Can We Trust Our Lives to God?

Back in the early 80s, I volunteered at a summer camp on Canada’s west coast. The program director was big on developing team camaraderie among staff. She’d selected several activities to accomplish her goal.

One activity involved staff lining up and facing each other while holding a huge blanket between them. Volunteers climbed a ladder at the end of the lineup, closed their eyes, and dropped backwards onto the blanket one by one. Most of them felt nervous about taking the fall because doing so required them to trust their friends’ strength and ability to hold the blanket. Thankfully their friends proved reliable.

Trusting our lives to God

That activity illustrates a basic but all-important spiritual truth. First Peter 4:19 says,

“Trust your lives to the God who created you, for He will never fail you.”

Easier said than done, right? Especially when life takes a detour onto the road marked suffering. Or He asks us to wait. Or He asks us to forgive a person who’s deeply hurt us.

Frankly, I’ve found trusting my life to God unnerving at times. My desire for control reveals that I falsely believe I can orchestrate my circumstances more successfully than He can. I have to remind myself that the opposite is true.

The same God who created the entire universe created you and me. Who’s more trustworthy to accomplish His eternal purposes than the One who knit us together in our mother’s womb and ordained every moment of our lives before we were even conceived?

Time and time again, Scripture reminds us to yield control and trust the Lord. To close our eyes, let go, and fall into His arms. And then He gives us a promise: “I will never fail you.”

That doesn’t mean life will turn out the way we dream or plan. But it does mean that no matter what happens, His presence is always be with us and His purposes will always be accomplished.