Trust.

I've been thinking a lot since the beginning of Easter -- Easter is still going, of course; it runs until Pentecost (this year on June 9) -- about trust. It has been an issue for me since I started to claw my way out of paganism and agnosticism many years ago.

Can one be a pagan and an agnostic? Well, I gave it my best shot.

The advantage of both paganism and atheism is this: that they answer the question "If God is good, why do bad things happen?" The pagan may be pantheistic (seeing bad things as the result of bad spirits or gods) and feel that bad things may be countered by getting power for oneself; the atheist simply says that God is not good because he does not exist. The Christian is the one who must square this circle, and it hardly needs to be said that I'm not the first one to run against this stumbling block. It doesn't help that I'm naturally pessimistic and that faith is like a second language to me.

The early Christians, and saints throughout the ages, did not find the bad things in life to be bad. They found the harshest persecutions to be nothing compared to the glory yet to come; they found lessons and endurance in the most difficult of life's circumstances. The average cradle Christian on the street may look at that and say, "I think I'll go see what the pagans and atheists have to offer instead."

When one is not blessed with an extraordinarily powerful faith, but does believe in a good and loving God, how does he fill the gap between the bad things that can happen and the belief in a merciful and loving God? God did not spare His own Son the Cross. How much more will He let happen to me? Doesn't he know how weak I am?

People would tell me to simply trust in God. Christian writers who informed my budding belief knew that trust in God was crucial. But how I could I trust God when he allows typhoons, earthquakes, birth defects, volcanoes, etc. etc. etc.?

A friend of mine told me that trusting in God just meant saying, "Whatever happens, it's going to be okay." And he could speak with some authority, having buried his teenage daughter a few years earlier -- she had died suddenly of natural causes. If he could survive that and still have faith, that at least told me it could be done.

I came to think eventually that my problem was that I was treating trust passively rather than actively. That may work with people, but not with God. I trust you because I lent you fifty bucks and you paid me back last week. I don't trust Joe because he made a pass at my wife. My trust is a reaction to others' actions.

But trusting God is different. It requires me to take an active approach. I have to make the decision that whatever happens, I am going to trust in God and not go back on it. This requires effort, at least for me.

So I've tried to adopt this attitude and so far I think it's going okay. I have my dark days, where nothing seems to be going right; you have probably heard my whining from wherever you live. You certainly can find it on this blog. But I have enough faith to believe this is ultimately a destructive and unhelpful attitude, and that I can find a better one if I put in the effort.

What the heck; I've come this far.