Why do we Trust God?

[The Nehor]

2 hours ago, MustardSeed said:

Great question.  Objectively, no. I would never want her life either way. But I do believe she would be happier if she weren’t  so disillusioned with life for letting her down. She definitely operates from a currency model.  To be fair, severely abused children can very easily find messages of promise of relief through righteous living in primary lessons. (OR at least 40 years ago they could) 

She won’t let herself be angry with God. But she is a very angry woman.

I suspect she would be better off allowing herself to be angry with God. Sounds like it is redirected anger. Not allowing yourself to be angry with people you love leads to all kinds of badly directed emotions. With God it is worse because people get the idea that being angry with God will make God angry in return and to potentially laugh at that.

I had a friend tell me you can’t blame God for anything.

My response was: “Why not?”

[bluebell]

13 hours ago, Rain said:

I've pretty much always trusted God. Proverbs 3:5-6 is a balm to me because I know I can trust him. I often don't trust myself. I don't trust other people who tell me about God - I've always needed to verify what they were saying with Him.  Even with my husband, whom I trust more than anyone.

The one major time when I didn't trust God was during several years when I heard nothing from him... except one thing. Nothing about selling and buying a house. Nothing about schools for kids. My health. Job problems with my husband. Etc. Things were not going well with my son and the one thing I heard from God was "love him".  And that's the only meaningful time I didn't trust God. The only time I remember.

Loving him couldn't be enough. I needed to do something!  No, loving him was enough and things would have gone better if I had trusted and done that instead of trying to fix everything. 

Why can I trust God when other people can't?  I don't know.  Why do I have struggles others don't have? (rhetorical). I absolutely get why others struggle to trust though.

 

It is interesting how we are all so different and move through life with different understandings and different abilities, even when we come from very similar places (even when we come from the same family).  Different personalities are part of it i'm sure, but I also wonder if we might need to get different things out of life (have different weaknesses to move to strengths, etc.) so that is part of it.

[bluebell]

59 minutes ago, The Nehor said:

I suspect she would be better off allowing herself to be angry with God. Sounds like it is redirected anger. Not allowing yourself to be angry with people you love leads to all kinds of badly directed emotions. With God it is worse because people get the idea that being angry with God will make God angry in return and to potentially laugh at that.

I had a friend tell me you can’t blame God for anything.

My response was: “Why not?”

I agree.  I've found a better relationship with God when I allow myself to be angry at Him.  I don't stay in that place but it's an honest emotion sometimes so I think I have to start there if I want to get anywhere.

[Rain]

Sitting in sacrament meeting today the sacrament song had words that showed that people don't always trust God.  I was going to remember the song so I could tell you and the promptly forgot! Sorry. 

[Tony uk]

I feel that sometimes people feel anger towards God. Is because of the trust that we have in God. When things do not go our way, or things happen that we do not understand. Then that anger becomes aimed at God. We trust in God, because we are part of his family, and we can trust in God as the head of that family to make things good.

[Calm]

22 minutes ago, Rain said:

Sitting in sacrament meeting today the sacrament song had words that showed that people don't always trust God.  I was going to remember the song so I could tell you and the promptly forgot! Sorry. 

Do they send out the bulletin in an email so you could check?  Write the chorister or bulletin person or organist to find out if possible.

[Rain]

Just now, Calm said:

Do they send out the bulletin in an email so you could check?  Write the chorister or bulletin person or organist to find out if possible.

My husband had it. He is not home yet, but I'll ask if he still has it when he gets home. 

[MustardSeed]

30 minutes ago, Tony uk said:

I feel that sometimes people feel anger towards God. Is because of the trust that we have in God. When things do not go our way, or things happen that we do not understand. Then that anger becomes aimed at God. We trust in God, because we are part of his family, and we can trust in God as the head of that family to make things good.

That could why I don’t get mad any more at God.  No expectations.

This life is nuts. 

[Rain]

35 minutes ago, Calm said:

Do they send out the bulletin in an email so you could check?  Write the chorister or bulletin person or organist to find out if possible.

As Now We Take the Sacrament.

The line is

"And silently we pray For courage to accept thy will, To listen and obey."

While some trust is there, if you are wanting courage to accept God's will the trust isn't completely there.

Edited March 30, 2025 by Rain

[Benjamin McGuire]

On 3/29/2025 at 2:59 PM, Calm said:

I also hate it at times because of what can be inferred when the miracle of healing does not occur.  Would love to hear your thoughts on that.

