The Opportunity and Privilege of Trust

“Wonder why God didn’t give us the gift to read the mind of others? So we could have the chance to trust and the privilege to be trusted.”

— Shaun Pollock

Relationships, if we haven’t worked it out by now, are about trust, and, its complementary twin sibling, respect. Where trust and respect are present there’s the blessing of God over the relationship.

By trusting people we respect them.

By receiving their trust we allow them to respect us and there is also an invitation to engender more respect between us.

Given our brokenness and propensity to sin, how ingenious it is of God to create us unable to read the mind of another. Yet, we will still leap to our own conclusions from time to time, which is probably more dangerous.

If we were to analyse trust and respect we might find them not entirely equal.

Trust, I’d suggest, goes out in advance of respect. When we trust, first, we are likely to be respected, as a result. Of course, we could respect someone, initially, and then gain their trust, but trust usually takes the initiative.

Pollock’s quote, above, highlights that trust is transactional—as relationships are. We give and receive it.

The Opportunity to Trust

Trust is a gift. When we take hold of the opportunity to trust someone, or a certain situation, we are bequeathing a gift. We are giving something that may be deserved, but, because trust generally involves some risk, we may be giving something in our trust that is, in some part, undeserved. This sort of risk is good; it encourages people to soar.

Because we don’t know what makes people tick in their moment-by-moment lives—not with comprehensive surety, at least—we need to trust people if our relationships are to blossom.

The opportunity to trust may be seen as ever present, particularly where there’s some battery of alliance formed. It may be just as well that we don’t know what’s going through people’s minds, in order to have this opportunity to trust.

In this way, God forces us to have faith—for we cannot trust without faith. Faith is a gift.

The Privilege of Being Trusted

There is something powerful in the matter of being trusted. It is an invitation to diligence, where we, with more care than usual, do the best we can. Being trusted brings out our best.

Being trusted communicates we have been accepted.

Being trusted is necessary in any team effort.

Being trusted is a privilege we don’t want to abuse. Perhaps we wouldn’t be trusted so much if people knew what we were thinking. This, again, causes us to be grateful to God—that our thoughts are known only to us and him.

God will know the disunity in our hearts at times, but, when we are trusted by others who don’t have so much ‘raw intel’ on us, we don’t want to disappoint. We understand it’s a privilege to be trusted.

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God loves us so much as to give us opportunities to trust people as well as to feel the privilege of being trusted. Trust is a gift both ways.

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.