Love always trusts
1 Corinthians 13:7
The safety afforded by love is arrived at with the crossing of many high bridges over many treacherous ravines. We have crossed many of them over the last days and in truth there are yet more to come. But I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge that today’s is one of the deepest yet.
Trust embraces a measure of exposure to risk that belief does not. It is possible to believe in something without the requirement of risk. Trust by its very nature requires us to believe in something and expose ourselves to the consequence of that thing meeting, or indeed failing to meet, our expectation. It is this element of risk and consequence that make trust hard to win, harder to keep and impossibly easy to lose.
Unmet expectation is the thief of a great many things. Trust is chief among them. Given that we and indeed the people we encounter are certain at some point to fail to meet expectation how then can we commit ourselves to a life of trust?
First to the question of how we as people can engender trust in us. At the outset let’s acknowledge that we are imperfect people and the result of that will necessarily occasion times when we breach people’s trust. Our objective should be to keep these occasions to a minimum and to recognize and repair the relationship if and when they do occur.
It is helpful here to abide by the words of James and let our Yes be Yes and our No be No. In a great many cases It is acceptable to say No. It is equally acceptable to say yes. The advice given is to choose early, and let your decision post that point be resolute. When we double back on our word we break trust. When we make no decision we also fail to engender trust, for we have not given a word that people can hold us to. Where possible, choose early, be resolute.
And then to the question of how we can trust always in others. The first and most straightforward way forward (in theory if not in practice) is to recalibrate. For there are only two real ways to fix this broken paradigm; Have people adjust their behavior and attitude to where we would require it (I wish you luck wth this). Or, adjust our expectation of that circumstance or person. It should be painfully obvious that there is only one side to this equation that we hold any level of control over.
And so in order to find peace and the way of Christ’s love we must reset our expectations. To this end it helps immensely if we stop making it about us. Because mostly it isn’t. Which can come as a great surprise. But while ever our main concern for others is how their behavior effects us, we are constrained. Not only are we inhibited in our ability to love effectively, but our lives can become deeply unhappy because we are constantly misreading people and situations in order to reframe them in a way that see’s us the central character in the play. You may be the central character of your own play but the world is not reorganizing itself in order to make you the central character of theirs. Nor should it be expected to.
If our trust is built on achieving prescribed outcomes where we alone are writing the prescriptions, we will constantly be in a place of disappointment and mistrust. True of people, true of God.
What if, church, we stopped making the world about us? What if we removed the burden of expectation on people in order for people to gain our trust? What if we spent as much time making ourselves worthy of trust as we do analyzing and critiquing others motives and chastising their execution of their intentions.
There are no guaranteed outcomes in love, for love is not for the risk averse. Christ put his faith and trust in us. Gave it all on a maybe from us. No outcome guaranteed. That is love. It trusts that people are worthy of love. Always.
All my love
Stephen Hickson