Building on some of my other ramblings, I was still coming up short in the area of loving God. I was approaching it as a missing experience, a mountain I had not climbed, a feeling still to be collected, bagged, and labeled. I saw others with the prize, and I was frustrated at my inability to get my share.

The problem was that I was approaching it like skydiving, something that had to be mastered. With learning, determination, overcoming fear, understanding, and practice, I felt I should be able to produce the desired result. In spite of the common belief among all the world's religions that man must humble himself before God, it didn't occur to me that an ego-driven experience with God was unlikely to succeed.

Throughout this false start, I looked at trust in God as a poor cousin to faith in God, which I had in my measure, but which I felt was a cold, logical stepping stone to the epiphany of finding a love of God. The stalemate continued until the day I was involved in a legal battle, one whose outcome meant a lot to me and my family. We entered the quiet time leading up to the verdict, a time of unbearable stress. I felt I had done the best I could, and the judge seemed fair. Perhaps a patriotic belief in the system primed me for the epiphany that was to come. I prayed to God, but I didn't view him as a trickster, someone who doled out good luck to those who begged well and often.

On the drive to court, I heard myself mumble to God, "You sort it out. I'm sure it will somehow work out OK in the end." Like a hot shower on a cold day, I felt my stress melt away. I had delegated the disagreeable job of waiting to someone else. With such weight off my shoulders, I entered the courtroom light of step. The verdict was largely in my favor. In a quiet moment afterward, I asked myself if I would have dumped any further trust in God if the verdict had gone badly. My surprising answer was that I would have continued to trust in him. That was the epiphany, that I could trust someone so deeply. I didn't do that with people I knew and could touch.

The stress reduction was a palpable reward, but that was just the door opener. Somewhere in the heat of battle, I realized that God had to be defined as good, and that he would arrange for a good outcome, however he defined good. This was so counter to a take-charge kind of guy that I was surprised at myself taking the leap.

In retrospect, I had concluded that the world was basically good, which wasn't hard since I'm an optimist, and that it was made good by someone, which wasn't hard since I see the hand of God in many wondrous ways. Trust was simply a belief that God would keep doing what he was already doing. A remaining question was whether I would be more than a speck in this cosmic good that God was going to keep producing. Would good happen to me, or just the huge world I was part of? In other words, does God know or care about me as an individual? If not, I couldn't trust him to produce a good outcome for me personally.

The answer came from asking the follow-on question, "Why does God bother to do all this good, whether for the world or me personally?" It isn't pity for he wouldn't create us just to pity us. The only answer to make sense is because he loves the world, with love at a level we may not understand, but with our understanding of love coming as close as humans can. The question then morphs to whether he loves the world or its components, us. We love a child but not one of its skin cells. Is that how God loves, with us as just skin cells?

The big difference between the world and a child is free will. A galaxy responds to physics with its actions and fate predetermined. A child is not that predictable. Our thoughts are governed at the molecular level, where physics like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle make the outcome of a thought unpredictable. Almost as though God designed the world so even he wouldn't know exactly what choices we would make, only the statistically determinate effect of all of us on the world. Because God has free will and he wanted us to resemble him, he arranged for the world to give us free will.

Free will also gave us the ability to have goodness, another connection to God. A galaxy is neither good nor bad; it just does what it's told. Since love is a connection between two beings, God seems to have worked the system to enable several connections between us and God, more so than between him and the big world at large.

To grow those connections into love, where each connection is an opportunity to see oneself in the other being, we need to grow in our understanding of the object of our love. It is hard to love a person if all I know about them is their social security number. If I see their photograph, I can begin to make the connections. If I spend my life with them, I will make so many connections it would be hard not to love them. We love those we have known most deeply. So to love us deeply, God would need to know me and to love me individually to increase the depth of his love.

So if this admittedly porous logic tree gets me to the point that God will continue to make the world good, that he works with me as an individual love object, then he will produce a good outcome for me personally. That means I can trust him.

It also poses the question of what I will do in return. There is of course gratitude, so I will say grace at my meals, but I'm not sure God gets much out of an attaboy from me. There is also the natural reaction to return love. This is not a universal reaction, as any parent with a teenager can attest. But the wholesome, fulfilling relationship we all aspire to is two-way love, one that grows in both directions over time.

This doesn't offer me much in ways to love God, my original problem, but it does provide a fresh approach to success. No longer is the objective to experience a feeling, to produce a sensation where there is none, but rather to connect back to someone already out there loving me. My mission is no longer to find God and produce love, but an easier job of finding his love for me as an individual, and reflecting some of it back. I go from a false starting point of a doer to one done to -- yet another example of the ego no longer in charge.

And in the way these things often go full circle, I'm back to the trust that God will take care of this, too. If he is producing good for me personally, he will surely include the good of finding his love.

This trust doesn't mean I hang around and wait for all this to happen to me. I trust in my abilities to succeed in business, but I know that is not enough to succeed. It is in fact that trust which compels me to work hard to succeed.

What is curious is how finding trust in God can turn out to be the back door to the love that did not succeed with a frontal attack.

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