Trusting God can be a struggle for the godliest people. As when Peter walked on water until he noticed the waves, the struggle comes from looking at circumstances and feelings. Even David had trouble maintaining his trust. Allow me to offer my own paraphrase of Psalm 30:6-12:

When I felt secure. When I felt secure. Was I secure, or did I just feel secure? Whatever it was, it seemed, it felt like it would last forever. But it didn’t. When life took a downturn and I didn’t feel secure any more. It felt like God had decided to hide from me. It felt like I was all alone. It felt like I just might die.

So I said to God, what’s up? Where did you run off to? If I die, will my corpse praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness? I said to God, listen to my prayers; help me. And he did. It felt great. It felt like I’d never have to cry any more. It felt like I could dance forever. And of course, I promised to thank God forever, too.

What’s wrong with this picture? Now when it’s my own faith walk careening back and forth between complacency and despondency, it never seems like anything is wrong with the picture. So God got David to write a psalm about trusting God when his feelings flip-flopped like that.

David wrote Psalm 30 for the dedication of the temple: not the magnificent temple that Solomon built, of course, but for the tent that he erected in Jerusalem. A long time passed from the day Samuel anointed him king to the day his throne was secure. He moved his capital to Jerusalem and brought the ark of the covenant back to the tent he erected. In all that time, his faith had experienced highs and lows.

The patience of the potter's hands

Now perhaps it’s just modern translations that bring feelings into the psalm, but I think if points to a truth that the modern American mind needs to grasp. Feelings never tell us anything about what’s happening around us. Feelings never tell us any external truth. In God, we are secure; nothing can change that.

Faith, being secure, and trusting God do not depend on feelings, but that does not make feelings useless. They do tell us what we’re letting our mind focus on. When outward events throw us for a loop, our feelings will reveal whether we see it as a problem we can’t solve or as an opportunity to grow. When outward events turn in our favor, out feelings will tell us whether we think we somehow deserve the good times or whether we are receiving good fortune. Our feelings will definitely tell us that, but have we learned how to listen?

More to the point, if we know how to listen, our feelings can tell us whether our mind is really focused on God or not. They tell us if we have an active, living faith or if faith is just a word that gives us religious warm fuzzes. God’s grace gives us the good times and helps us through the bad times. Am I complacent in good times? That should warn me that I am not really trusting God. Am I despairing in bad times? That should warn me that I am not really trusting God.

Perhaps the opposite of being pushed around by unexamined feelings is patience–patience to give wholehearted thanks in good times and bad, to look to God for guidance and help in bad times, and to recognize that we are secure in him in any case. In patience, I can recognize that nothing but God himself lasts forever. Everything else changes.

In patience, I can recognize that not all is rosy in good times and be on the lookout for how to respond to any gathering clouds. In patience, I can recognize that even in the worst of times, something good is all around me. I can take focus off my feelings of pain to appreciate the beauty of a flower or enjoy my food or recognized the hand of God in a chance conversation.

A habit of patience becomes perseverance, a new level of intention and intensity in our faith. Another way of putting it, a habit of patient focus on God’s grace builds our strength in trusting God. That way, when bad times give way to good, we can say with David that God turned wailing into dancing, that God removed sackcloth and clothed us with joy. And then when good times give way to bad times, trusting God means that, truly being secure, we don’t remove our joy and clothe ourselves with sackcloth.