In God We Trust – Rev. Darrell Jones
This video features the Sunday “talk” only. Watch the full service on our Facebook page.
DESCRIPTION
The idea of trust is a concept, a noun. However, lived trust is a verb. Trust requires action on our part. Trust is something that calls us to practice it whether we know a path to a certain outcome or not. Trust is something that calls us to act even when life stings or we don’t understand it. Trust like Love, ideally is not a conditional practice, however, for most of the world it is. Is this true for you? Do you sometimes trust or always trust? Let’s get down to understanding and practicing trust this week in a powerful way that ignites trust not only in God, but self and others.
SUMMARY
In this transcript, Rev. Darrell Jones begins by acknowledging Father’s Day, Pride Month, and Juneteenth. He shares personal stories about his father and the significance of these holidays. He then discusses the concept of trust in relation to God. He questions whether we truly trust in God and explores the idea that trust is not conditional. He emphasizes the importance of understanding God as a law rather than a person with human traits. He encourages curiosity and asks the audience to consider how God is showing up in their lives. He suggests asking the questions, “Isn’t this interesting?” and “What good may come from this?” to deepen trust in God. The transcript concludes with Rev. Jones expressing gratitude and affirming trust in God.
TRANSCRIPTION
This transcription was auto-generated, please excuse typos, errors and omissions.
Rev. Darrell Jones (00:00):
Good morning. Thank you. Hi everybody. I’m so glad it’s 10 50. So according to the schedule, we’re supposed to start now, like the talk is supposed to start at 10 55, so I’m going to take five extra minutes, Connie. I’m just saying because there’s a lot going on today. My talk titles in God we trust, but I can’t quite get there yet. I got to get some other things, some housekeeping. First and foremost, happy Father’s Day. Happy Fathering Day. This day holds a special space in my heart. This room holds a special place on this day. Many of you had the opportunity to meet my father, but maybe you didn’t. The last time that he spoke a talk on this planet was in this room the Sunday after Thanksgiving in 2019. He had just been discharged from the ER the night before in his battle with mesothelioma and lung cancer.
(01:01):
He still got up and we gave a talk together. And so there’s something special about this day in terms of just the energy of it, the memory of it, the sweetness of it. And so I just have to speak that into the room and know that he’s here with me. He’s been sitting with me all week getting ready for this talk as he always was. I would just call him up and share with him what was going on in my heart and he would always have the perfect question or a little tidbit to help me bring it home. So Dad’s going to help me bring it home today in some way, not just the root beer, which is delicious by the way. And then also I want to recognize the month that we’re in. It’s June, it’s Pride month, happy pride to everyone. It’ll be officially celebrated in a few weeks, but I just have to speak out that my name is Reverend Darrell Jones.
(01:53):
My pronouns are he, him, and I put no expression of humanity outside of the Circle of the Divine. Everyone and all of its expressions to me are whole and holy Lee, and I think we believe that as an entire community. And then finally on Wednesday, June 19th, it is Juneteenth. This is a new holiday federally that many people don’t know about or they’re still learning about. And so Reverend Amy asked me to give some recognition to it and I thought I would share just an actual reading about it to you and then put it into a little bit of context. The holiday Juneteenth also called Juneteenth Independence Day. Freedom Day, or Emancipation Day is celebrated on June 19th in reference to the 1865 date on which Union troops informed the remaining enslaved African-American people. They were emancipated. On June 19th, 1865, Gordon Grainger issued general order number three, which declared the people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free.
(03:04):
Anyone know what he’s talking about happened two years earlier, 1863. This was more than two years after President Lincoln legally free the enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the union with the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. The nearly 250,000 enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, however had no idea that they were free until Granger’s General order number three was spoken to the state of Texas. Juneteenth has been celebrated as America’s second Independence Day by the black community for more than a century, more than one and a half centuries. And after becoming a federal holiday in 2021, it has become more universally recognized beyond the black community. It is not recognized in every single state. It is a federal holiday, but you still have to recognize it on the state level. So not all states recognize it, and I think in this idea, somehow I’m going to make it who is telling me, like Daryl, you always find a way of connecting all the dots.
