Training for Trust

By Charlie Johnston

Years ago, when I was visiting Alabama, I went to visit my sister at a Farmer’s Co-Op where she worked as assistant manager. When I got there, they were frantically busy; four registers open and at least three deep waiting at each. My sister had come out to run a register during this rush, so I got in her line. Directly in front of me was a farmer who was raising quite a ruckus, demanding to be served immediately because he was a big customer. My sister glared at him and said, “You’ll wait your turn or you’ll go to the very back of the line.” He had been raising quite a stink, but then he quieted down and muttered audibly, “I’ve been praying for more patience.”

It hit me wrong and I said, “Don’t you know that when you pray for patience, God doesn’t sprinkle you with magic fairy dust to make you patient? He gives you more opportunities to practice patience. So quit griping and thank God for answering your prayer.” Instead of being angry, the farmer looked at me like he had been pole-axed and said, “You’re right. I should have known that. I’m a preacher.”

Last month I got more calls than I ever have from people in great and terrible pain. Some involved intractable family issues, others dire health issues – a few of which were terminal, and some who had suffered real tragedy and loss. It got me thinking that it has pleased God to give a lot of people the opportunity to practice trust.

Many people (and good people, at that) misunderstand trust to mean that if you become pious enough, God will do what you want. To the contrary, trust means learning to want what God wants, even when you can’t quite discern it. It is to trust that, when you surrender to God, whatever He allows to befall you is for your benefit and that of His glorious Kingdom. You were conceived to eternity, required to spend a brief moment on this mortal plane. Once you emerge from the cocoon of this life you enter into an eternity of perdition or the next step on the road to an eternity of paradise. In that sense it is like real estate: the key issue is location, location, location. It helps to know that how you comport yourself in the brief moment of this life determines how God will judge you. Location, location, location.

(I’m going to briefly go down a rabbit hole here on behalf of my Protestant friends, many of whom read these columns. I have seen an uptick in hostile statements that Catholics think they can save themselves by works, when only God’s grace can save. Some of that is true…but the emphasis misses the point. Yes, some Catholics mistakenly do. I’m thinking here of the mob boss who donates heavily to the Church in between contracting hits and thinks that makes a difference. That is an error on the part of some Catholics. But the emphasis some Protestants put on their statement suggests that works are irrelevant – or nearly so. And THAT is also an egregious error…that is also contra-Biblical. You shall know a tree by its fruit. Good works are the invariable fruit of real faith. Ask St. James – and maybe read his encyclical. The fact is, Martin Luther made up his own idiosyncratic theology and tried to remove the books from the Bible that contradicted it. He succeeded in removing seven books from the Christian Old Testament for his followers. He did NOT succeed in getting the five books he wanted removed from the New Testament. So we are constantly confronted with some amateur theologians contradicting Scripture to support Luther while convincing themselves they are “Scripture only.” Not to worry, I have to deal with bad Catholic amateur theologians these days far more than Protestant ones – but it is very clear that MANY Christians of all stripes like to make up their own theology, unrelated to actual writings, and go ballistic when they are contradicted. Good works are the invariable fruit of true faith. If there are no works, there almost certainly is no faith. Moving on…)

Many of you here know that, on three occasions, I have had maladies which seriously threatened death. During my pilgrimage, I was caught in two genuinely dire situations that threatened the same (so you know, my definition of dire does NOT include the two men who threatened me with knives during that period. They were easily chased off).

This last Advent I was overwhelmed with calls from people suffering genuine existential trials. I had more during this last Advent than I normally get in a year. Some have gotten a devastating medical diagnosis, a few absolutely terminal. Others have had incredibly intractable family problems come to a head. I have had a folder marked, “Souls in Pain” for over a decade. It almost doubled in size this last Advent. I have no easy, soothing words to beguile those suffering from their grief. But it occurs to me that God is giving a lot of people opportunities to trust – and to learn what trust really is.