If God were to perform miracles for even a half of a percent of the times that He gets asked to perform them, we would have countless stories of miracles. And it's worth pointing out that while we read and hear about healing miracles - they all occur within some sort of framework. So, I will agree with you. Perhaps there are people who have the gift of healing (and being healed). That is not one of the miracles that has happened to me. And while the New Testament has stories about these miracles - they aren't really the point. There is that narrative in Matthew 9 -

Quote

And, behold, they brought to him a man sick of the palsy, lying on a bed: and Jesus seeing their faith said unto the sick of the palsy; Son, be of good cheer; thy sins be forgiven thee. And, behold, certain of the scribes said within themselves, This man blasphemeth. And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, Wherefore think ye evil in your hearts? For whether is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? But that ye may know that the Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins, (then saith he to the sick of the palsy,) Arise, take up thy bed, and go unto thine house.

I don't have the answers here. I am not convinced that when people pray for healing, and healing occurs, that God had anything to do with it. I know of too many instances (as you suggest) where it doesn't happen. The real miracle isn't about fixing our human frailties and removing our mortal conditions. When my father needed a triple bypass, I had far more faith in his physicians recommendations than in a blessing (priesthood or otherwise). Perhaps this means that I don't have faith - but the reality is that - especially at my age - my experience is of a different sort. The real miracle is not about whether my colon works properly but whether I have a clear conscience before God when I eventually stand before him. And for every 'miraculous' event that has happened that has shaped my life, I can find hundreds of people for whom the entire question is muted - children who are starving and abused, child soldiers in the Sudan, the non-combatant citizens of Gaza. Does God answer their prayers? It is much harder, I think, to worry about righteous living when you are under such conditions. Where are their miracles?

I think that when we consider all of that, these stories in the New Testament aim at providing us with a different sort of guidance - that the gospel should be free of violence. That we should consider everyone our neighbor - and then treat them as ourselves. That we are require to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick and afflicted - regardless of any reason we might have to cross by on the other side of the road. I think that real belief is difficult, and that doubt is completely natural. This thread asks why we should trust God. If you really want me to dig down and answer that question, we trust God because God's message is not one of justice (no matter what some of my fellow LDS suggest here). God's message is not one of exclusion. It is a message that unless we can set aside the urge to violence and the urge to scapegoat, we can never create that heavenly kingdom here on earth - and this is what God asks us to do. And trust in God means that I don't have to worry about anyone else's righteousness. I can trust that God will judge them mercifully just as I ask Him to be merciful to me. It is trust in God that allows me to completely forgive everyone else (and then to forgive myself). And I think that it is difficult to accept at face value the claims that someone trusts God while at the same time they are completely in favor of discriminating against others.

Which is more important? That the man is the Matthew text is healed of his infirmary? Or that his sins are forgiven him?

My wife likes to leave pithy little sayings around the house for me to discover. She has put several of them right out in the open for me to read every day. One of my favorites is this one: "You do not find the happy life. You make it."

[Duncan]

9 hours ago, bluebell said:

Maybe Abinadi?  The guy was burned at the stake.

I like this talk, with the theme of "But if not".  The GA giving it shares the story of his 5 year old son who dies after getting a childhood disease.  I think it can be good to remember the times when the 'but if not' does happen in our scriptural or personal stories.  Nothing feels as lonely as believing that everyone else gets intervention but you. 

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2002/10/but-if-not?lang=eng. 

Do you believe that your client's life would be better if she was able to believe that she shouldn't expect anything from God? (sincere question)

I don't know any non religious people well enough to really gauge their happiness. It's an interesting idea.  I feel like the concepts aren't mutually exclusive, and that we can still expect things from God and also live in a space where we understand His love for us and are able to love others without seeking specific outcomes.  A space where we can be extremely grateful and still treat God as our Father.  

That's the space I've found my most happiness in but man it's hard for me to stay there!  I always seem to slip into the other spaces.

here is another talk  with the same theme, this is the one that I remember !

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2004/04/but-if-not?lang=eng

[manol]

9 hours ago, MustardSeed said:

The people who I know that are happiest are not necessarily religious. They do believe in God. But they don’t pray for outcomes. Instead, God just tells them of their worth and thereby God teaches them to love others wholeheartedly.  God teaches them to be grateful. These are the people I observe are happiest.

I vaguely remember sitting through talks about gratitude.  Seemed like gratitude was transactional:  "How can we expect God to give us more if we do not express gratitude for what we have?"  So gratitude had a not-so-hidden agenda, and was yet another addition to "The List" of all the things I was supposed to be doing but falling short on.  Ugh.

