Trusting God in All Circumstances: My Way

I wanted to share how I’ve learned to start trusting god in all circumstances, my views on this topic, and the challenges I encounter when doing this.

I’ve had a curious journey with spirituality. Let me say now that I don’t consider myself Christian. I don’t go to church, at least not in the traditional sense. I was brought up in a secular family in an even-more-secular country.

I’m Christian, Buddhist, Sufi, Hindu and all the others, and yet none of them exclusively. I see God as a placeholder word for the universal reality that all these traditions point to. Right now, I’m deeply engaged in Tibetan Buddhist practices.

I’m a yogi, a practitioner of meditation, not a scholar analysing theism from an armchair. I want to live, breathe and drink God, the Buddha, our Source, our Suchness. I don’t care much for stereotypical boxes, false identities and graven images. I love all spiritual teachings, but most of all I love my deepest nature.

Anyways, whatever I am now, for many years I was a hardened scientific atheist, obsessed with maths and physics and chemistry and logical, mental explanations for the world.

Like Richard Dawkins, I found all the evidence I possibly could to discredit the Bible and the mythic, fundamentalist religious teachings. I was pretty successful, I think. It isn’t hard to find lots of utterly compelling evidence that the earth is billions of years old and wasn’t created in seven days. I thought I had sussed out the universe. I laughed self-righteously at all the religious nonsense.

This view dominated right through my school and university years, and though I got good grades, it turned out I was too clever for my own good. It wasn’t until I started practicing meditation, mindfulness, Buddhism and Sufism, studying human development, psychology, spirituality and Eastern practices, and developing a post-rational faith, that I discovered my spiritual life.

It’s hard to pin down exactly when I found God, because it was a gradual thing. I did have some particularly profound experiences in my early spiritual days, and they have guided me ever since. In fact, even before that time, I saw the radiant love of God shining down on me during a rough life experience. I realised how ill I was at the time and firmly let myself hear it, but with pure love and compassion. That moment spurred me to dramatically change my life.

I continue to have deep experiences of God, and they have spilled over into my everyday life. Over time, I’ve gradually come to appreciate more and more what God really is and how I relate to God.

Yet I also realise that God was always with me, even when I was totally asleep, even in vehement denial about God. Unfortunately, nobody had ever pointed me to this great Beingness that I have always been.

And this leads to how I trust God in all circumstances. I do so because I know that deep down, even when I forget, even when I am lost in delusion and ignorance, in the wheel of Samsara and the dungeons of Hell, even when I’m in pain, I know that God is who I really am and who we all really are and what the entire world is.

I also know that God loves me unconditionally. Not love in the human sense, where our love is limited to certain people and only when they behave in accordance with our ideals, but love as a quiet yet powerful, all-embracing force that engulfs and sustains my entire being and the entire world.

I don’t mean that God loves me as some kind of special treatment I receive. God doesn’t love me for a particular reason. He loves me equally however I am. It’s inherent, ever-present, guaranteed, unconditional. No matter what happens to me, God’s love is available.

That’s why I can trust God in all circumstances, no matter what the specific details are, however the cards appear to fall. The key is to take refuge in your spiritual connection at all times.

It takes strengthening and weight-training, and I’m not perfect. Often I fall back into my habitual patterns. Of thinking in terms of gain and loss, life and death, success and failure, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant, self and other, and all other kinds of dichotomies. I start to fear, crave, doubt, agonise, cling on, push away, and I suffer for it, as the Buddhists will gladly remind you.

But more and more I discover truly trusting god in all circumstances is the key to peace and equanimity in life. That doesn’t mean being passive or complacent. But it does mean you act with peace, knowing things are okay and will be okay.

I also see my life as a divine journey. This doesn’t mean some idealistic, fairy-tale story with a happy ending. My life is a divine journey simply because I’m experiencing it. Every experience is a teacher, a glimpse of God, a part of the divine plan for humanity and I. It’s not mine, it’s God’s, so I trust God in all circumstances.

I feel connected to a wise, deep life stream that is way beyond me. I’m just a vessel for it as it slowly unravels through me over the course of months and years. “God’s will be done”, not my will.

You might like my video on the mystical meaning of the Christian Cross.