(04:14):
And God we trust. We’re talking about trust this month. I know that my father on Father’s Day, he’s someone that trusted in God and showed that trust was not about showing and proving, but it was loving whatever the expression of God was that showed up. He truly loved every single person that came into his life, even if he didn’t understand or agree with them. Can you imagine the trust that was required by someone who was enslaved to just stay alive? Think about that for a minute. Is anyone experiencing hardship in their life? Okay, just you and me, John. Oh, and Judy. Okay, just a handful of us. So the hardship that I experience in my life, sometimes it gets to the point where it seems like it’s unbearable. I don’t want to deal with it anymore. People that were enslaved didn’t have a choice to deal or not deal.
(05:10):
Think of the trust in something greater than your experience that’s required of someone who’s enslaved. So as we move into today’s talk title, as we move into today’s discussion on In God we Trust and trusting in God in particular, I think it’s very appropriate that we acknowledge Juneteenth. The last thing that I would like to say about that holiday is some people don’t understand why we celebrate that when we have the 4th of July, but let’s just take it into context. The independence on the 4th of July is celebrating independence from the Brits. That’s it. It was a great thing. It’s a thing to celebrate. But the truth of the matter is in terms of this house known as our United States, there’s some creeks under the floor. If you ever bought an old house, you walk into it, there’s some little things in there. This is one of the creeks our country said had this beautiful declaration of independence, but it didn’t apply to everyone.
(06:15):
So this is another celebration. This is another evolving. This is another understanding of how freedom is something that is constantly being peeled away. Like that onion layer. There is not one thing, one state, one static moment of being free. There are constantly things. There are creeks in the floor. There are little things under the surface that we need to look at within ourselves, within our communities, within our country that will only liberate us, but sometimes it’s a little stingy and this is one of those things that can be a little stingy, but ultimately it’s still something to celebrate. Alright, deep breath in everybody this week, this month is about divine discomfort. So if that brought you some divine discomfort, know that you are on the right track. Okay? And the talk title I chose in God we Trust. Now I just have to pepper this in there and then I’m going to leave it and you can chew on it all you want.
(07:10):
I think that phrase in God we trust, where did I lift that from? Money in God. We trust this federal organization known as the United States that we live in. We say that there is separation of church and yet we say in God, we trust in the middle of our very state. Kind of weird anyway, but still, if we were to say in God we trust, my question is do we really, really, do we really God? Do we trust in God? The idea of trust is a concept. It’s a noun, right? This idea of I trust something, I trust someone. I trust a friend. I trust a partner. I trust my bones. I trust my heart. It’s a concept, it’s an idea. You make a statement that you trust something. However, lived trust is a verb. There’s a verb version of trust and there’s a noun version of trust tracking.
(08:17):
So far people online, if you’re not tracking, that means you’re multitasking. Just a reminder, all that stuff can wait close the other windows put down, turn off the TV focus. Let’s get into this conversation. Trust requires action on our part. Trust is something that calls us to practice it. Whether we know the path to a certain outcome or not, trust requires action on our part. Trust is something that calls us to practice it. Whether we know the path to a certain outcome or not, trust is something that calls us to act. Even if life stings and we don’t understand it. Trust like love ideally is not conditional. However, for most of the world it is, is it true for you?
(09:22):
Is trust conditional or unconditional? Do you sometimes trust or do you always trust? If you are saying, I always trust God bull, you’re full of it. I stand here as a minister that’s been practicing for almost a whole half of a century. There’s moments that I don’t trust. I’m human. I doubt I have fear intellectually. I can tell you I trust God all the time, but there is something visceral in my body. There is fear that happens. There is anticipation. There are stories that I tell myself, oh my God, there are stories that I tell myself. Anyone tell themselves stories? You telling yourself a story right now maybe. Do you sometimes trust or do you always trust? Let’s get down to understanding and practicing trust today, in this week in a powerful way that ignites not only trust in God, which is the focus of today’s talk, but trust in yourself and others. And I want to come back to the reading. The focus, the book of the month is titled Trust by Ilana van Zant. If you are familiar with her as a thought leader, as a TV extraordinaire, the book is called Mastering the Four Essential Trusts. And one of those four essential trusts is trust in God, which we’re focusing on today. And she wrote, there is only one thing you have to trust in when it comes to God, that everything is at all times just as it needs to be.