Somewhere between then and now I stumbled upon what might be called "agenda-less gratitude".  Imo it's an amazing thing.  If feels clean and pure.  And maybe this is just me, but it seems to be the quickest way to raise my spiritual energy by an octave or so.  All it takes is a quick but sincere two-word thought or prayer that goes something like this:  "Thank You."

 

3 hours ago, MustardSeed said:

That could why I don’t get mad any more at God.  No expectations.

Ime agendas for the behavior of others tends to not work out well for me.  Much better if I can adopt something like what @Benjamin McGuire describes in the quote below:

35 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

... the gospel should be free of violence. That we should consider everyone our neighbor - and then treat them as ourselves. That we are required to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick and afflicted - regardless of any reason we might have to cross by on the other side of the road... God's message is not one of exclusion. It is a message that unless we can set aside the urge to violence and the urge to scapegoat, we can never create that heavenly kingdom here on earth - and this is what God asks us to do. And trust in God means that I don't have to worry about anyone else's righteousness. I can trust that God will judge them mercifully just as I ask Him to be merciful to me. It is trust in God that allows me to completely forgive everyone else (and then to forgive myself). And I think that it is difficult to accept at face value the claims that someone trusts God while at the same time they are completely in favor of discriminating against others. (emphasis manol's)

Imo that is magnificent. 

I took a (presumably) rather different path and ended up in, or at least aspiring to, a similar place. 

Edited March 31, 2025 by manol

[MustardSeed]

12 minutes ago, manol said:

I vaguely remember sitting through talks about gratitude.  Seemed like gratitude was transactional:  "How can we expect God to give us more if we do not express gratitude for what we have?"  So gratitude had a not-so-hidden agenda, and was yet another addition to "The List" of all the things I was supposed to be doing but falling short on.  Ugh.

Somewhere between then and now I stumbled upon what might be called "agenda-less gratitude".  Imo it's an amazing thing.  If feels clean and pure.  And maybe this is just me, but it seems to be the quickest way to raise my spiritual energy by an octave or so.  All it takes is a quick but sincere two-word thought or prayer that goes something like this:  "Thank You."

 

Ime agendas for the behavior of others tends to not work out well for me.  Much better if I can adopt something like what @Benjamin McGuire describes in the quote below:

Imo that is magnificent. 

I took a (presumably) rather different path and ended up in, or at least aspiring to, a similar place. 

Lovely.  


 

 

[bluebell]

4 hours ago, Rain said:

Sitting in sacrament meeting today the sacrament song had words that showed that people don't always trust God.  I was going to remember the song so I could tell you and the promptly forgot! Sorry. 

Thanks for trying!

[bluebell]

26 minutes ago, Duncan said:

here is another talk  with the same theme, this is the one that I remember !

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/general-conference/2004/04/but-if-not?lang=eng

I really like that one too!

[Rain]

59 minutes ago, Benjamin McGuire said:

If God were to perform miracles for even a half of a percent of the times that He gets asked to perform them, we would have countless stories of miracles. And it's worth pointing out that while we read and hear about healing miracles - they all occur within some sort of framework. So, I will agree with you. Perhaps there are people who have the gift of healing (and being healed). That is not one of the miracles that has happened to me. And while the New Testament has stories about these miracles - they aren't really the point. There is that narrative in Matthew 9 -

I don't have the answers here. I am not convinced that when people pray for healing, and healing occurs, that God had anything to do with it. I know of too many instances (as you suggest) where it doesn't happen. The real miracle isn't about fixing our human frailties and removing our mortal conditions. When my father needed a triple bypass, I had far more faith in his physicians recommendations than in a blessing (priesthood or otherwise). Perhaps this means that I don't have faith - but the reality is that - especially at my age - my experience is of a different sort. The real miracle is not about whether my colon works properly but whether I have a clear conscience before God when I eventually stand before him. And for every 'miraculous' event that has happened that has shaped my life, I can find hundreds of people for whom the entire question is muted - children who are starving and abused, child soldiers in the Sudan, the non-combatant citizens of Gaza. Does God answer their prayers? It is much harder, I think, to worry about righteous living when you are under such conditions. Where are their miracles?