Many people, including some very good and faithful ones, are under the misimpression that trust means that if you are piously dutiful enough, God will do whatever you want and protect you from any serious temporal setbacks. My own Father, one of the finest men I have ever known, suffered from that misimpression. My Mom died during my pilgrimage. Oh, what a torment it was to me! I was afraid to come home because I believed the pilgrimage was appointed by God and that to do so would be a failure of obedient docility. So, I continued on. I’ll never forget the day I got the call where I knew it was hopeless. I was in an area with very limited cell coverage, but at the top of a ridge of mountains, a call came through from my sister. She told me it was almost over – and there was no more hope. I cried because I knew all my prayers and obedience were seemingly for naught, now. Even getting a cell signal in this otherwise forsaken place struck me as God’s way of telling me, you now have My answer. (Yes, God does not always talk to me directly, but sometimes shows me – if I but pay attention.) Two of my brothers made arrangements to get me back from the wilderness west of Yosemite I was in (Mariposa County, the only county in California with no incorporated villages or cities at all). I will not go through the amazing gauntlet of trains, planes, sheriff’s deputies, and cab rides I went through to go from the wilderness to Sacramento airport, except to say there were 11 “connections” before I got back to my parents. I was there for the last week of Mom’s life.

A lot of amazing things happened that week. I was glad to be there to see Mom, talk to her, and  give moral support to my Dad during that time. The funeral was held at the little Free Pentecostal Holiness Church Dad was Pastor of. He had fretted when taking over the Church, because it had been dying for several years, down to maybe 20 families by the time he took the reins. Dad worried a lot about it. Just before I left on the pilgrimage, I had a brief visitation – and was able to tell Dad that the next time I was at the Church with him, it would be packed to the rafters. Dad was a very shrewd man who played things much closer to the vest than even I do. Fully a decade before I told anyone about my supernatural visits and such, I found that Dad had concluded that I was a “seer.”

He never spoke to me about it except once – and, then, indirectly. The night of his mother’s funeral (my Mamo Johnston) Dad and I sat up until almost four in the morning talking together. He was disconsolate with grief, one of the rare times I saw him crying. We loved talking with each other – and I was trying my best to console him. At one point, through his disconsolate tears, he asked me, “Is there really a heaven?” I quoted at length from the Bible about the subject. When I was finished, still disconsolate, he asked, again, through his tears, “But is there really a heaven. (This was a technique Dad and I often used with each other on serious matters of real moment, listening patiently to the other give some answer and then, if unsatisfied with the response, ask the same question again and again until we were satisfied. Most never knew that our histrionics were a fun sort of gamesmanship for us – but this was how we held each other’s feet to the fire until we obtained real satisfaction. It was both calm, understated, and unrelenting until we got an answer that satisfied.) So, I launched into a lengthy theological discourse on the matter. He sat patiently through it all, tears unabating, then asked again, “But Larry, is there really a heaven?” (Larry is my middle name – and what my family calls me). With the use of my name, it dawned on me that he wanted me to tell him personally, on my own authority. I tamped down my amazement and, with definite assurance, told him, “Yes, Dad, there is heaven.” He smiled in real relief, wiped off the tears, and we went to our beds. He needed to hear me assure him personally. I thought to myself, “My stars, he knows – and he has never given a hint of it to me.” Years later, my sister told me Dad had long said at times, with enthusiasm, that, “Larry is a seer. Many authentic seers are in the Bible – and we have a real one in the family.” But he never said a word about it to me, respecting that, for some reason, I did not like to speak of it.

Dad and I rode alone together in the procession from the funeral home to the Church, where Mom would be buried at the little graveyard behind it after a fellow pastor said the funeral service. It was quite the crowd as we drove up. My youngest brother was in the dozen-man Aviation Unit of the Alabama State Police – and the governor had given the whole unit the afternoon off to lead the funeral procession and to “bury one of their own.” The south is big on law enforcement leading funeral processions to the place of burial, but it is always the sheriff or, occasionally, a local municipal force escort. The State Police do not do that. On this day, the governor, himself had given them leave to do so. As we drove up, we were both taken by the crowd already outside the Church. Dad glanced at me and said, “Wow, it is packed to the rafters. Tootie (Mom’s name) will be tickled by this.” Right after he said it, Dad realized what he had said, and we looked at each other for a minute, but did not speak of it aloud. My prophecy had come to pass, but not at all as either of us had envisioned. (I leave this detail here because too many people assume they know exactly what a prophecy means when it is said. My experience is that, when it comes to pass, at least 30% of the time – and perhaps much more – it is both undeniable AND completely different of what the hearer expected. Please have more humility about these things. Authentic prophecy is a call to watch and wait…and then when it comes to pass see that God is in it, no matter how painful the actual fulfillment of it might be. God rarely gives you prophecy so you know His mind, but so you know His presence during certain temporal events).

