and a glimmer of hope that this Aha moment might turn into action on my part, action that God likes: trust that he is who he says he is, trust that he can do what he says he can do, trust that I am who he says I am, trust that I can do all things through Christ, whose strength I need.