Advent: Trusting Seen and Unseen

I'm never really ready to walk through the passion at this time of year, but that is the path we travel through the beginning of Advent. Today we follow the disciples who are instructed to go and get a donkey and her colt for Jesus to ride into town. (Click to read...Matthew 21:1-11)

I'm one who learns through observing others. But reading with a lens of trust, I wonder if Jesus continues to do the things he can to to help us trust that God's purposes are being accomplished when it soon looks like nothing we expected will be accomplished.

Trust seems a fragile relationship for humans. Like a house of cards, it seems difficult to build and tumbles with the tiniest bump. So Jesus seems to be laying a foundation that might hold together, if we have eyes and heart to see.

Where do we get a donkey? God will provide. Say this and it will be loaned. Jesus enters in peace mode. The donkey symbolizes the peaceful intent of a ruler entering a city. And in this snapshot of time, the people trust. The laying of cloaks and branches is a sign of submission, being all in.

Of course, we know that changes. The same crowds that greet Jesus at the gate shout for his crucifixion days later. After his arrest and apparent impotence before Pilate and the temple authorities, we decide our trust was misplaced.

And that creates this wondering about our trust of God's purposes today. Are we good if life goes as we expect? On what is our trust of God's purposes based? Can we see the building blocks and assume that God will work God's purposes out, or do we too easily knock the house down when God's work doesn't look like "it should"?

Trust can be a painful journey, and perhaps that is our misunderstanding. Perhaps we assume that trust is painless, that staying in connection will only be joyful, that once "trust" is granted, the hard work ends. Perhaps that is the value of traveling through Jesus's passion at the beginning of Advent. If anyone trusted, it was Jesus. And the pain endured through the trust--well, I'm not sure I could have done it.

So God is asking us to look for God's work, to submit to God's purposes, to serve God's intent. And we get little glimpses of see-this-is-how-it-will-work-out because God knows we will always struggle with what we expected--the King--versus how God really works--the baby.