The Prayer Thread is a collection of teachings and practical prompts to help as we learn to pray in community. This text was originally delivered on February 7, 2025 as a short teaching at our online weekly prayer sit.
Often, trust is paired with faith. The deposit mode of faith, in which the objects of faith, like beliefs and words and rituals and actions and images, are loaded into your head and heart, with the expectation that you simply assent to the fact of these things, treats trust like a transaction. This modality of trust in faith can be good for edifying minds and hearts, especially the young and the new to faith, but it is not enough for developing mature faith.
The tested model of faith, in which life throws all the rocks, and even big boulders at you, and you somehow manage to hold on, stay strong, get through it, and remain standing, treats trust like a test. In this modality of the trust of faith, you have to begin to see through unseen things. You learn to build up your confidence in the previous patterns that got you through it all before. You learn to say, “I may not know how or when, but I do know God, in the spirit of Good and Love, has got this.” This modality of trust helps to deepen and widen faith.
So if some deposits of faith are transactional and some tests of faith are invisible, what is the role of prayer in the trust of faith? Trust, in prayer, is transformational. Showing up to pray on a regular basis, especially when it isn’t seemingly productive or you don’t get anything from it, helps to build up the muscle memory in the Spirit that holds the postures needed for transformation. The energy and vitality that comes with using your will to stay committed to pray animates your spirit to also be open to transformation. Showing up and gifting the use of your energy, as offerings of Presence, are modalities of trust in prayer that open up to the transformative work of the Holy One.
May each of us be blessed, not only with the deposits and tests of faith, but also with the trust to be transformed in faith by our prayer!
