A great deal of our spiritual struggles arise from the assumption that we cannot discern what it is the Lord is asking of us. Though this assumption is sometimes rooted in reality, other times it is really a way by which we evade doing what we already know He is asking.
In other words, do we really not know what He is asking of us? Or do we not like what He is asking of us, so we feign ignorance?
Many of the prophets struggled with this as well. In a sense, this struggle puts us in good company.
Today we hear that the Lord speaks to Ezekiel. He asks for obedience and warns against rebelliousness. Really, He is asking for nothing else but a disposition of trust: “Open your mouth and eat what I shall give you.”
This image of trust as a willingness to eat the food the Lord gives us is quite important, not least because of what it is the Lord gives Ezekiel to eat: a scroll. This quite obviously represents the importance of Scripture, but less obviously, it shows us the way we are to engage the Scriptures. They are not merely a subject to study, but food for the soul. They must be a source of sustenance and spiritual nourishment. It is in the Scriptures that we come to know both what the Lord wants from us and why we should obey. It is where we learn to trust.
This also helps us see the call to be like children a bit differently. Children receive what is given to them and are shaped by it. They depend upon others for their nourishment, instruction, and formation. They learn to trust.
We must approach the Lord and His Word in this way: ready to receive what is offered and to be formed by it. If we begin by trusting the Lord, our trust will never ultimately be broken, because He is infinitely trustworthy.
But so often we project the ways in which trust has been broken in our own lives onto the Lord. We judge Him according to the many ways in which we fail to be as faithful as He is.
Though we should not lose our faith in Him for this reason, we can see how it happens. We can also see why it is so scandalous to the faith of many when someone who claims to be faithful practices any sort of dishonesty. A disciple must be many things, and a radical commitment to the truth is at the forefront of those things.
This is because Truth is at the heart of the Scriptures. It is not merely an accumulation of facts, but the revelation of a Person: the one, true, and Triune God, who has revealed Himself fully in Jesus Christ.
The Lord calls us to Himself through Scripture, which means that He calls us into the Truth. Every time we open ourselves to His Word, ready to receive it and be nourished by it, we are responding to His call. But when we demand that things be as we want them to be rather than as they actually are, we partake in the very rebellion against which Ezekiel is warned.
May we all be given the grace to have a disposition that radically accepts and embraces the Truth and is ready to receive it wherever it is found. May we trust the Lord enough to allow His Word to form us, rather than trying to conform His Word to what we would prefer it to say.