Perhaps you’ve heard this one before, but it was new to me when it came across my social media this week in a brief video clip by a beautiful young woman whose postings I watch frequently. She simply said something like, “I am so deeply distrustful, I look both ways when crossing a one-way street.” Boy, how that resonated with me, worming its way into my brain for several days of overthinking.
Though it was only trust she mentioned, obey has always lived next door, at least in the musical memory of someone brought up in the Southern Baptist church. “When We Walk with the Lord” is the title of hymn number 260 in my tattered old copy of the Baptist Hymnal, but the refrain gives its more usual name. “Trust and obey, for there’s no other way/To be happy in Jesus/But to trust and obey.”
That particular hymn was the one used by one of my piano teachers when I was about 11 or so to show me how to embellish on the simple four-part harmony as written in the hymnal. Mrs. Bell taught me how to use octaves and chords to ramp up my piano game, stretching my fingers to strike as many keys as possible to get the full complement available for any song. Once I knew how to start each measure with a bass octave followed by chords to match the melody chording in the treble, I had learned all that Mrs. Bell could teach me.
Then came Mrs. McGuire, the wife of a minister who had gone into church administration with the Southern Baptist Convention. She was the absolute best at playing gospel piano, so Mother lined her up to show me the tricks of the trade. With her, I learned to go beyond octaves and chords, adding rolling arpeggios and other frills and trills every time the melody of the song was holding a whole note. “The piano needs to sing, too.” So it was that when Mrs. Bell and her family moved their letters to a larger church following some unpleasant internal politics, the role of church pianist became vacant, and I left the pews and moved to the piano bench.
So when that joke about trust hit my radar this week, that old song woke up and started rattling around in my head. That I could remember the words of the refrain when I had been so busy with all those octaves and chords is somewhat mystifying.
To be happy in Jesus is to trust and obey. Looking around these days, I don’t see a lot of trust in Jesus. At dinner recently with a couple of old friends, we were discussing the latest fresh hell visited on the world that week. One of them took the opportunity to express her trust in the Lord to sort it all out. I, like so many others, brought up in the same tradition, seem to lack that trust. We need to try to take matters into our own hands to get the outcome that we desire, that we deem right, that we impose on others without their consent. No trust, no happy in Jesus.
As for the obey part, that’s even harder. Other than the law and Daddy while he was alive, I’ve always had a problem with obeying anything. I might follow the rules, at least some of them, but obeying them all has never been anything I aspired to doing. I do believe that if everyone sought to follow the teachings of Jesus, the red-letter stuff and not the chords and arpeggios added later by others, the world would be a better place. In all fairness, there are others about whom the same could be said.
J. D. Vance’s recent admonishment to the Pope to “be careful when he speaks about matters of theology” aside, I will go out on a limb to say that perhaps the hardest single directive given by Jesus is found in Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” At least it is for me.
There is, to be sure, a good deal of trusting and obeying. Folks who trust that they are right, almost as infallible as the pope. Folks who obey the rules for living that they have made or were made by others. To what extent that has anything to do with the teachings of Jesus is a legitimate subject for debate.
Despite it all, I am trying very hard not to judge. Or should I say judge not? So I’ll just give the last word to Jesus himself, according to the King James Version from which I was taught all those years ago. Just a bit further down in Matthew 7.
“Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits.”
