trust

Outgrowing our spiritual travel companions

On the spiritual path, as we ascend toward God, we will have to let people go along the way. No matter how close we may be to them or how big of an influence someone may have had on us, not everyone is meant to be our spiritual travel companion forever. We all have to make our own decisions in life and God will call us in different directions. 

It can be painful parting ways. Some people have literally helped to shape our hearts. The impact and impression made by them on our lives can be deep and long-lasting. If we have loved them, we will experience grief, sorrow, and even anger or disbelief when it is time to part, but when it’s time to let go, it’s time to let go. 

God will not allow us to hold onto that which is no longer for us. If we try, we only make things worse and prolong our suffering. We are asked, especially in times like these, to have faith, to trust that our Heavenly Father truly loves us and wants what is best for us. 

It helps to remember, although it can be difficult to do so when we are in pain, that we are never really alone. No matter how lonely we get, no matter how hopeless we may feel, God is always with us. All we have to do is reach out for help and his loving hand will be there to guide us through whatever darkness we find ourselves in. 

As we move with and toward God, we will inevitably change. This means our relationships will change also. Like a butterfly breaking free from the chrysalis that once contained and nourished it, we must shrug off our old selves and our old relationships as God calls us to grow closer to him. 

If we have friends and family who are willing and able to grow with us, we should consider ourselves fortunate because the spiritual path is often one of solitude, even when we are not actually alone. Prayerful solitude should lead us back to community, however. Spiritual community helps to form, guide, and motivate us through the darkest nights when we feel lost, scared, and forsaken. Our spiritual community may not be who we expected or even desired, but they will be who we need. Our Heavenly Father always provides. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Praying for courage

I’ve been a public speaker on and off in various venues for the past twenty seven or so years. Most of my talks have revolved around recovery from drug and alcohol addiction, and the relationship with God that made my recovery possible. It’s a subject with which I have intimate knowledge and about which I am extremely passionate. And yet, I still get nervous before I speak.

I have spoken at countless venues in front of a variety of audiences, and it has always worked out. With the exception of one or two talks many years ago when my anxiety got the best of me, things have always gone well. Even in those rare one or two rare cases, I was able to pivot and pull it off.

Time and time again, my experience has proven that I have nothing to fear, I’m not an imposter, and things are going to be fine. Most importantly, however, my experience has proven that God will not abandon me, that he loves me, provides for me, and protects me. He has never let me down. And yet, I still get nervous before I speak.

I often wonder what it would be like to have perfect faith. That is, what would it be like to trust God implicitly, always, to fear nothing, and to never worry? While I do believe that this state of perfect faith is possible, if only because I believe that, for God all things are possible, I have a long way to go before I achieve it.

I have had brief moments of perfect faith. But like most people, I’m flawed and broken, impatient and untrusting, and I try to control things that are either out of my control or that would be better left to God. Precisely because of this brokenness, when I get nervous before I speak, and even when I don’t, I find a quiet space to pray. My fear is my own, but my courage comes from God.

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

Invest in spiritual tools

When I was a teenager, my father told me something like, “Invest in quality tools. If you buy cheap tools, they will break. Then, you’ll be buying them twice, the first time when you buy the cheap tools and the second time when you buy the expensive tools to replace the broken cheap tools.” Needless to say, I didn’t listen. For as long as I can remember, defiance against authority has plagued my decision making, even when it means self-sabotage. 

Many years later, I was in the middle of a project for work in the city and I realized that I didn’t have a flat-head screwdriver. So I made a quick run to the store. But there are not many hardware or tool stores in the city, so I stopped at the closest place I could find, which happened to be some sort of dollar store. 

Hesitant but in a hurry, I grabbed a screwdriver and checked out with the cashier. All the while, I thought to myself, “This thing is cheap, but it’s a screwdriver. What could go wrong? It’s not the best screwdriver, but it will get the job done. How could they mess up a screwdriver?” I wasn’t convinced, but I was trying to keep my spirits up. 

I made my way back to the job-site and put the screwdriver in the screw-head. As I attempted to turn the screw, the entire tip of the screwdriver broke off in the slot. I immediately thought back to my father’s warning about buying cheap tools and my head fell in shame and frustration. 

As much as I wanted to be angry at the manufacturer, the store I bought it from, or even the screwdriver itself, I knew that this was my fault and I couldn’t blame anyone else. After all, the signs were there – my father had warned me, I knew it was a dollar store, and my spidey-sense was tingling, even if I tried to shut it up – I just chose to ignore them.

More important than the dollar and some change that I spent on a screwdriver that couldn’t drive screws, I had just wasted an hour of my life and the job still wasn’t done. So I found a hardware store, bought a decent screwdriver, and went back to the job-site to finish what I’d started. It’s been several years since this happened, but both the lesson and the image of that broken screwdriver are burned into my memory.

I recently recounted this story to a friend when we were talking about how fortunate we are to have a set of spiritual tools with which to navigate our lives and through which to solve the problems we face. This wasn’t always the case and I’m beyond grateful that, through God’s grace, I have been given a new lease on life. I spent many years trying to manage with a set of cheap, broken, or non-existent tools. 

It wasn’t until I hit a spiritual, emotional, and psychological bottom that I was able to admit that what I was doing wasn’t working – that I was using a broken screwdriver – and I had no idea where to go or who to ask for help. But “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18 NIV)” and, through the kindness of people in my life who loved me, as well as the help countless generous strangers, God heard my cries and delivered me out of my suffering. 