(11:06):
That’s all we really need to do. Finish this phrase for me. If you know it, God is good. Okay, do you believe that God is good all the time? Do you trust you can say that God is good? Do you trust that? Do you really trust it? You cannot trust what is going to happen, what might happen or what has happened in the past. This is going on with her quote. These things are grounded in perception, speculation and experience. What you can trust is that whatever happens is what is required for our growth and evolution, and that process is good even if it hurts a little or a lot.
(11:58):
So in the section titled Trust in God, one of the chapters is called God and Gravity, and she goes into really trying to get the reader to embrace this idea that God is not an entity or a person, that it is a law. Does that sound familiar to anyone? And she has this anonymous quote at the beginning of the chapter that’s kind of humorous and it uses the word man, but I’m going to say humanity. It says, humanity says, show me and I’ll tell you and I’ll trust you. Show me and I’ll trust you. God says, trust me and I’ll show you.
(12:46):
You feeling it? Lemme say it again. Humanity says, show me and I’ll trust you. And then God says, trust me and I’ll show you. This is a clever idea and it kind of gets you thinking about this idea of trust. It illustrates our human nature to be conditional. I think we will trust, love, and accept and celebrate. If you show me and give me a reason to, you may have even said these words yourself, trust is earned. Anyone I’ve said that before. This ultimately is withholding. It is withholding. We deny our natural capacity and ability to love, trust, celebrate and appreciate life unless we are given a reason that we like and understand, right? We’re given all kinds of reasons that we don’t like and understand, and that’s often where we get in trouble in our minds. This seems to make sense, right? Give me a reason and I’ll trust you.
(13:59):
But it really doesn’t work very well for a deeply engaged and connected life. If you want to live a deeper, more connected life with your understanding of the divine and the people around you, then that conditional show me and then I’ll trust it really does not support that there’s so much uncertainty in our lives. Literally every single day something is changing. Will the bus show up on time? You think you’ve got an app that tells you it’s two minutes away, but there’s some traffic that inevitably happens. Will the coast law be vinegary or creamy like I like it. You may have gone to the restaurant before, but there may be a different chef that decides to mix it up a little bit. Now I’m being a little surface level, but just think about that. There’s so many of uncertainty happening every day and if we were to really embrace this idea of show me then I’ll trust you. Would you even leave your house?
(15:03):
There’s so much uncertainty waiting for you. If we waited for life to show us everything we need to know before trusting it, if we didn’t leave the house, our life would be much slower. Our overarching societal cultural belief is one deeply activated in this model. I’ll trust you but only if you give me a reason to trust you and continue to give me a reason to trust you. So it’s not just earned once. You got to keep showing improving along the way. The challenge is most of the world isn’t patient enough for this model to even eke out some trust. Think about that. Trust doesn’t just happen. The proving doesn’t happen right away. Sometimes it evolves. But are we really willing to wait? Most of the time, I don’t think the answer is yes. So what do we do? We manipulate ourselves and others to configure into this idea of what is right and trustworthy. The other side of this quote is God says, trust me and I’ll show you, this is a conditional response from the divine as well. Is that the God that you want to be in relationship with?
(16:28):
There’s no right answer just asking the question. Everyone’s like, oh, I don’t know. Is that the God I want to be in a relationship with? This is one of the biggest challenges I believe that we have in living a spiritual life. Regardless of your personal theology, regardless of your religion of origin, I want to designate something here a little bit. There is the religious practices that we do and then there’s our spiritual living. Every single religion on the planet, the people in it practicing it have a spiritual life. You may not understand it, but everyone has a spiritual life. Everyone in this room has a spiritual life. Even if you’re teetering on the side of being agnostic or even atheist, you have a spiritual life because there is something that you believe in and try to understand, even if it’s science that is living our spiritual life.
(17:21):
So regardless of what the framework is, this is one of the biggest challenges in our spiritual living, our personal secular living. We made God in the image of human qualities, at least in the Abrahamic faiths for sure. This is a nice idea, but it doesn’t afford a relationship with God or life that is deep and rich. It is set up for conditional living. Now, I’m not going to try to take that away from you, but I just want you, I just had the opportunity to speak at my undergrad alum. There’s a bunch of students that were in town doing summer internships and I just reconnected with the biggest gift that I got from this liberal arts education was critical thinking, questioning even some of the hard things that I said are absolutely true. They forced me to look in the mirror and go, is that absolutely true? Before there was any spiritual deep delving from this intellectual standpoint. So I’m not going to try to tell you what to believe about God. I just want you to question your relationship with God in a great way. Now here at Cityside, we ascribe to the philosophy and teachings of science of mind and spirit, which simplified for the sake of getting through some information. Here. God is all that there is, period. God is all that there is. So if this is true then then God is not similar in image and expression as humanity.
