A Cardboard Box Hyena

One of my students had been asking me for help in rounding out a part of her papier mache creature. When, today, I took a pair of scissors to her cardboard box hyena, and she watched me lop off a part of the shoulder, the horror which rang through her voice was apparent: “Miss Milco, what are you doing?!”

Though she soon saw how it solved the problem of making her hyena a little less boxy, her question still stands. For I, too, have asked my Teacher on many occasions: “What are You doing? You’re cutting away the very part I need. What are You doing? Didn’t You understand what I was asking? What are You doing? Your answer’s so different than what I’d meant - ”

To walk by faith does not, however, have anything to do with our discerning God’s reasons. We are no more called to know His specific aims than we are to “bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion” (Job 38:31). Our call is only to trust.

And that is where the difficulty arises. For we are a people absorbed with sight, with evidence which should motivate us to decide. We rely upon proof in everything from court cases to sales pitches. And we refuse to be swayed without cold, tangible reasons to believe.

Yet there is a beautiful example in Luke 5 which points us to the kind of obedience which Christ seeks:

Now it happened that while the crowd was pressing around Him and listening to the word of God, He was standing by the lake of Gennesaret; and He saw two boats lying at the edge of the lake; but the fishermen had gotten out of them and were washing their nets. And He got into one of the boats, which was Simon’s, and asked him to put out a little way from the land. And He sat down and began teaching the people from the boat. When He had finished speaking, He said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch” (v. 1-4).

Why would He ask of them to do what all evidence pointed to the contrary of their accomplishing? Had He missed the discouragement on their faces? Why would He ask of them to try once more, when they had no reason to believe circumstances would be any different?

And yet, the command is a grace. For in it, He permits Peter to voice a faith which states, as resoundingly as Job’s (see Job 13:15), that it is not a matter of understanding what is being asked, but of knowing the One who is asking.

For Peter’s response comes in weariness, yet also in acknowledgement of three elements:

“Master…”

…that Christ remains his Lord, his Teacher; the only One who is wise, the very One to whom his allegiance, submission, and obedience are due.

“…we worked hard all night and caught nothing…”

…a recognition of the impossibility of circumstances; a human estimation of what is attainable, and what logic says should not be attempted.

“…but I will do as You say…”

…nevertheless, all trust is rightly placed in You alone. (Or, as the NIV words it even more emphatically, “…but because You say so, I will…”)

We are not given opposing circumstances that we may be undone, but rather, that we would recognize with grateful submission that – if God is asking – it is that He may supply us the opportunity to declare more fully our trust in His character. And so, when God brings us to those moments in which our trust of Him seems the greatest affront to logic, we have the joy of crying out, even as events confound our reasoning, that our certainty of Him (2 Tim. 1:12) runs deeper than our ability to discern what lies around us.

For either we can look at the horror and discouragement of the circumstances, and declare that God’s character is contingent upon those transient elements of life; or we can look to His immutable character, and state emphatically, even where “sight” cannot bridge itself to understanding, “My God, in whom I trust!” (Psalm 91:2).