Trust

There is a story about the mid-Victorian era Bishop Samuel Wilberforce who experienced a religious conversion late in life. He said that one night, some years before his conversion, he was thinking of the wickedness of the world, and it bothered him. And he said, of course there was some self-righteousness involved, but he truly was bothered with the wickedness of people, especially people in London. And then he thought of the wickedness of people in general, the whole mass of humanity. Most people were terrible — so unlike himself — and God would surely punish them. They thought some awful thing would happen if he didn’t do something about it. So he decided to stay up all night to try to save the world — to see if he could save the world from the doom it so thoroughly deserved. He knelt down and hour-after-hour asked God not to destroy the world. Finally, he heard God speak to him: “Why don’t you go to…