A Taste of Trustworthy

This book was not written from the comfortable shore of resolution.

It was written from the middle of the water—by someone who is still learning, still waiting in some areas, still holding promises that have not yet fully materialized, and still choosing, day by day, to trust the God whose character does not shift with circumstances.

That is important to say before we go any further. If you are reading this in the middle of something hard—a season of silence, loss, unanswered prayer, or long and wearying waiting—you are not reading the words of someone who has arrived. You are reading the words of someone who has walked the same road, stumbled on the same stones, and, by the mercy of God alone, lived to tell it—still learning, still trusting, still held by the same faithful God who holds you.

This book is not about how to feel more confident. It is not a collection of techniques for manufacturing trust on difficult days. It is an invitation to behold the God who is, in Himself, the only foundation worthy of the full weight of a human life.

The invitation stands whether you are thriving or barely holding on.

God is trustworthy in both seasons. And by the final page, my prayer is that you will know Him well enough to rest in that truth—not because I have argued you into it, but because you have encountered Him more deeply in it.

Read slowly. Your Father is worth unhurried attention.

Treasuring Christ, Angelique Cooper McGlotten July 2026 Warrenton, Virginia

I was born with clubbed feet.

Both of them. Twisted inward. By the time I was more than two years old, I was still not walking.

My sister, thirteen months younger than I was, had already begun to walk while I still couldn’t take a step. My parents were told I would need correction—significant correction—if I were ever going to walk normally. What they could not have imagined, and what I would not recognize as part of God’s providential care until decades later, was that the correction would come not from a hospital on land, but from a ship. A floating hospital that sailed to places where treatment was otherwise out of reach.

I cannot tell this life-changing story without honoring both of my parents. Before my father ever learned about the Hope Ship, my mother had already been praying for me. Her prayers preceded an opportunity neither of my parents could have foreseen.

One day, at a business luncheon, my father happened to be seated beside a fellow attorney who knew about the Hope Ship. Somehow, their conversation turned to my condition. The man urged my father to act quickly. “Counselor, the ship is pulling out in two or three days. Get your daughter there before it pulls out.”

Think about that for a moment.

My father could have sat elsewhere in the room. His colleague might never have learned about my condition. Their conversation could easily have remained focused on legal matters, as one might expect at a business luncheon. And the ship was preparing to leave in a matter of days.

Yet there they were, seated beside each other, having precisely the conversation that would change the course of my young life.

What appeared to be an ordinary encounter became the means through which God opened an extraordinary door.

My mother had prayed. And when that door opened, my father did not hesitate to walk through it. By God's enabling grace, my Daddy was determined to do whatever it took to make sure his little girl received the care she needed. His sacrificial love turned an unexpected opportunity into a life-changing reality.

Through my mother's faithful prayers and my father's devoted, determined love, God was tenderly caring for me through circumstances I was far too young to comprehend and no one in my family could have orchestrated.

And so, before the ship sailed, I was brought aboard the Hope Ship.

There, skilled hands straightened what had been bent. And in the months and years that followed, I walked. I ran. I stood. I never gave much thought to what my feet rested on, because they worked, and working was enough.

It would take me decades to recognize the tender providence of God in bringing a floating hospital within reach. As I began to see more clearly God’s unfailing, fatherly heart and care, He sweetly drew me closer to Himself. And through my own two feet, He would teach me a lesson whose significance reached far beyond the ability to walk.

What are you standing on?

Over the years, in mentoring and encouraging others and in what I have read, I have encountered a recurring struggle around trust. One expression of it sounds like this:

“I want to trust God. But what do I do when I do not feel capable of trusting Him with what is happening in my life?”

I want to pause over that question because even this struggle can arise from different places. Some disciples still know that God is trustworthy but do not feel capable of living from that conviction. Others may be so worn by suffering that even the conviction itself feels obscured—truths once held with confidence now seem distant or difficult to access. Either way, the experience deserves to be named honestly.

Whatever form the struggle takes, it is not evidence of any defect or change in God’s character. It is the painful distance that can open between what is true of Him and what the heart presently feels able to access or live from.

That distinction matters enormously. I can speak to it from the inside because I have lived within that distance.

Through decades of unanswered prayer, disappointment, grief, and silence, I have never ultimately believed that God Himself was untrustworthy. His trustworthiness has remained bedrock for me. I recognize that as a gift of grace, not a personal achievement. God gave me a settled conviction about His character long before I understood how to live from it.

But that gift did not remove the struggle.

Perhaps you know something of that distance too—the distance between truth and the heart’s present ability to live from it. You may know the verses and believe what Scripture says about God. Or suffering may have left you reaching for truths that once felt more settled. You may know how you think you ought to respond, yet what is true can still feel painfully difficult to live. That is not always rebellion. Sometimes it is the quiet exhaustion of a disciple whose heart is still learning—or relearning—where it can make its home.

