Trusting God With the Landing

Many years ago, I was working with a group of teenagers, and we attended a conference that included some team-building activities. One of them was the classic “trust fall.”

You probably know the one. A person stands with their back to the group, crosses their arms, and falls backward—trusting everyone behind them to catch them before they hit the ground. Well, as one of the leaders, guess who got to go first? Yep. Me.

I’m not going to kid you. As I stood there with my back to this group of teenagers, a thought crossed my mind: These are kids. What if they think it would be funny to let me hit the dirt?

They assured me they wouldn’t. Still, there was something very unnatural about purposely falling backward when every instinct in my body was telling me to catch myself.

Eventually, I had to make a decision. I could keep standing there, completely in control and completely safe, or I could trust them. So I let go. I stopped trying to control where I was going to land and fell backward into their arms. And thankfully, they caught me.

It was a simple exercise, but it really did build trust between us. I’ve thought about that trust fall many times over the years because I think following God can feel a lot like that. It’s easy to say we trust Him when we can see where we’re going. It’s much harder when we can’t.

Sometimes we pray about something and already have the answer worked out in our minds. We know exactly how we’d like God to fix it, when we’d like Him to fix it, and what the ending should look like. Then things don’t go that way, and that’s when trust gets real.

Trusting God doesn’t always mean believing He’s going to give us the outcome we’re hoping for. Sometimes it means ​releasing our grip on the outcome​ altogether and saying, Lord, I don’t know where this is going, but I trust You with where I land.

That’s not easy. Our natural instinct is to brace ourselves, grab hold of something, or try to regain control. But faith sometimes asks us to do the opposite—to loosen our grip and trust the One we can’t see behind us.

And unlike those teenagers standing behind me all those years ago, God doesn’t need to convince us that He’s trustworthy. He has already proven to us who He is, over and over again.

Looking back over my own life, I can see times when things ​didn’t turn out the way I prayed they would​. At the time, I couldn’t understand why. But I can also see God’s faithfulness woven through places I couldn’t understand while I was living them.

Maybe you’re standing in one of those places right now. Maybe there’s something you’ve prayed about, worried about, planned for, and tried your best to control. And maybe God is asking you to trust Him with something you simply cannot see yet. You don’t have to know where you’re going to land to know Who is holding you.

Sometimes faith is simply closing our eyes, loosening our grip, and saying:

Lord, I trust You with the landing.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” — Proverbs 3:5–6

September 20, 2026 Morning Brew