(19:07):
We are an expression of God but not the way God is. But for some reason we think this is the way God is. On some level, I believe this is the purpose. This is the very core and purpose of a spiritual life, to attempt to see God in a little bit more of our day every single day in some way that we hadn’t understood God to be the day prior. That is living a spiritual life. If God is all that there is, just think about it for a minute, okay, I’m about to get into this idea and share a little bit. I just came back from Kenya. So Kenya is one of 54 countries on the continent of Africa. I’ve only been to one. There were 43 tribes just within Kenya. I only met one of them.
(20:11):
So God is all that there is, and I think I understand what God is. I’ve only been to one country out of 54. Okay, forget about that. Maybe we can’t wrap our head around. How am I going to get across? How many of you been to all 48 contiguous states? One. So there’s some pie in a state that you haven’t been to that you haven’t tasted yet, like no other slice of pie that you’ve ever had before. That is God expressing in an action. There is way, way more expression of God than you’ll ever actually understand in your entire life. Do you realize that? So the spiritual life is just trying to understand as much of God, not in what you know, but that and what you meet every day. You feeling me? You tracking?
(21:10):
Alright, so there’s another quote. There’s so many good quotes in this book, but I want to read this next one because there are so many competing conceptions of God, knowing what to believe is often difficult. Anyone want to put a hand up on that? Alright, and I want to point out that Ilana vanzant without any shame or blame likes to call God. So I’m going to use the quote as she wrote it, but then I’m going to flip the script and play with pronouns a little bit and see how it changes your relationship with God. So she’s using he. If God likes you, he gives you good things. If he doesn’t, he will make your life miserable.
(22:02):
Let me just try a different pronoun. If God likes you, she gives you good things. If she doesn’t, she will make your life miserable. This is the impression of God that most of us grew up with and it lingers in our consciousness more than we realize. Whether you want to admit it or not, even if you didn’t have a religious upbringing, most people that I have met that have not had any sort of grounded practice in religion, the understanding of how God is presented is still in this way even to the agnostic, scientific based family. And that’s why most people don’t want to have a relationship with God. Who in the hell wants to be in a relationship with the divine that is going to maybe give you something if they like you? How do you gauge that?
(22:55):
So she goes on to say these early impressions often have a staggering lifespan. They often leave little space to know God or a desire, a desire even to have a healthy relationship with God when human beings don’t understand something. So you’re included in this and so am I. When we don’t understand something, we will not and we should not and we cannot trust it. Why would you? We want to understand it. That is the conditional relationship that all of us have with trust on some level. Really quick just to play around with a little bit of pronouns for a minute. Let’s go back to that initial sentence. If God likes you, it gives you good things. If it doesn’t, it makes your life miserable. When I use the word it, do you have an image of a person in your mind? Maybe it’s still lingering there from the he’s and she’s just kind of an interesting concept. I’m going to really push us to step into relationship with God as law as opposed to an entity or a person. Have you ever said, how can God let this happen to me? How can God let this happen to them? As you watch something horrible on the news, how can God let this happen to us? Has anyone ever either thought that or said it out loud? My hands up because I have. God is not a person with opinions.
(24:43):
It doesn’t like or dislike things. God is not human. It is not even human like God is not conditional. God is law. There is a creation and it works with itself through law to sustain, maintain and expand itself. That’s it. But we’ve created God in the image of what we understand and that is human interaction. So we place upon conditionality. The law does not think it’s kind of like our nervous system. Our nervous system doesn’t go, I’m not going to let them get excited today. No, you get excited when you get stimulated by something that excites you and the nervous system goes, oh, we’re getting excited, and it takes off getting excited or it takes off getting scared. The nervous system does not think, it does not discern the law is like our nervous system. It does not discern. It just creates with what is there to sustain itself and expand it. When I was in Kenya, one of the coolest things, I saw so many animals, we went on safari. I was there for about nine days every single day. We are out early in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening to see different animals, giraffes, hyenas, water, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest. The migration is happening in a few weeks. So we didn’t see the thousands in droves of them, but it was still quite amazing to be literally as close as I am to all of you in the room. And there was a lion going.