Sometimes the mind arrives by car at a truth the heart must learn to inhabit on foot. Both are traveling the same road toward the same destination, and both pass the same signposts along the way. But the mind can encounter those truths in rapid succession: God is holy. God is sovereign. God is wise. God is good. God is faithful. The heart often encounters those same truths more slowly—across the lived miles of disappointment, waiting, remembrance, loss, and mercy. The signposts have not changed. Neither has the destination. But for the one walking, there can be long stretches of road between them.

But those miles are not evidence that God is far away. He is near in every one of them. Nor does He shame the heart for walking more slowly than the mind can travel. With every step, He beckons us onward along the road of His tenderness—meeting our fear with patience, our questions with His presence, our weakness with mercy, and teaching us, step by step, to rest in what has always been true of Him.

In Liberia, we sometimes say, “My heart can lay down.” It is a beautiful expression of deep relief and contentment—the feeling of finally being able to rest inwardly because a matter that has weighed upon the heart has been satisfactorily resolved. The concern has lifted. The heart is at ease. It can lay down.

That is the natural longing of the human heart: resolution first, rest afterward. But trusting God invites us into something deeper. We can rest the weight of our lives upon His unchanging character even when the matter remains unresolved, the questions unanswered, and our hearts unsettled.

That kind of rest is not the same as emotional ease.

A disciple can know that God is sovereign and still feel anxious. She can believe that God is good and still struggle with discouragement. She can know that nothing can separate her from the love of Christ and still experience profound emotional weariness. She can believe that the joy of the Lord is her strength and still find that joy difficult to experience in a painful season. These experiences do not, by themselves, tell us how deeply the truth is believed.

The mind may encounter the sign and say, Yes. True. The heart then walks another mile—through disappointment, mercy, unanswered prayer, remembrance, another morning of receiving enough grace for that day—and encounters the same truth again from within lived experience. The second encounter does not make the truth more true. The mind had already recognized the sign.

The heart needed the miles.

That distance is not necessarily unbelief. Sometimes it is simply the space between truth already understood and truth still being inhabited.

What remained difficult was living from that settled conviction that God was trustworthy—resting the full weight of my life on what I believed about His character. In seasons of emotional distress, I struggled—deeply and honestly—to rest in what I already believed: to live from the peace, joy, and contentment found in Christ when discouragement pressed in and my circumstances and emotions seemed to tell another story. That gap is not outside discipleship. It is often one of the places where God patiently teaches the heart to rest more deeply in what is true.

Feelings are real, but they are not always reliable narrators. They may tell us something true about our experience. They do not always tell us something true about God.

The refinement of trust does not make us invulnerable.

It does not remove grief, silence every question, or make future waiting painless. It does not produce a version of the Christian life in which we no longer need to return, again and again, to the character of God.

Over time, refinement begins to change where the soul turns first.

Earlier in my journey, trust often felt like something I had to summon in response to a crisis. I knew the truths. I believed them. But when the ground shifted, I had to reach for them deliberately—sometimes slowly, sometimes through tears, sometimes with trembling hands.

Across the years, that reaching began to change.

Not because the truths became less necessary, but because they became more deeply embedded. The God I had learned to trust in one wilderness was the same God I encountered in the next. His sovereignty had not diminished. His wisdom had not faltered. His goodness had not thinned. His faithfulness had not wavered.

And repeated encounters with the faithfulness of God began to reshape the reflexes of my soul.

Trust did not become effortless for me; it became more instinctive.

Effortlessness would suggest that trust no longer costs anything. But instinctive trust means that even when the cost is real, the soul increasingly knows where to turn.

Human relationships give us a faint picture of this. When we have come to know someone as trustworthy, we carry ourselves differently in their presence. We are less guarded, less compelled to control every outcome, more able to speak honestly, receive correction without assuming rejection, entrust what is precious, and remain at rest even when we do not understand every silence. Trust changes posture.

With God, the analogy reaches beyond itself. Even the most trustworthy person can fail us. God does not merely possess a trustworthy record. He is trustworthy in His very being. As the heart comes to know Him—not merely as trustworthy in theory, but as the holy, sovereign, wise, good, and faithful God He has revealed Himself to be—it increasingly relinquishes the reflex to hold everything together. Rooted trust does not mean the absence of fear or pain. It means the heart is learning where its weight can rest.

Instinctive trust does not mean we outgrow the practices through which God continues to form us. We still pray, return to Scripture, and bring the heart again beneath the truth. Over time, those movements become more deeply ingrained. What once required prolonged interior argument may begin to arise as quieter convictions:

This is not spiritual mastery. It is spiritual memory.

It is the soul remembering, sometimes before circumstances offer any encouragement, that the God who held it before is the God who holds it now.

That spiritual memory has reached even into the smallest interruptions of ordinary life. If I am stopped by a red light, encounter an unexpected delay, or find my plans slowed by something I did not choose, I no longer feel the same compulsion to fret over the minutes I have lost. I do not assume I know why God permitted each interruption or attach special meaning to every inconvenience. I simply rest in the larger truth that nothing has slipped outside His providential care. The God I trust with decades, callings, and unanswered prayers is also trustworthy with traffic lights, detours, and the ordinary rearrangements of a day. Trust is not only handing Him the future I have dreamed about. It is also releasing the next five minutes.