Where do we place our trust?

One of my favorite poems is about trust. It was written by Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science, and begins,

If worlds were formed by matter,
     And mankind from the dust;
Till time shall end more timely,
     There’s nothing here to trust.
     (“Miscellaneous Writings 1883-1896”, p. vii)

To me, that poem has always spoken to the heart of human experience. It asks, “Where do we place our trust?” Trusting in a world seemingly composed of matter comes with the conviction that life is limited, often unfair, and generally unreliable. And this view can be very convincing.

But Christian Science teaches that, through practice rather than theory, we can have a calm certainty that our “world has sprung from Spirit,” as the poem later says. A world that is sprung from Spirit, God, is safe, solid, sound – trustworthy.

It may take courage to trust Spirit. Where does that courage come from? It comes from God! We don’t have to create the courage or the ability to trust. The Bible story of Daniel shows that he trusted God before and after he was thrown into the lions’ den, and that his trust was vindicated by his safety. We all have the same inherent courage and ability to trust God.

To truly trust God, we have to give up affixing conditions to our trust – as in, “I will trust God if this happens” or “I will trust God when that happens.” Christian Science teaches us to rely on God, good, whether things go the way we hope – personally, politically, globally, – or (especially) when they don’t.

This kind of trust isn’t irrational but spiritually sound, based on what Mrs. Eddy refers to in the Christian Science textbook, “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” as “a sweet and certain sense that God is Love” (p. 569).

God is Love, regardless of where we live, what political party is in power, how much money we have, or even how much faith we have. Christ Jesus said that if we “have faith as a grain of mustard seed” we can move mountains (Matthew 17:20).

It’s not the size of our faith that matters so much as our understanding that trusting God’s infinite power is not wishful thinking; it’s acknowledging the divine law of Love as absolute fact.

Many years ago I learned a valuable lesson about the healing effect of exercising the courage to trust God. I was a full-time university student as well as working two part-time jobs while trying to start my writing career. My living situation was stressful, and finances were limited. In the midst of all this, I suddenly began having panic attacks that made it very hard to leave my apartment.

But being a student of Christian Science gave me a firm foundation for a willingness to trust God, who is all good and only good – in fact, in some languages, “good” is the term for God (see Science and Health, p. 286).

The wisdom of this reliance on God, good, was confirmed for me by a passage in Proverbs that reads: “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (3:5, 6).

And that is what I did. That Bible passage gave me a path, so to speak, by which I could find my way out of the fog of fear to trust more in Spirit, God, than in a belief in a limited, matter-based world.

The healing came gradually, like the dawn. It came, not through human will or by “powering through,” but with trust. And courage. I found my freedom from fear the way it is described in Science and Health: “Step by step will those who trust Him find that ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble’” (p. 444).

One year later, I had a new and more harmonious living situation and was working full time at the newspaper I had been freelancing for.

But the courage to trust God came first. It always does.

So if it seems as though there’s nothing here – that is, in a material sense of existence – to trust, as the poem at the beginning of this article says, take heart in the fact that your “world has sprung from Spirit.” The world of Spirit is the real world, and that world has no end. And it doesn’t include any fear. Just Love. That’s what we can trust.

Adapted from an article published in the Aug. 12, 2024, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.