If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.
       ― Ernest Hemingway, 

Trust as a Moveable Feast

Hemingway's memoir, A Moveable Feast, highlights his most meaningful memories, the ones that traveled with him.  

I wondered about our own moveable feasts, those essentials that travel with us, tucked in our hearts. Trust in God is one of my essentials, but there was a time when I felt alone in a storm.  I had to go the distance to be found.

A Pocketful of TRUST

It was years ago, and although time has softened the wounds, I can easily retrieve the anguish. Divorce is a painfilled unraveling of two lives and of self.  It is a wrecking ball, an earthquake that rattles your inner tectonic plates. The aftershocks continue long after the ink on paper dries.

Reeling from loss of solid ground, loss of identity, tired, depressed, I slow-walked my life. Dark clouds hid the sunshine in my daughter’s face from me.

I was on a runaway train, taking me to an unknown frightening world.  I could not hear my own heartbeat.  A distant voice I used to know tried to reach me. I strained to hear it.                                             

Find it.  Trust in ME.

I wanted to believe in that voice, but I had no strength to go the distance, and even doubted its existence.  But that faraway voice kept coming . . .

Trust in ME.

I needed something, anything as my touchstone.  And that one persistent word, trust, became my life line. I grabbed a permanent black marker and I wrote it on a 3×5 note card. Emboldened; two inches tall; all caps.  TRUST.

Trust in what or whom?  I had forgotten. The fog that engulfed me clouded my thinking.  But I fixated on this one word written on my card. It traveled with me, folded in my pocket.  When fear grabbed my throat, threatening my very breath, I would take the card out and look at it.  TRUST.  

My Moveable Feast: TRUST

And thus, began my journey to reclaim that loving voice; a voice that beat stronger and more familiar as I began to heal.  I was lost and then found. Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all of my days. Trust will continue to travel with me. It is my moveable feast.

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight.  
      ------Proverbs 3: 5-6.

I would like to say that from that point on, I had no need for my TRUST-card. But life presents many crossroads.  Which path to take? Whose voice am I hearing?  I now keep that TRUST-card imprinted on my soul.  It is my directional vane, redirecting me to the one consistent voice that will never abandon me. It never has. It never will. The good shepherd will leave his flock to find the one sheep.  I was found.

Maybe my story is also your story.  If you are lost, you will be found. If you are on that distant run-away train, a voice will call you back.  Strain to listen.  Keep it close.  Mobile.  Feast on its message.

What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? 
        -----Luke 15:4 NIV

For More on Trust:

Prodigal

Walk On . . . But Not Alone