We’ve seen a lot of posts on social media about people’s “word” for the upcoming year, a word that will focus their thoughts and actions in 2023. After much consideration, we here at Freedom Lake have decided that our word for 2023 is…trust.

Trust is defined as “firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something”. We can also look at trust as an expectation of how someone will act or behave in the future.

Trust is something that can be difficult for us to extend to others because the most common time that we are asked to trust people involves uncertain or negative circumstances or asks us to come out of our comfort zone. 

Trusting someone is always easy when the stakes are small, when the outcome can be seen, when we’ve had a long-term relationship with someone who has never steered us wrong or who has never failed us. 

But what about when we are not confident in the outcome and the entity is someone with whom we’ve not had a long-term relationship? Then extending trust is a little more difficult and taking the familiar path – even though it isn’t the healthiest path – is the preferred way because we know what to expect.

Trust is something that we are constantly speaking into the men of Freedom Lake. As spiritually young followers of Jesus, they are still in a vulnerable position – as any follower of Jesus is – to the pressures, influences, and temptations of the world. 

For men who used to be incarcerated and are now seeking to navigate in a world as a follower of Christ, their trust gets tested on a daily basis. Freedom Lake was founded to give the men we mentor a place where they could focus on their relationship with God as they began their new lives as men on mission for Christ.

However, the world is still out there. A world that tells them they need to get money in their pockets, a world that seeks to influence them away from “leaning fully into God”, a world that pulls the men back into habits and a lifestyle that is not always in the best interest of the men.

Every day we are asking the men of Freedom Lake to put their lives, their hope, their trust in God in situations and in circumstances that are unfamiliar and in which they do not have a clear indication – or an idea for that matter – of how those situations and circumstances will turn out. This is when spiritually young believers can start to question their standing with God and how much they trust God.

As human beings we know it is easy to trust and/or to be confident when things are going well but do we trust and are we confident when life goes sideways or when people in our personal sphere try to pull us away from what God called us to in the first place? We made that commitment, so do we think God changed His mind…or did we?

It is easy for any of us to say that we trust God but do we really? Are we really trusting that God’s word is true? And, for that matter, what is trust?

When we look to the Bible we see scores of instances when God asked people – Abraham, Moses, Noah, Jonah, Gideon…to name just a handful – to trust Him and to do as He has asked. Some of those individuals said yes immediately while others took a little bit longer to come around, not because they wanted to disobey God but because they were unsure about their safety in a particular situation (see: Jonah going to Ninevah as one of many examples of this).

It is easy, too, to say that it’s easier to trust people that we can see over a God we cannot but remember Jesus walked among people who He asked to do certain things and they did not trust Him in all circumstances (see: Peter). Again, when uncertainty and a perceived level of potential harm to ourselves – physical, financial, career, family, reputation, social standing – is proportional to our level of trust. Low uncertainty = high trust. High uncertainty = low trust.

No matter how long humanity has and will walk Earth, this will always be true.

What you may not realize and what we constantly pour into the men of Freedom Lake is that even though their relationship with God may be relatively new, His relationship with us is Eternal and that doesn’t just mean from the time we came to Christ and forward. No, our Eternal relationship also extends all the way back to Adam. 

If we look at the Bible as, say, a diary we can see circumstance after circumstance that what God says is true all the time and He is trustworthy all the time. God does not ask us for our strength (he’d be a very small God if He did) but asks us to see what we can do when we lean into His strength, especially in uncertain situations or circumstances (see: Noah and Gideon).

We can see in Scripture more examples than we can count that God keeps His promises, He does what He says He will do, and that He is with us always – good times or bad times. He is always working, whether we can see it or not.

Conversely, we can see example after example in our own lives at how the world around us does not have our best interests at heart and cannot always be trusted. It’s a fallen world we live in so it stands to reason that it is not something to find trustworthy. Sometimes we can, other times we can’t. BUT God can always be trusted.

Trust as our word for 2023 is our encouragement to all that God’s Word, His Ways, and His Promises are to prosper us and not to harm us regardless of the people, situations, circumstances, influences, pressures, and temptations in the world around us.

Jeremiah 29:11 states it this way: “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future. Friends, what a faithful friend we have in Jesus, bless God for your dedication to acknowledge and praise Him.”

Despite how the world around us acts and what it tells us how we should act, we teach the men we disciple to stand firm in knowing that we can trust God with:

…our emotions

…His timing

…His provision

…His direction

…His will for our lives

God can be trusted in any and all aspects of our lives. It’s documented since before the dawn of time and will be true long after the end of time.

Trust me on that.