Daily work

The hardest job I awake to daily, the thing that my challenges me like no other, is not what I get paid to do. It's not my position at Starbucks. It's not my writing. It's not what I've studied in school, what I volunteer to do as a service, or, if I were unemployed, what position I'm searching for.

I wake up each morning and the task handed to me, the only task God asks of me, is this: to trust.

With all the questions running through my mind each day, all the uncertainties, all the pieces of the puzzle I want to fit together and feel peace, isn't trust the hard work? And if it's the hard work, isn't it easier, lazier, for me to choose stress or worry or anxiety over trust? Let my mind run rampant like a child with permissive parents. Ann Voskamp says this, and it makes me think: "Are stress and worry evidence of a soul too lazy, too undisciplined, to keep gaze fixed on God? To stay in love?" Because trust takes continual discipline. I can't coast in trust, at least not for longer than the span of a driveway, because it doesn't take long to encounter a bump in the sidewalk.

What really defines my life is not my employment (or perhaps, lack of it), but trust. This trust defines what I see, and life is held in the sight of my eyes.

Thankfully, I'm not being graded daily on whether or not I succeed at trust. God isn't hovering over me with a clipboard, jotting notes on my performance with a raised or furrowed brow. Each day, each moment even, is a chance to start fresh and choose trust. To choose trust is to choose to receive his love, because love is trust, too.

May we awake to choose trust - and love - today; to keep getting back up when we fall and scrape our knees; to feel our souls swell with the life of seeing deep in trust; to feel the gaze of love upon us.