To my bewilderment and deep hurt, for the first week and a half after Mom was buried, Dad was furiously angry and short-tempered with me. All the rest of the family noted it and were puzzled. If I said anything at all, Dad was likely to explode with anger and contempt at me. Finally, I got out of my hurt long enough to realize what was happening. Dad was telling himself that, if I had only gotten there sooner, Mom would not have died.

Now Dad had as powerful a gift of faith healing as I have ever seen. On several occasions, I saw chronic illnesses and wounds heal up in a moment after he prayed and laid hands on someone. On this day, I steered the conversation towards that phenomenon – because almost all had seen profound evidence with their own eyes of it. I mentioned what a profound power of healing he sometimes had. Dad immediately corrected me (he loved doing that!) and said he had no power at all, but that sometimes it pleased God to channel His healing power through Dad. I looked at him firmly and agreed. “Yes, that is right. If it was your power to use as you would, Mom would never have even gotten seriously sick, would she?” Dad looked at me with wide-eyed astonishment and said, “No, she wouldn’t have.” I told you he was shrewd. He knew immediately exactly what I was saying to him and why – and that was the end of it. His anger at me was gone.

Sadly, his anger at God was not gone. Dad was always one of the most dutiful men I have known. He always tried to do the most right thing he could think of. Despite his big, bold and provocative personality, he was never determined that whatever he said was right. He was determined to find the right and do it – and to correct course as quickly as he could when he found he had been wrong. What a role model he was for me in that…big and brash, never afraid to speak up, but determined to find the actual right and do it as best he could. I slowly realized during this sojourn that Dad thought he had made an implicit deal with God: he would be obedient and docile to the Holy Spirit and, in exchange, God would allow no serious, devastating temporal ill to befall him. Of course, that was dead wrong.

Dad lived for 10 years after Mom died, but he was a very different man from what he had been the rest of his life. Always the life of the party, he was big, brash and charismatic – except for that last 10 years, when  he could not stand a crowd and was oddly timid about a lot of things. Though he did not have a lot of serious health problems, by summer of the year he died, my youngest brother and I concluded that it was likely Dad would not survive the year. He was lonely…lonely for Mom and lonely for who he had been. It was clear, at least to the two of us, that Dad was tired of this life and looking forward to the next. He passed on November 12 of that year, not because of any great medical crisis, but because he, literally, gave up the ghost.

Whatever we say, very few of us can see life as it is. Rather, we see the whole of life, the whole of the good, within this brief temporal sojourn in time during this way station to eternity. The truth is that once we are conceived, we are, indeed, immortal. This life is very important, for it is our audition for heaven. After this life, we will either be born to the path to heaven or we will be born to perdition – but we are eternal. That is not to say we should not grieve when someone we love is born to eternity and lost to this life. How could we do otherwise? Jesus, Himself, the Master of life and death, wept when he heard His friend, Lazarus, had died – and Jesus knew He would raise Lazarus shortly. (It is worth much contemplation on why Jesus wept here). I am the oldest living male member of my extended family. Among people I love, there is a whole world gone by for me that I will not see again until I, too, am born to eternity. (Ironic…for much of my life I have been the youngest man in the room for serious matters. Now that I am old, I am still the youngest actual patriarch I have ever heard of.)

When someone we know dies to this life, we do not know whether it is blessing or curse. If they are in their final state of grace (which God alone would know) it is a signal mercy – both for them and for us – that God would pluck them, for it guarantees they will be in heaven and friends with us if we make the cut. More untimely deaths than people know fall into this category. When people speak of good and evil, using only the course of this life as their touchstone, they have a terrible spiritual myopia. If we can learn to contemplate the good from the standpoint of our whole life, instead of just this life, our perspective would be much different.