(26:26):
It was kind of crazy. But one of the coolest things was watching the giraffes eat. One of the things that they love to eat are the leaves of the acacia tree. Now the acacia tree in terms of nature being a reflection of the divine and the creative life force, the tree over the millennia has developed these big spiky things that if the elephant or the giraffe just came in and started chomping on the branch, it’s going to get lots of thorns in its tongue, doesn’t feel good. So it forces them to slow down a little bit and they have to work their tongue. If you’ve ever seen a giraffe tongue, it’s kind of crazy and long. It works around the thorns and pulls what it can. But here’s this other really cool element that takes place as we were driving around on the thorns were these little things that looked like blueberries.
(27:16):
They were like little growths. And the closest I could think to it was like a little spider nest. There was something growing inside there and our guide stopped and said, every single time one of the giraffes bumps into and starts feeding inside those little bulbs are ants and those ants get irritated by the movement. So they come out and they bite and they bite the tongue, they bite the face. Now they’re pretty tiny, but they irritate. So the way that the guide presented, he’s like, instead of the giraffe eating for five to 10 minutes, it eats for two and it moves on.
(27:58):
And it made me think about the western world for a minute. So there everyone loved that and the guides, no one touched anything. They just wanted you to see this natural symbiotic relationship in life. And I was like, you know what? If this was the United States and this was happening, one of our national parks, we’d probably get some scientists to try to remove all of the little buds and kill the ants because how can they possibly hurt the giraffes? That’s so sad. They should be able to eat as much as they want whenever they want to. And what would probably happen slowly, the acacia trees would dwindle from the ecosystem because they’re not protected to live. That literally helps the trees to grow into mature trees, to seed and grow more trees. But if those trees didn’t live, then what happened to the ecosystem? Probably giraffes which start to diminish from presence and numbers and so would the elephants. And so bringing it back to this idea of trusting God and trusting life, the folks in Kenya, at least in the middle of these camps and conservations, they weren’t trying to change anything that was there. Did they truly understand all of it? Was it a little bit uncomfortable to see? Yeah, but it was something that life, that creation was happening and creating so that life could sustain and carry itself on the law wouldn’t care though about our opinion. It just creates with what we give it.
(29:40):
I was sharing with Nora beforehand, one of the points in the talk today, and I know I’m getting to time, so just peep this for a second. You ready for some mind blowing? I really want you to take this in. One of the things, this is still kind of in reference to being in Africa and watching all of these animals, we are animals, right? We’re part of the animal world and the thing that we say makes us the highest of all the species is our capacity to think. It’s pretty awesome. Our capacity to think brings us into a place repeatedly questioning whether or not we can trust God. The very thing that separates us, makes us greater than all the other animals on the planet is the very thing that disconnects us from our very source. What are you tracking that? Just breathe that in for a minute. An elephant isn’t going, oh, I don’t know. I don’t know about God. Today.
(30:59):
The lion is not questioning anything. It is moving upon its instincts. Now, I’m not saying that we should shame and blame and shut down this creative and contemplative capacity. I love it and we need to have a relationship with it. We need to have a relationship realizing that this very thing within us that is so awesome is the very source of us disconnecting oftentimes from trusting the divine. Ilana goes on to say, when we understand and embrace the concept of God as law like any other law, we want to obey it and be in good relationship with it. She used gravity. That was the chapter God and gravity. Once you understand gravity, you want to be in relationship with it, right? So you don’t get hurt. If we could step back from God being this entity that we are trying to appease or somehow win favor of and realize that there is a natural flow, to me it put me into a new relationship with a divine 25 years ago that actually made me curious, how can I work with this law to be in harmony with it as opposed to try to hide from it and hopefully it doesn’t see me do this thing over here that I want to do on Friday night.
