From Fear To Trust
“When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”
—Psalm 56:3
For many of us who were raised in biblical homes, this is a very familiar verse. It may even have been one of those verses we repeated almost nonstop when we were little and something frightened us.
Let’s all be honest for a moment. Does this situation sound familiar?
You’re about five years old, tucked into bed, when suddenly you wake up because of a noise. The whole house is quiet, and you have no idea what woke you. Maybe it was a bad dream. Maybe you didn’t really hear anything at all. Maybe you have way too many stuffed animals piled onto your bed, and one of them fell onto the floor at exactly the right moment to wake you up.
But you don’t know that.
All you know is that it’s dark.
The moon is shining through your window, casting strange shadows across your room. Suddenly, your five-year-old imagination begins doing what five-year-old imaginations do best. Every shadow looks suspicious. Every little sound seems louder than it should.
And then you remember:
“When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”
So you start saying it.
Maybe you whisper it over and over beneath the covers until, before you even realize it, you’ve fallen back asleep.
Then morning comes.
The sunlight fills the room, the shadows are gone, and whatever seemed so frightening a few hours earlier doesn’t seem nearly as powerful anymore.
There may be a few variations in your story, but come on…can you relate?
Whether that exact scenario has happened to you or not, every one of us knows what it is like to be afraid.
And as we get older, the things we fear change.
The monster in the shadows is replaced by things that are much more real.
We fear for our safety. We fear for our families. We worry about our children and the world they are growing up in. We wonder whether we are making the right decisions. We worry about finances, relationships, health, the future, and circumstances completely outside of our control.
Maybe you’re traveling alone and find yourself suddenly questioning whether you are safe.
Maybe you’re a father trying to raise a family in a world that seems to be pulling in a hundred different directions.
Maybe you’re a single mom trying desperately to raise children who know and love Christ, and they have reached the age where their questions are getting harder—and you don’t always know what to say.
Maybe your fear looks completely different.
But it is still fear.
And there is something incredibly humbling about knowing that the God of the universe cares about it.
Psalm 56:3 doesn’t say, “I will never be afraid.”
It says, “When I am afraid…”
Fear itself is not evidence that our faith has failed.
The question is what we do with that fear when it comes.
“…I put my trust in you.”
Trusting God does not always mean the thing frightening us immediately disappears. It does not mean every difficult question suddenly has an answer. It does not mean we know what tomorrow will bring.
It means that in the middle of everything we do not know, we remember the One we do know.
The world around us can feel incredibly uncertain.
Circumstances change. Plans fall apart. People disappoint us. The future rarely unfolds exactly the way we expect it to.
But Christ does not change.
The same God you could call out to as a frightened five-year-old lying underneath the covers is still the God you can call out to when the fears are bigger, the consequences are real, and the answers are harder to find.
Maybe that is why such a simple verse can stay with us for a lifetime.
“When I am afraid, I put my trust in you.”
Not if fear comes.
When it comes.
And when it does, we have a choice about where we place our trust.
In a world filled with uncertainty, we can place it in the One who is certain.
So whatever is frightening you today—whatever question you cannot answer, whatever future you cannot see, whatever circumstance you cannot control—bring it to Him.
You do not have to understand everything before you trust Him.
You simply have to know where to turn when you are afraid.
Christ is there. Trust in Him.