That is not to say that we are not – or even should not be – jealous of this life. In the times that I have been near death, I have preferred (sometimes deeply wanted) to remain in this life. It is what I know…and the new and unknown, however much or accurate our theories about it may be, is somewhat fearsome. Plus, there is the fear of not knowing for sure about our salvation. I know that some Christians claim to know their salvation with certainty – but that is simply wrong and unbiblical. To a larger extent than most know, Martin Luther founded Protestantism because he hated the lack of certainty Christians had about their own salvation (keep in mind that, at this time, for the first thousand years Catholics had been the only Christians and, for the latter 500, they and the Orthodox were the only Christians. Both, because of their knowledge of the necessity of grace, maintained that one could not be certain of one’s own salvation (though one could be confident about it). Luther wanted absolute assurance of salvation – and that drove a lot of his theological musings. It was a big part of why he wanted to omit so many books from the then Christian Bible. He bolstered his case by what he omitted and what he disdained, but I doubt it changed anything from the point of view of eternity. I know that in 1 Corinthians 9:27, St. Paul speaks of keeping his body under subjection, “lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified.” St. Paul worried about losing his salvation. In a disagreement over a theological matter between St. Paul and Martin Luther, I’m gonna go with St. Paul every time. All that said, it would be foolish to judge our whole life by what happened one day at the bus stop in First Grade – and yet when we judge the good solely by this brief sojourn, we are judging by a comparatively much smaller slice. What I fear most, in the times I have been near death, is that I have not borne sufficient fruit of the sort God wanted from me. I think that is a rational fear…and the biggest fear we should have at such a time.

Thus, we can get a calmer and broader perspective if we can learn to see death as an event in our larger eternal life. It is much easier said than done, I well know. It takes learning to trust AND concentrating on seeing that reality. The biggest problem is that we say we believe but act as if we do not on that subject. I long ago disciplined myself not to ask, “Why me?” when severely trying circumstances arise, but instead to ask, “What do You intend for me in this, Lord?” Yeah, I still sometimes forget and, in the moment, ask, “Why me?” – but I get past that pretty quickly. It allows you to deal with things steadily and without panic – knowing that if it is not your time, God will leave you here and if it is, He will take you. Blessed be the name of the Lord. I could not have successfully developed my late-stage prostate cancer protocol if I had constantly been thinking, “Oh no, I’m gonna die!” Of course, had it been my time, it would not have worked anyway. In an odd way, dealing with these things calmly – and then surviving them – builds both trust and docility. I am never confident that God is going to spare me this life, but I am ever more confident that whatever happens, God will use for both my and others’ good – and that is more and more sufficient for me. I remember 23 years ago, just after they gave me the anesthesia for my neuro-surgery (which I had just under a 70% chance of surviving, according to my surgeon) I thought with bizarre calmness that, if I were not a nut and God did have work for me, I would wake up from this and would probably hurt like the dickens for a very long time. If not, I would never wake up and my passing would be painless and peaceful. It was an oddly soothing thought just before the anesthesia overtook me.

Let us turn then to the divisions and incredible pain in families. I suspect this is a greater distraction from your course and work than even fear of death is. I know there have been huge, often seemingly unbridgeable divisions in my family.  I have taken comfort from the little-repeated September apparition at Fatima, where Our Lady said that many souls are lost because they have no one to pray for them. So, I resolved that I would never neglect to pray for those I love…or have loved. When I was considering taking up the mantle I believe was laid out for me, one of the promises I was given by Our Lady was that if I kept faith until the end, not a single person I loved would be suffered to perish to eternity. That was a powerful motivator – and given before I knew about the September notation during the apparitions.

I discovered, though, that crises in the family could easily draw me away from what I had pledged. I had to learn to stay my course, doing what I could, but NOT dropping everything in some panicked effort to “save” someone I loved. That was one of the tools the devil used to try to get me to violate my pledge and, thus, void the promise. It is a hard thing, when we always imagine (whether we admit it or not) that we are vital to the salvation of those we love. We are – but we are not their savior…and when we trust to God, we have to know He will act in HIS time, not ours. It is NOT because He is neglectful, but because He has important work and seeds to plant even in the midst of disorder, using the disorder, itself, to plant them. The toughest early training was when my daughter got into severe – and willful – dysfunction just before she turned 12. She was declared a ward of the state for a time on a delinquency petition. Even after that was finished (we’re talking years here, not weeks), there were serious problems that could badly impact the family and the welfare of my minor son, her brother. I was raising the kids on my own – and I had to make some very hard, agonizing decisions.