I think that when we consider all of that, these stories in the New Testament aim at providing us with a different sort of guidance - that the gospel should be free of violence. That we should consider everyone our neighbor - and then treat them as ourselves. That we are require to clothe the naked, feed the hungry, care for the sick and afflicted - regardless of any reason we might have to cross by on the other side of the road. I think that real belief is difficult, and that doubt is completely natural. This thread asks why we should trust God. If you really want me to dig down and answer that question, we trust God because God's message is not one of justice (no matter what some of my fellow LDS suggest here). God's message is not one of exclusion. It is a message that unless we can set aside the urge to violence and the urge to scapegoat, we can never create that heavenly kingdom here on earth - and this is what God asks us to do. And trust in God means that I don't have to worry about anyone else's righteousness. I can trust that God will judge them mercifully just as I ask Him to be merciful to me. It is trust in God that allows me to completely forgive everyone else (and then to forgive myself). And I think that it is difficult to accept at face value the claims that someone trusts God while at the same time they are completely in favor of discriminating against others.

Which is more important? That the man is the Matthew text is healed of his infirmary? Or that his sins are forgiven him?

My wife likes to leave pithy little sayings around the house for me to discover. She has put several of them right out in the open for me to read every day. One of my favorites is this one: "You do not find the happy life. You make it."

That sounds like the book I'm reading - The How of Happiness. It says biology goes into how happy we are, but a great deal of what makes us happy is what we do. 

[BlueDreams]

On 3/29/2025 at 11:56 AM, bluebell said:

In a different thread another poster mentioned (I think it was @MustardSeed) something to the effect of how they are glad that God doesn't ask them to trust Him without first proving He is trustworthy (not a direct quote but that's what I got from the post and since I can't remember which thread it was in I can't go back and look I'm hopeful I'm remembering correctly).

That statement got me thinking because my first reaction was that it seems like God expects me to trust Him all the time without first showing me that it's a good idea.  I'm not doubting the personal experience of the other poster, but for me, it hasn't been my experience.  Maybe that's because God treats us differently because we need different things, or maybe we just perceive things differently.  It doesn't really matter why my feelings are the opposite of theirs. 

Their experience made me wonder how other people view God and trust, and to want to discuss why trusting God is so dang hard for a lot of us.

In a book written by Emily Belle Freeman (she is currently the YW's general president) she writes about how hard it is for her to trust God, how hard it is for her to believe that God is good.  She holds back on trusting Him fully because so often His way is not her way, and her way always feels like the safest, best way to her.  Even when she learns that her way wasn't the best, and that God's way in some specific issue was actually better, she still struggles with trusting Him the next time some trial hits and she needs to.

She says:

I say amen to that.  Most of the time I find it absolutely terrifying to trust God, and for all the reasons she listed above.  I want to trust Him, and the times that I have (kind of been forced) to trust Him in the past, He hasn't let me down, not really.  It might have felt like it in the moment but with enough time and distance, the picture in the rearview mirror made perfect sense.

But none of that matters the next time trust is required.  I still feel like He's always asking me to jump without seeing the net.

How do we get to a place where we trust God first, and not after He has shown that in this instance He knows best?  How do we let God be God in our lives?

I haven't read the thread just yet as I don't want to shift my own answer in the process. 

 

I feel like I've gone though stages with trust in my life. Early on I trusted science and I trusted pragmatic religious practice. Science in the sense of odds and stats about this or that possible outcome from this or that exposure or scenario. It was rooted in my need for proof ...for everything. If you were going to tell me something was right or good or true, you better also give me a solid reason for it. 

Pragmatically, I could also see people's lives as proof for religious practices. I was miserable when I came to desire what I saw in other people of faith. They looked happy. I wanted that. There seemed to be simple means to get there. And as I did a few of them, things did get better. Proof. Simple. 

This transformed over time. Faith in science became nuanced as I realized that at some point the odds wouldn't be in my favor, our understanding would always be limited, and there would always be exceptions to the rules around human behaviors. 

In religion the shift happened more as I realized more complexity into the purpose of this life here. A simple assumption that the right answer was the one that would make me immediately happy shifted to one where meaning and something more lasting came from overcoming pain and experiencing the hardships life will bring. It came from realizing that becoming something better often meant experiencing something hard. I lost faith in my immediate happiness as a reward for faith-practice while gaining a sense that my eternal understanding, peace, and happiness could unfold from my faith in God through difficulty.

I find that faith has deepened as my relationship to affliction and pain has shifted. I don't seek these out, but I also don't believe I should avoid them. My goals and assumptions about how life should unfold assumes that pain, sorrow, and death are as essential as soil. I don't fear it as much as I used to and I have faith that what may come can be sanctified in God for my growth or the growth of others. That last part is likely still built on previous experiences for me and others that's shown me even in the worst, God is there.

