Faith to Trust God's Plan

This Sunday, I'll be teaching a lesson about Gideon (from the Old Testament, not the Book of Mormon). I don't imagine that this will be very difficult because the story is interesting and the message is clear: Trust the Lord. God may use bizarre, counter-intuitive methods sometimes, but His ideas work about as often as they're tried. If God tells you to reduce your army based on how they drink their water, humor Him; odds are, He has a plan.

Unfortunately, that level of trust is hard to come by. When I receive a commandment, I won't to know why that commandment makes sense before I commit to keeping it. For example, I was once asked to serve as an Eleven-Year-Old-Scout Leader. I had served in that position before, and I knew that the Eleven-Year-Olds have a difficult place in the church's Scouting program. They had grown out of the Cub Scouts, but they didn't meet with the other Boy Scouts, either. These boys were stuck in a sort of limbo between two functioning programs, and I'm not sure why that was. So, when I was asked to be our ward's Eleven-Year-Old-Scout leader, I declined. It was the only calling I ever rejected, and I rejected it because I had no idea why that position and that practice existed. For the record, I still don't know why the Eleven-Year-Old-Scouts are kept separate from the other Scouts. It still seems like a terrible idea to me, and I hope we don't implement it again with the new program we use after we officially part ways with the Boy Scouts of America (or Scouting BSA, or whatever it is now). But if we do continue that practice, and if I am once again asked to mentor those ostracized boys, will I have enough faith to trust that God has a good reason for all of this?

I'm not sure. I would hope that I would trust that God's ridiculous-, counter-productive-, and foolish-seeming plans and practices actually have good logic behind them, but I'm not sure that I actually would trust that until I saw the logic for myself. I like to know the reasons for things. If a course of action doesn't make sense to me, I'm not likely to follow it. I'm not sure what I would have done if God had asked me to lead the Israelite army and deliberately reduce its numbers in such an arbitrary way. I'm not sure that I would have gone along with it. I don't think that I have the kind of faith that Gideon seemed to have. Perhaps I should try to develop it.

Of course, I know that God knows more about these situations than we do. I know that He knows the best course of action. God's ways are always the best ways, even when they don't seem to make sense to us. I should trust God and His unconventional ideas more than I currently do, like Gideon did. Theoretically, I shouldn't need to know why God wants something done in a certain way. I should be able to just take it on faith and trust that God has a logical plan.