(32:28):
When we understand and embrace the concept of God as law, like any other law, we want to obey and be in good relationship with it. However, when we hold the concept of God as a person with human traits and characteristics, we believe we can get away with the same unlawful behavior the way we do with other human beings. When you are learning to trust God yourself, you must use spiritual tools to support yourself. Trust is not something you can convince yourself of, nor is it an intellectual process. Trust is both a spiritual tool, so it’s something that you practice like you do prayer and meditation, you pull it out and trust is a spiritual process, which means you must have a spiritual foundation and an approach to activate this energy of trust in your heart and mind. Unfortunately, she says, when trust is challenged, much of what you believe and know about your spiritual foundation takes a backseat to the ruthlessness of the ego.
(33:49):
There’s a Harvard study and a where they from national, the National Science Foundation that has shown that there’s an 80 20 relationship in terms of the quality of our thoughts and thinking. 80% of them are negative, 20% of them are positive. We are constantly looking and actually telling ourselves what’s wrong with God, with life? What isn’t working within us? We’re not trusting, we’re not leaning into that capacity that we obviously have the capacity to. We do it 20% of the time. So what is it that we can do? How can we be in relationship to this and move the needle a little bit from that 80 maybe to like 70 30, maybe get to a 60 40. Hey, I’d settle for 50 50. That’d be a pretty good life. I think in terms of negative, positive thoughts, it’s a wash. Here’s another thing from specifically the Kenyan culture.
(34:51):
In Swahili, you’ve probably heard this phrase before. If you’ve ever seen the lion King Una matata, no trouble, no troubles, no worries. That’s a consciousness. It doesn’t mean that you don’t like something. It means that you are affirming that there is no trouble here and that there’s something possible that’s coming forward. So here’s the practice that I invite you into this week. The way for us to move into greater relationship with trusting God is simply to be curious instead of trying to define this is God and this isn’t God. Because if you embrace the teachings of science, of mind and spirit in most of the news thought, new age traditions, the basic statement is God is all that there is. So that trying to posit back and forth of this is and this isn’t God, you can just wipe that off the plate this week. God is all that there is. So get curious. How is God showing up here?
(36:02):
Here’s the question in statement, actually two questions. The first way to get curious is whether you understand something or not. Maybe your first reaction won’t be this question. You might go, what the let the next phrase that comes into your mind be, isn’t this interesting? Isn’t this interesting? It’s not a declaration of I understand or I don’t understand. Isn’t this interesting? When I say, that’s interesting, my body naturally wants to go like this. I want to lean in and learn a little bit more. That’s interesting. And then after you say, isn’t that interesting? Followed up with what good may come from this? You don’t have to know asking the question, what good may come from this opens your mind and heart. Out of that 80 20 space to maybe 70 30, it’s giving an opportunity for the goodness of God to reveal itself, which is always there. You may not understand it, it may not feel good, but if God is all that there is and it’s working towards your greatest good, then all we really need to do this is the path of the spiritual life, is to ask ourselves what good may come from this? You may not get the answer in five minutes, y’all. It may take five years and probably you’ll get in an answer and five years later, all of a sudden you’ll get another revelation.
(37:39):
I’m on my second marriage, the first one completed, and I was like, I had no clue what good was going to come from that literally every single day I am aware of new goods that came from the solution of that marriage. Do I wish that upon anyone? Is that the path to understanding God? No. It was my path. We will continue. If we ask the question, what good may come from this or what good came from that, it keeps our heart and mind open and available to trust that God is all that there is and there’s something there for us, especially when we don’t understand it. Yes, take a deep breath in. Close your eyes.
(38:23):
There’s a Ricky Byers tune called I Trust in God, and I want to just read some of these lyrics over to you to close out today. Let these resonate and reverberate in your heart and mind. I’m thankful, so grateful. I am one in the spirit all around me. I’m thankful, so grateful. I trust in God. I’m thankful, so grateful. I am one in the spirit all around me. I am thankful, so grateful. I trust in God. If you hear nothing else other than the last four words of that stanza, I trust in God. Let that be an affirmation that you practice in your prayer and in your meditation this week, not because you know the path, just to affirm I trust in God what good may come from this and see your trust in God, expand and deepen. Happy Father’s Day. Happy pride month. Happy Juneteenth. Happy love, happy, trusting. Peace and blessings everybody.
Paige Kizer (39:44):
Thanks.