The Hidden Reason You Struggle to Trust God (And It Has Nothing to Do with Belief)

a 24-Hour efficiency fast

Do you tend to take control quickly and then justify it as just being more efficient? If you want something done right, do it yourself, after all.

Do you struggle with anxiety?

These tendencies often overlap with the unconscious assumption that trust, especially when it slows things down, isn’t a good use of your time, and that’s why faith feels inefficient to a mind trained to optimize.

You would probably never say those words out loud or even to yourself. But it shows up in how uncomfortable it feels to leave anything unresolved. Inefficiency doesn’t just bother you; it feels wrong. A little irresponsible, even, like you’re failing to do your part.

I first wrote about this idea last week, in my article, Is Your Faith Efficient? And it has occurred to me since that this idea is more universal than I originally thought, but rarely, if ever, identified and dealt with.

So I’m running an experiment.

For 24 hours, I’m stepping out of my instinct to be efficient, and I want to invite you to do it with me. I’m not suggesting this because efficiency is bad, but because, like me, you’ve may have been using it in places where it has been slowly replacing simple trust.

So for 24 hours, we are going to reject the need for control for efficiency’s sake in favor of letting go of what doesn’t actually belong to us, and learning what it looks like to pause long enough to ask whether this is actually ours to carry right now.

That means we aren’t going to:

Get rid of every unresolved thing the second you notice it.
Do something just because we can.
Or use speed to give a sense of relief.

You’re still going to show up, respond, and complete real responsibilities, but without solving things that were never assigned to you. And in that, I hope we will start to notice exactly how often we’ve been doing the exact opposite.

Before we start, we need one clear definition, or this will get muddy fast.

The version of efficiency we’re talking about is this: removing discomfort by taking control and creating closure.

That’s the kind of efficiency we’re fasting from. Not wise action, responsibility, or diligence, just the reflex that says: “I can make this feel better right now, so I’m gonna.”

For the next 24 hours, instead, we’re going to interrupt that reflex.

What follows is a 24-hour experiment that will show you exactly how often you’ve been choosing efficiency over trust, and what it looks like to interrupt it in real time.

For those who want to go deeper, what follows is the full structure of the experiment and how to actually run it

The Rules of the Fast

These are not suggestions; these are the rules of the experiment.