Trust and Obey
We sang the song, it seemed like, almost weekly. “Trust and Obey/ for there’s no other way/ to be happy in Jesus/ but to Trust and Obey . . . .” A go-to for small-town worshipers on Wednesday nights at the Church of Christ. A song regulars could sing without the assistance of a hymnal, though there was always a reminder. “Turn next to #915.” We sang it so often we forgot to hear the words.
Trust and Obey. The directives come hitched like a trailer to a truck, though it’s hard to say which is doing the pulling and which is being pulled. They’re not the same and yet one rarely makes a showing without the other in tow.
A seasoned high school basketball coach who’s won enough to wonder and lost enough to know she must, danced along the tension line that tethers these two terms. “On offense,” she said with easy assurance, “I want my players to trust their understanding. Trust their instincts. Trust one another.” Individual certitude, clearly, is her team’s offensive gravitational pull.
“On defense, though,” she continued, “I want them to obey the rules.”
She questioned if imploring one might cancel the other one out. Or, at the least if she was asking for, and expecting, impossible things.
Another friend, the Rhodes scholar, says trusting is easy. It’s the obeying part that’s hard. He reads 2 Corinthians chapters one and two. “It’s clear,” he says “what God wants me to do, and yet I’m having a really hard time doing it. I trust Him but obeying is tough.” I get it and concur, however, trusting, too, can be a slog. I immediately think of how often I fail to trust my instincts, my experience, my training, my tennis swing, my choice of ice cream.
We are taught to follow the rules, abide by the laws of the land, toe the ridged line. We stop at red-and-white octagonal signs when we are driving. We pay for groceries before we leave the store. We file our taxes, take our trash bins to the curb on Monday mornings, wear clothes (well, at least we mostly kind of do) when out in public. It’s not that hard to go where someone points you. Legions of soldiers learn quickly how to one-two left-right march.
But it’s not easy to trust and obey.
Twisted like a pretzel around the integral and the insignificant, obedience and trust both exist within us. Each is sometimes easy to get hands on. Each is sometimes almost impossible to grasp. In desperate need of one another, they make an intimate team.
The weathered words of John H. Sammis, originally overheard at a revival coming from an unnamed man, have stuck because there is no other way.