 

Faith has become an expression of allowing the world to unfurl rather than trying to fuel the illusion that I can control and mitigate pain out of my life. I'm not perfect at it. Far from it. But I can see more the pattern in my life than I did in the past. The moments that have included the most yielding are the moments that have held some of my most sacred experiences. And these have illuminated God most to me. 

 

With luv,

BD 

Edited March 31, 2025 by BlueDreams

[BlueDreams]

8 hours ago, The Nehor said:

I suspect she would be better off allowing herself to be angry with God. Sounds like it is redirected anger. Not allowing yourself to be angry with people you love leads to all kinds of badly directed emotions. With God it is worse because people get the idea that being angry with God will make God angry in return and to potentially laugh at that.

I had a friend tell me you can’t blame God for anything.

My response was: “Why not?”

I can definitely see that. Although I get why people often scapegoat something else rather than the thing more directly responsible. Often the more responsible party also holds more complications or loss to recognize as the problem.

 

Not that I'm sure God's the problem in this. But there may be more sense of investment or risk in being angry at God than at someone or something else. 

 

With luv,

BD

[Benjamin McGuire]

9 hours ago, BlueDreams said:

I feel like I've gone though stages with trust in my life.

And this is not a unique experience:

Quote

When I was young, I couldn’t tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it’s all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe — I’ve counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.

Whenever I think there’s a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say “only” or “always,” someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like “principles of uncertainty” and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.

While I am on the fence about René Girard's ideas, he would have found your description interesting - especially the part that you wrote about desire: "I was miserable when I came to desire what I saw in other people of faith." For Girard, mimesis is the foundation of culture. From the wiki link:

Quote

Girard's main contribution to philosophy, and in turn to other disciplines, was in the psychology of desire. Girard claimed that human desire functions imitatively, or mimetically, rather than arising as the spontaneous byproduct of human individuality, as much of theoretical psychology had assumed. Girard proposed that human development proceeds triangularly from a model of desire that indicates some object of desire as desirable by desiring it themselves. We copy this desire for the object of the model and appropriate it as our own, most often without recognizing that the source of this desire comes from another apart from ourselves completing the triangle of mimetic desire. This process of appropriation of desire includes (but is not limited to) identity formation, the transmission of knowledge and social norms, and material aspirations which all have their origin in copying the desires of others who we take, consciously or unconsciously, as models for desire.

The Gospel, in a Girardian sense is about refocusing the object of our desire from those around us back toward God. (This only really comes to mind so easily this morning because I spent some time last week in a couple of workshops with Anthony Bartlett).

[stelf]

Something that really complicates this for me is what happens when we lose trust in the sources from which we learn about God?

[MustardSeed]

7 minutes ago, stelf said:

Something that really complicates this for me is what happens when we lose trust in the sources from which we learn about God?

We have to re learn to trust ourselves more. 

[Benjamin McGuire]

16 minutes ago, stelf said:

Something that really complicates this for me is what happens when we lose trust in the sources from which we learn about God?

This is one reason why, I think, that there is a necessity for that personal revelation - that personal experience with God. Even if it is not some sort of continuous experience or engagement. There is something of this sort in the D&C when Oliver Cowdery is having his doubts. So D&C 6:22-24 -

Quote

Verily, verily, I say unto you, if you desire a further witness, cast your mind upon the night that you cried unto me in your heart, that you might know concerning the truth of these things. Did I not speak peace to your mind concerning the matter? What greater witness can you have than from God? And now, behold, you have received a witness; for if I have told you things which no man knoweth have you not received a witness?

There is a lot to unpack there, but, I think it is relevant to the question. I think it can be a bit more complicated than this if it is our own experience that we become skeptical of - but - I think that this witness from God is certainly greater than those sources that we tend to look at as authoritative (but which we can lose trust in).

[stelf]

15 minutes ago, MustardSeed said:

We have to re learn to trust ourselves more. 

I agree completely. I suppose it's not too different that the process we generally go through as we become adults and realize that our parents do not have all the answers. 

[JVW]

21 minutes ago, stelf said:

Something that really complicates this for me is what happens when we lose trust in the sources from which we learn about God?

We learn about the God of Israel from the Old and New Testament. In the LDS church we have the Book of Mormon to reinforce the Bible. If you don't believe in any of those texts but you still believe in God then you should start reading other religious texts that define God differently and see if any of them resonate with you.

[MustardSeed]

I think this is what I was talking about earlier.  
God has never let me down in the trust I have that He exists- love, beauty, energy, connection- it’s abundant and very consistent.  
I don’t think God expects me to blindly trust any men and women without accountability to be held. IMO.