Thankfully, my daughter is my sidekick in many ways, now, and a great help to my work. But even before the troubles lifted entirely, she tearfully told me that I had been her lifeline…that even when she was waging war on her brother and me, she knew that I would welcome her back if she seriously focused on getting straight…but that I would NEVER be a co-conspirator with her in her dysfunction, even in an enabling or tolerating sense. In tears, when she was still just 19, she told me that she was glad I had held strong, because it showed her that there actually was good in the world that could not be broken (she had no clue how close she had come to breaking me). Again, in many ways, she is my sidekick now, but for five very intense years, she almost broke me – and for 20 years after that it was up and down, terribly unstable.

Even in the midst of all that, much fruit was borne from it. In so many cases of such intense dysfunction, the parent either gives in and enables it – or disowns the child. I did neither. For more than a couple of years, when a prominent person in my state had a notably intractable problem with their child, often DCFS would quietly ask them and me if I might help them as a friend – because I had struck the best balance they had seen. As bad as things got, my daughter was always adamantly pro-life…and when the lowlife boozers, druggies, dancers et al around her would start talking favorably about abortion, she would go ballistic on them. Who knows how many people were evangelized because of the serious problems my family dealt with? I don’t. God does. He works in mysterious ways.

Though now there is little real division in the broader family, there are more than a few “troubled encounters,” where there is an effort to patch things up. I have resolved to go back to old-fashioned hand-written letters as a means of healing and closing the breach…talking about things without the immediacy of emotional outbursts. There are times, though, when I have avoided all contact with some family members out of fear that, if I did, I would eventually cease to love them.

I was given to see, a few years after the promise that was given me, that I had been tricked. It was not just a promise for me – but a promise to all the faithful who will live their faith determinedly in troubled waters. Do what you can and not a whit more…then trust that so long as you continue to live your integrity with firm resolve, the Lord will keep those you love in His hands. But the action WILL be on His timetable, not your preferred one. I have lived that on faith for a lot of decades and, as this year dawns, I am seeing, temporally, that it is likely true as well as trusting spiritually that it is. I don’t see how that could have happened had I not determinedly trusted first. Too often things seemed like they were irrevocably broken and entirely hopeless.

The things I write here today are not easy…no 30-minute sitcom answers and resolutions. It is brutally hard and can seem without hope at all, at times. It seems that it cannot possibly be true. But it is.

I once talked to my Dad about some incredibly difficult times when I was young, when it seemed there was no hope for better days ahead. Yet Dad always persevered and was usually pretty optimistic. I asked him how he did it. He told me, “Well, when things were completely hopeless, I would just pretend to have hope. If I could do that long enough, it eventually became real hope again.”

We are beginning what I think will be a very consequential year. As we do, I am very mindful of all the pain in families and in lives there are out there – among people I care a lot about, people reading these pages. I pray often for all my “Souls in Pain.” I have no easy way to offer you on how to endure the things you often speak to me about. The only way I have is brutally hard and flinty. But it is certain. The Lord says that he who endures to the end is he who will be saved. Either surrendering to anything but God or choosing an easy way is a trap of the devil. When you feel you are so weak and so disconsolate that you can’t go on and have no hope, you may not be able to help asking the Lord to lighten your load. That’s fine, so long as you also ask the Lord to strengthen you that you may bear even more in His service without giving up.

I tell you what, I get angry when I hear those superficial sorts selling the schmaltzy Jesus of gauzy sentimentality. If there is one thing I know for certain, it is that Christianity is not for wimps. My New Year’s wish for all of you is that you be strengthened to bear the unbearable, that you may inspire those around you when you have no hope by your determined fortitude, that you use all these opportunities to trust being given you as opportunities to make your trust into galvanized steel instead of a wispy sentiment. You will find, over long years, that your trust is well placed in the Lord and, along the way, you will inspire many, including some you thought were hopelessly lost, to find hope, themselves.

Now, let’s get to work.

If communication goes out for any length of time, meet outside your local Church at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Tell friends at Church now in case you can’t then. CORAC teams will be out looking for people to gather in and work with.

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