Last Thursday, for one hour, I was the coolest person on the face of the planet …
… at least to the three-year-old sitting across the table from me at Chilis.
For my first trick, I took the coasters and leaned them and stacked them until I had a towering castle.
My greatest feat came later though, when the waitress set down a handful of straws. They were individually wrapped in white paper and when I handed one of the still wrapped straws to the little boy, I asked him what he thought was inside.
He took the straw from me and furrowed his brow, but couldn’t come up with an answer.
“Is it a straw?” I suggested.
Methodically he began peeling the wrapper away until finally, he pulled out a straw and held it up to me, smiling.
“It is a straw!” he exclaimed.
As if it could have been anything else. But here he was staring at me like I had just revealed the secrets of the universe to him.
The secret being that sometimes that straw-shaped mini-package is hiding exactly what you expect it to hide … a straw.
Sometimes I feel like a three-year-old in the presence of God.
His tricks, of course, aren’t tricks at all. He doesn’t have to use coasters to build facsimiles of castles. He is the creator of the universe. Unlike my card castle, God’s mountain ranges, His stars aren’t snuffed out by a persistent child with crayon.
God endures.
But I do feel like a three-year-old sometimes in the sense that I have a hard time trusting God even when He is constantly proving Himself to me (something that He is really under no obligation to do).
That little boy at Chilis didn’t trust me, didn’t trust what was right in front of his eyes. He had to figure it out himself and only when he unwrapped the straw, and saw it for himself, did he believe.
How many times in my life has God handed me something so beautiful, so blessed and so obvious and yet I’ve held it at arm’s length, struggling to make sense of it, trying to figure out if it is what I think it is and not truly believing until I’ve seen said blessing in action?
Why is trusting God so difficult when we know God is so benevolent? We know God intends only the best for us, so why is it so hard to trust Him and the good things He brings into our lives?
I think it probably comes down to self-worth. Are we worthy of God’s grace? Are we worthy to be loved? And because we struggle with those questions, because we have suffered so much at times, we doubt God’s love.
Worthiness is beside the point.
As author Max Lucado writes, “God loves you simply because he has chosen to do so.”
God loves.
God is love.
It’s so obvious and yet we doubt.
But we have to move beyond that doubt. Think of all the time we waste trying to make God prove Himself. All that time we waste unwrapping metaphorical straws when it’s so obvious what we have been given.
It’s a lesson I have to learn.
