a blog by Miriam Jessie Fisher

This week’s reading was about Abraham offering Isaac – such a powerful and somewhat perplexing (to me) reading. How did Isaac respond to being offered as a sacrifice – how did it effect his relationship with his Father?

Was his trust like Abraham’s? Was his peace with him?

In a later reading for this week there is a challenge to offer ourselves to righteousness. It feels kind of the same thing – this reckless trust.

Do we trust God enough to lay it all on the line?

Or is it easier to apply natural wisdom to situations and to hold a little back. I could so easily have ‘spiritually talked myself’ out of Abraham’s sacrifice. Come now, I can’t have heard this right – Isaac is the son of God’s promise. He wouldn’t want this thing done. For goodness sake he even promised to make Ishmael into a nation and he was just Hagar’s son. There’s no way he could approve of this. I heard wrong, it wasn’t God’s word to me – I was confused, maybe it was evil?... and so on.

In hindsight we know.

Reckless trust – that has been my phrase this year.

Trust that takes us to a new country, to a new church, into new endeavours….. maybe it seems easy or stupid or something else.

But some days all we have is trust.

The kind of trust a person exercises when they leap from a plane with only a backpack and silk fabric to stop them dying…. only more so.

Yet I am daily faced with this trust – trusting him to sort out the best for me as I walk with determination in his steps. Trust that he will not let me be overcome by my own sin –

and he will provide what I need

but sometimes I have to head up the hill with only wood and a knife and my most beloved thing/s –  and I need to know that those things – my comfort, my thoughts, my reputation, my finances, a relationship ….. whatever they are sometimes need to be entirely surrendered as lost before I see another way.

and the only way to really give those things up is when I want God’s way more than my own

and the only thing that gives me the strength to do it is reckless trust

and I am flinging myself up that hill with my heart heaving with trepidation but I repeat