Trusting

Spiritual reflection to start the day with Bryan Kerr, a Church of Scotland Minister in Kilmacolm, Inverclyde.
Script:
Good morning. Well later today, Scotland play Brazil, and up and down the country, people will gather in living rooms and pubs and gardens to watch. They'll wear the same colours. They'll hold their breath at the same moments. They'll trust, against most of the available evidence, that this might just be the day.

There's something interesting about that. Football fans trust every week. They trust the manager. They trust the team. They trust, often without much reason, that the game will give them something worth the wait … and occasionally, even in Scotland, it does.

But the trust that matters in a life is usually quieter, and more private than that. It doesn't have a crowd around it. There's no stadium for the parent waiting up for a teenager. No singing for the person walking back into work after a hard diagnosis. No banners for the two people who said, years ago, I don't know exactly who you'll be in thirty years, but I'll find out with you because I love you. That's where the real trust lives, in the small leaning-back trusting that someone will be there to catch you .... the places, often, where nobody's even watching.

For Christians, trusting Jesus is meant to work like that too. Not the loud trust where we are certain of the outcome, not the absence of doubt. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, whatever we've sometimes been told. They travel together. A trust that has no room for questions isn't really trust, it's just a closed door.

What faith offers, on the days when life doesn't seem like it'll hold, is the company of others who've leaned back and learned to trust before us. The quiet sense that we're not the first to be afraid. And the slow discovery, again and again, that something steadier than us is waiting to hold us up.

God who holds what we cannot hold, give us the courage to lean back and trust today, even when we are not sure. Amen.