Mike is one of my best friends. What you need to know about Mike is that he is a natural-born athlete. I, on the other hand, am a natural-born glutton for punishment. When Mike and I were in college and graduate school, we spent a lot of time working at our neighborhood pool during the summers. When there was a break in the action, we'd play some basketball on one of the hoops that was set up adjacent to the pool's tennis courts. I never beat him head-to-head. Let's just say that he was the Kevin McHale of our neighborhood, while I played basketball like the swimmer I was. Sometimes, though, one of Mike's best friends from college, Jeff, would stop by for a visit. Perhaps as a way of paying me back for my willingness to continue my futile participation in our one-on-one games, Mike would let me play on the same side with him and Jeff when we were able to get a three-on-three game going. Notwithstanding my participation, we were unstoppable. No matter the opponent or what defense they threw at us, Mike and Jeff had an unnatural ability to find each other on the court and make the winning play. All I needed to do was to set the occasional pick and pull down the occasional rebound. They did the rest. No-look passes. Give-and-go's. You name it, they executed it, often without so much as exchanging a look or a word. They had the ultimate in-game level of trust in one another.

When hard times or issues come along in our lives, whether at home, school, work, church or the athletic field, it can be difficult to trust God's plan for us. When it comes to trusting God, I have come to realize that it is a lot like those no-look passes that Mike and Jeff used to dish out on the playground. In other words, it is not so much that there is a method or process for trust that I need to learn or to absorb, so much as I simply need to accept as a fact that God is not going to let me down when it comes to the truly important things in my life. Paul gets at this in the key passage noted above. He reminds us that nothing can separate us from God's love for us.