From the moment you took your first breath until your last breath, the big question of your life is ‘can I trust the other to care for me?” Trust of others is more essential to life than food or water. Everyone here had parents and grandparents who immediately assumed care of you from the very first moment you entered this world on your own.
As we grow older, we learn that there are people and situations that you cannot trust Most often it is only when your parents are very elderly that you learn that there were some people in their lives that they did not trust.
The very next time you pull up to a stop sign and the Canadian traffic stops (even though there is no other vehicle at the same corner), you appreciate how much we can trust our fellow citizens to follow the traffic rules. We trust each other to obey the traffic rules.
We also must apply this to our relationship with God. Is God trustworthy? Faithful?
The second Sunday of Lent this year we are given the story of Abraham and his dilemma to trust that God would be faithful to the promises made in the covenant between God and Abraham/Sarah and the people. He had been promised to be the father of a great nation. The promise was to be fulfilled through the birth of his son, Isaac.
Along the line Abraham understood he was to sacrifice this son (the child of promise) to God, the great One. Can you imagine the struggles and the contradictions that Abraham felt in his heart?
We know that Abraham trusted in God and was delivered from this horrendous sacrifice by the angel sent from God. Abraham was faithful and trusting and named the place “The Lord will provide.”
There are moments in our life with God when we also are put to the test. Crushing events happen to us, such as the accidental overdose of our twenty-four year old. How could we lose our only child? A liquor store in Winnipeg was robbed and your cousin was injured in the robbery. Where is God in all this senseless suffering? Does God not protect us?
Why was this story of the sacrifice of Abraham in the Bible (child sacrifice was absolutely abhorrent to the Jews)? The only possible explanation is that when the story of Abraham was told the Jewish people were also telling their own story. They had suffered so much in the seventy years of exile in Babylon. They had learnt through many tears to trust in God. When they told this story they were telling their own story at the same time.
This Sunday, take the story of Abraham and substitute your own painful situation and the moments that you cried out to God for protection.
Reflect back through your tears and frustrations when God proved to be faithful to your life and your family. When did you experience that “The Lord will provide?”
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