It’s been many years since I made the decision to turn my will and life over to the care of God and more recently Jesus Christ, but I now have an entirely different outlook on life and an entirely new set of tools with which to work. Of course, I still make poor decisions rather frequently, whether out of obstinance, impatience, or ignorance, but I now know that in God’s word and in his grace, there is an infinite store of wisdom, love, and peace at my disposal if only I am willing to trust him and not settle for cheap tools that don’t work anyway. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

My wife hit me with an egg

While I was making pancakes for my daughter, my wife hit me with an egg. Well, that’s not exactly how it happened. My wife and I were both in the kitchen this morning, rushing around, getting our daughter ready for school, my wife ready for work, and myself ready to go visit my mom in the hospital. I was making pancake batter for my daughter’s breakfast. She likes the pumpkin pancake mix from Trader Joe’s. Today, I mashed up an over-ripe banana in it just to mix things up and so I didn’t have to throw it away, but I digress. 

As I gathered the ingredients for the pancake batter, I saw that my wife was getting something out of the refrigerator. I asked her to grab me an egg because the pancake recipe called for one. She got one out of the egg bin, reached over to hand it to me, and just as she did, I turned toward her, the egg and my elbow meeting at just the right time and angle for the egg to go crashing to the floor. 

For about thirty seconds, we both blamed each other for the mess and then it turned to joking. As my wife cleaned up the egg on the floor, which I think I thanked her for doing but will thank her for later just to be sure, I mixed the pancake batter and proceeded to make my daughter’s breakfast. In spite of the whirlwind of chaos, my daughter got to school on time, my wife made it to the office, and I drove out to the other side of the beltway to meet up with my brother who was acting as my mom’s caretaker for the day, and to see my mom. 

As I sat in a local coffee shop writing, reading, and waiting for the message that my mom was out of surgery, my wife called to ask if I needed any help getting our daughter home from school later. We talked over our plans for the day and both agreed that, if the other needed anything, we would be there to help, eggs in hand. We both laughed at the beautiful chaos that is our life. 

Some days things feel like they are going perfectly. Everything runs smoothly, we are on time, and it feels like nothing can stand in our way. The wind is at our backs, all the traffic lights are green, and the life just seems to fall into place. But other days, in spite of our best intentions and preparation, nothing seems to go right. We feel hurried, clumsy, and like nothing we do is working out. We oversleep, argue, we hit all of the red lights, and we drop the eggs. 

What I try to keep in mind is that God is ultimately in charge of all of this. Of course, we play our part. We have free will and God doesn’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. On the other hand, nothing happens in this world outside of God’s will, either his perfect will or his permissive will. Whether life seems to be going well or poorly, it is all being divinely orchestrated by a God who loves us. He is writing a divine love story for us, even if we don’t understand it from moment-to-moment or day-to-day. 

We don’t always know the plan. We can’t always see the bigger picture. We are asked to trust, to have faith, and to walk forward into the dark unknown on a promise, a promise that God loves us and will not fail us. In faith, God allows us to walk across the stormy waters toward him, but even when our faith falters, when the winds and the waves frighten us and we begin to feel like we are drowning, if we call out to him, he will reach out his hand to pull us up out of the depths (Matthew 14:22-33). 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox. 

He asks us to trust him

My mom is scheduled to have voluntary surgery on her neck tomorrow. She has one or more herniated discs that have been causing her pain for some time. The problem is that the discs are pressing up against her spinal cord. This makes her two options of either getting the surgery or not getting the surgery both risky. 

On one hand, even with our modern standards and practices, surgeries are inherently dangerous, especially around the spine. There is a risk that the surgery may not help her, or that it could make things worse. Additionally, some other unforeseen issue like an infection, for example, may arise as a result of the procedure. We simply can’t know. 

On the other hand, if she does nothing, the problem remains. She will have to live with the pain that has been bothering her for some time. Additionally, she has been warned by multiple doctors that, because her discs are pressing against her spinal cord, if left untreated, an accident could result in her being paralyzed from the neck down. This threat of paralysis is ultimately what motivated her to get the surgery. 

But I’m worried. I’m worried because I cannot predict the future and I don’t know what is going to happen. I’m worried because the whole thing is out of my control. While I know that this worry doesn’t help and it won’t change the outcome of the surgery, fear still haunts me. And yet, as I write this, I’m reminded that all God really asks from us is that we trust him. 

Since the beginning of time, God has been asking this one simple thing of his people, but, in spite of the fact that he is always faithful and always keeps his promises, we still hesitate. From Adam and Eve, Abraham, Noah, Moses, and the people of Israel, to David, the prophets, Mary, Joseph, the apostles, and Jesus himself, God asks us to trust him. 

He promises that he loves us, that he is always truthful, always faithful, always just, and that he will never lead us astray. He proves this in his written word in the Bible, in the living word of Jesus Christ, and in our own lives day in and day out. But like Adam and Eve in the Garden, we so often don’t believe him, like Moses at Mount Horeb, we are reluctant to answer his call, and like Thomas after the resurrection of Jesus, we doubt him and demand proof that he is who he says he is.

And yet, in spite of our prideful mistrust and disbelief, the Lord remains steadfast. He provides what we need, even when it is not what we think we want. He is faithful even when we are not and he loves us even when that love is not reciprocated. So, am I worried about my mother’s surgery? Yes. I am. Do I have reason to be? Well, I guess that depends which part of me you are asking. 

The selfish, broken, and sinful part of me worries because, like Adam and Eve, I have eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and I want to be like God, knowing what God knows, seeing what he sees, and determining the outcome of all things. But the faithful, trusting, and humble side of me knows that my Heavenly Father is always good, that he knows what is best, and that he has a plan that is beyond my understanding. And so I remain to pray. 

Robert Van Valkenburgh
Grappling With Divinity

To read my poetry and shorter writing, please visit Meditations of a Gentle Warrior and subscribe to receive my daily meditations in your inbox.