Trust

I don’t remember exactly when I began to struggle with trust, but I do remember one time as a child I went to the library with my dad to return a long overdue library book.  I recall standing with him as he told the librarian why the book had not been returned.  No doubt my childish brain didn’t know all facts but whatever it was he told her I didn’t understand it to be the full truth.  For some reason that moment left me thinking I couldn’t trust my dad as well as I had before.    

As years past, I experienced many times when my mistrust of people compounded when they broke promises or betrayed me in some way.  By college, I had built a wall around myself allowing only a few select people behind it.  My struggle with trust lasted for decades. 

I read books and tried hard to figure out how I might be able to trust people more.  I learned “blind trust” is never wise.  Then I discovered what I called “calculated trust” which to me was trusting a person in a few areas of their life but not in others.  I might trust someone to be a friend but not to fix my car or manage my money.  I’ve since learned nearly every human has some form of a trust issue.  

Children often don’t trust their parents; parents don’t always trust each other; patrons don’t trust salespersons, etc.  In general, people don’t trust politicians, lawyers and certainly anyone in authority.  Mistrust is as old as Adam and Eve!  Our faultless God provided a perfect world for them and told them not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Yet, they chose to mistrust their authority figure.  Today, a person might trust God to give them eternal life but not trust Him to protect or provide for them.  So, they take things into their own hands and worry a lot.  Mistrust is obviously not just because of someone else’s unrighteous behavior.  It must be something within us.

It was my desire to trust God more that led me to change the way I did my private time with God.  To be candid, I was very afraid to change my method from what I had been taught and practiced for decades even though it had become only a duty.  But the Holy Spirit used these words of David to capture my attention.  Those who know your name will trust in you, for you, LORD, have never forsaken those who seek you (Psalm 9:10, NIV).  I trusted in Him, but certainly not as much as I wanted to trust Him!  This verse revealed to me the more I knew His name the more I would trust Him.  When my desire to trust Him more became greater than my fear of falling away from God because I stopped the dutiful way I had been doing my devotions each day, I took the leap of faith and radically changed how I read the Bible and prayed.  As I began to journal what I sensed the Holy Spirit whispering to me as I reflected on a few verses at a time, I found my trust level of God grow stronger and stronger.  As my trust in God increased, I was increasingly able not to trust people more but rather trust how God would protect me in the midst of human failures.  I found great comfort in what John wrote about Jesus.  In the context of people beginning to believe in Him, But Jesus on his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people (John 2:24, ESV).  What a contrast!!! 

Later, knowing the Jews were going to kill Him, with incredible confidence Jesus let them do it based solely on His trust in His Father’s greater plan.   Eureka!!  Healthy trust has less to do with a faulty human and more to do with our misguided expectations.  My security is not found in building a wall around myself but by learning to intimately know the awe-inspiring trustworthiness of my Heavenly Father who will not only walk with me through fire and floods but generously reward me for trusting Him.  Fallible people will inevitably fail you at some point.  So, exchange your expectations of them for greater expectations of God’s faithfulness and perfect wisdom! 

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