The pastor was preaching about trust.
About what we trust instead of God when we have options. About Gideon, who had to burn his to figure out what he had left. About altars, and what we put on them.
Trust is complicated when you have options, he said.
I was thinking about my boyfriend.
Specifically: about trust.
About how we have been figuring out boundaries — mine, his, where they overlap, where they don't. About the recent thing that came up. Nothing crossed. But he told me he didn't like it. And I have been turning that over since.
What it means that he said it. What it means that I am being trusted to hear it. What it means to be in the kind of relationship where someone tells you when something doesn't sit right with him, and the trust is the thing that lets him say it.
I was thinking about trust at a sermon about trust.
The pastor would not have called this a parallel. He was talking about God. Vertical trust. The kind that asks you to burn options and walk into the dark.
I was thinking about the person I share a life with.
These are not the same things. I know they are not the same things. The sermon was not actually about my relationship.
But.
Trust is the word he was using. Trust is the word I was sitting with. The room was full of one kind and my head was full of another. They were both in there at the same time. I do not know if they were doing the same work or just sharing a name.
He had a list of idols.
Success. Affirmation. Anger. Control. Ungodly relationships.
I clocked two of them.
The relationships one for the reasons I have been writing about. The way you do when an item on a list lands a little too near.
But also: success.
Success is something I have been working on, working toward, working at, for a long time. I have built things. I have stayed up. I have organized my life around getting better at making something out of what I have. Most of the people who know me would say that has been good for me. The pastor, in another sermon, would probably say the same. He was not preaching against ambition.
But the way the line landed, in the moment, was: what you have been giving your hours to is a thing you have been worshipping.
I felt that one differently. Not that's close. More wait, that's not fair.
The test he gave us was: anything we look to to meet our needs is an idol. I have been turning that test over since. The longer I turn it over, the wider it looks. The test catches my relationship. The test catches my ambition. The test catches my friendships. The test catches almost any commitment a person could be in.
A test that broad does not catch what it is supposed to catch. It catches everything.
There is a version of this where I let the sermon win. Where I write the post that says the pastor named the things, I am going to take them seriously, and put my relationship and my ambition behind God.
I am not writing that.
There is a version where I push back hard. Where I say the framework is small, the test does not work, the pastor was naming things that are not idols and calling them idols because the sermon needed a list.
I am closer to that one than I was when I started writing this.
I am still hedging — closer to, not at. I am not landing on a verdict. But the drift, the longer I sit with the sermon, is in one direction. I went into the pew prepared to be taught and I have left it less convinced of the lesson than I was an hour in.
It has been a week and a half since I sat in that service.
The first draft of this held the piece in the middle. Maybe the sermon found me sideways. Maybe I am letting myself off the hook. I do not know.
What I notice now is that the not-knowing has hardened. Not into certainty. Just into something firmer than the original wobble. The longer I sit with the framework, the smaller it looks. The longer I sit with what I was actually thinking about during that sermon — trust, growth, learning how to be in a real relationship with a real person, doing real work I care about — the less any of it fits inside idol.
I think the sermon was, and I am hedging here because I am still figuring it out — I think it might have been BS.
Or rather: I think the framework was. The verses are still in there. The conviction is still in there. Gideon still burned his options. Some of those points still land for me. But the part where success and relationships and ambition all got named on the same indictment shelf — that part, I think, I am not buying.
Make sure heart is aligned privately.
I wrote that down too.
He said it about Gideon doing the heart work where no one was watching. Before the public altar, the private one.
I am doing some heart work. It is not the heart work the sermon had in mind. It is the work of figuring out how to trust someone, how to be trusted, how to hear I didn't like that and not flinch, how to say I didn't like that and not soften it into nothing.
Maybe that is not what the pastor meant.
Maybe it is what God meant, and the pastor's frame is one of the frames it fits in, but not the only one.
I left church with the pastor's bullet points in my notebook and my own bullet points in my head.
They had the same word in them.
A week and a half later, I am not sure they were doing the same work. I am closer to thinking they were not.
That is where I am for now.