It feels like common sense, doesn’t it? That we act on what we believe. Of course we do. I believe a chair will hold me up, so I sit on it. And 99.9% of the time it works, except for the time I sat on the stool my girls had rocked back on one too many times and it literally collapsed under me. Even with that extremely unfortunate situation that left me with an equally unfortunate bruise on my backside, I still believe chairs will hold me and I still sit on them.

What if I said that I believed that a chair would hold me and yet when offered one, I always chose the floor? Would you believe me when I adamantly said that I believed in the ability of chairs to hold me, but I never sat in them? You would start to wonder if something was wrong with me. If there was a reason I wouldn’t sit in a chair no matter the circumstance. If you asked me what was wrong and I continually and passionately said that I had no problem with chairs and I believed that they would hold me and yet I refused to sit in them, my actions might point to a different truth.

There is a system of order we seem to abide by, we say what we believe and then we act. We think our actions follow our belief, that they will show our belief. I think it is true, that our actions reveal what we believe about ourselves, others, the world, God. But I don’t think that our words dictate our actions as much as our actions reveal our true beliefs.

With my very poor chair example you would clearly see that my actions contradict what I say I believe. If you were to look solely at my actions you might wonder what happened to me that I no longer sit in chairs and even more than that why I am in supposed denial about my belief and trust in the chair because no matter what, I will not sit in one.

If you dug deep, you might find that I have some past trauma from sitting in a chair (or stool) and where as I know that chairs can be trusted, I am struggling to act on that belief. Showing my real belief that the chair will break on me if I sit on it.

I wonder how many of us are living out this reality in our lives with things much more important than chairs. How many of us have been seriously wounded by a person and struggle to have true friendship with people? Or maybe an institution has been unjust, exploited or abused you? Can each of us think of leaders that have led poorly and people have been left in the rubble? I know I can. These painful experiences can cause us to act differently. They perpetuate skepticism and cynicism. We can become critics instead of supporters. Essentially we have bruises on our proverbial backsides from where whatever we trusted in collapsed under us. Now when we go to trust again, we remember the pain long after the bruise has healed and we act based on the pain, not on what we say we believe, because perhaps we no longer believe it.

I have had a lot of belief systems surrounding people collapse under me. People who I thought would support me, haven’t. Leaders who I expected to love me, looked the other way. I have written before that often in my life I have looked to people to approve of me, support me, and as community be the answer to my dreams and longings. Here is the truth, one that comes out of many healed backside bruises, people cannot do any of those things for me. In some way or another, people will fail us. Even the best ones. I know that even in all my desire to love others well, in my messy insecurity and stubborn pride, I have also been a broken chair for others.

So what do we do? Do we stop trusting? Do we take up floor sitting forever and always? Do we quit relationships, and institutions and throw it all away? Is it better to lock away our hearts like a hermit crab in his shell, to allow the critical, skeptical, cynicism to take over and grow a wall of bitterness around us crippling us from becoming the people we were created to be? No friend, that does not have to be our fate.

Because God can be trusted. We don’t trust in humans or human institutions, we trust in God. The Creator. When the chair breaks under us, we crawl into the lap of our Father and His healing touch allows us to trust and try again.

The key is to leave our hope with him. Our hope doesn’t belong in things forged by human hands, but in the hands of our Eternal God.

False belief systems stop us from acting on many good things. We believe in scarcity of purpose so we don’t share our unique story. We believe that a full bank account will save us so we don’t choose to be generous. We believe that people who have made mistakes can’t change or choose different and be sweet additions to our life, so we distance ourselves, we don’t forgive and we quit trying. Our actions reveal our beliefs.

I want to ask you with me to take a look at what your actions are telling you about what you truly believe. Not in what you say you believe, but in how you act which reveals your beliefs. Are they healthy? Are they cynical? Do you need to move your trust from what humans have created to the Creator of the humans? Are the spaces where forgiveness must be given, pride needs to be confessed, greed repented of? When we do this, we can live in freedom and we can share that freedom with others.

I know that my actions, even today, reveal belief in humans instead of belief in God. I want to trust the Creator and out of that trust, recklessly love and be in relationship with the humans he created. I want my actions to show above all else my belief in God, his great love for his people and his plans for each of us that he will accomplish. When this is my grounding belief, my actions will match my words and together we can all pull up a chair at the really big table, where there are enough seats for everyone.