The trouble with trust

I get asked all the time, oh, every once in a while, oh, well, I was asked once where I get my ideas. Truth is, ideas? Anyway, I seldom if ever think about these things before I sit down in the morning to let God pour forth onto the page. I know, I know. You can tell I never think about these things. My point, however tenuous, is that these things come from someplace outside of myself.

This morning while slaving over a hot tub of water, I thought back to something someone said to me recently. We were talking about decision making, and I was told, "You are just going to have to trust me."

The seed was planted, mustard though it might have been.

This thing called trust is such a migrant worker, isn't it? Here today, picking and pulling and tugging till the crop is harvested, then gone tomorrow.

Trust is a commodity in scripture that is the opposite, it seems to me, of fear. It is an idea harvested quite often in the Bible.

In Proverbs we read, "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."

The whole trip the Israelites took through the Red Sea into the desert was built not on manna but on trust. The Lord said to Moses, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, so that the people will hear me speaking with you and will always put their trust in you."

In Deuteronomy, God spoke of walls of trust that the enemies of Israel placed before them. "they will lay siege to all the cities throughout your land until the high fortified walls in which you trust fall down."

Heck, the entire book of Job is essentially about what you will trust in.
Job says, "If I have put my trust in gold or said to pure gold, 'You are my security...' then these would also be sins to be judged."
Job says, "Let him not deceive himself by trusting what is worthless, for he will get nothing in return."

The words translated trust in the Bible literally mean a "bold, confident, sure security or action based on that security, It is not the same as faith, which is the gift of God. Rather, trusting is what we do because of the faith we have been given. Trusting is believing in the promises of God in all circumstances, even in those where the evidence all around us seems to speak to the contrary.

Trust is the rewarder of peace. Trust is the main point of about half the Psalms. There are 39 references to trust in the Psalms, referring to trusting in God, trusting in the Word of God, or not trusting in the riches or the things of this world.

I once had a boss who continually spouted the phrase, "Don't put your trust in people, places, or things for they will let you down all the time."

So, coming full circle, trusting that someone else is more capable than myself is something that is difficult for me because that would mean I have indeed trusted in people. My experience says that all persons are capable of failure as well as success.

We trust our experience, we trust our parents, we trust our gadgets, we trust our technology, we trust what we've been told, we trust our friends, we trust our job, we trust our savings, we trust our knowledge and we certainly trust our wisdom.

Trust is what causes a thousand to drink the Kool Aid. Trust is what gets us elected officials who are in the long run not qualified for the task. Trust is what makes us think we can negotiate curves at high speed. Trust is believing in oneself for no reason whatsoever.

Trust is the most important tool in the faith dictionary

Therefore, what I try to do is trust only in the Lord. The problems come when I don't have a word from the Lord about something and I act out anyway. Truth is, that's what I do more often than not. When that happens, I usually say, "Don't worry. Trust me."

The woe (whoa) is I actually mean that.