Broken Trust
Raise your hand if you've broken someone's trust. 🙋🏻 Raise your hand if someone has broken the trust you put in them. 🙋🏻
"Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair."
Our society places a high value on trust. We teach it to our kids, we strive to be trustworthy people, and some of the most popular pins on Pinterest are quotes about protecting yourself from people who break your trust. It's a fragile thing, that's why we talk about it as something that is earned and broken so quickly. Trust is easily shattered, sending shards of brokenness in places we won't find for years to come. It contributes to a ridiculously high divorce rate, and the breakdown of countless families and friendships. Where trust is broken, the ground is fresh for all sorts of dysfunction & disorder to come in, and before it can be rebuilt these new residents have already established a foothold. Is this how we're meant to live? What does God say about it?
"Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord." - Psalm 40:4
"It is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in man." - Psalm 118:8
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight." - Proverbs 3:5-6
Beloved, I searched and searched but could not find one piece of scripture telling us to trust anyone other than God. Please correct me if I'm wrong, I'm no scholar here, just searching after God's heart for us and this is where I think He wants to take us. What if we were a people who trusted God so much that we were free to love? If we figured out how to truly trust Him with our whole hearts, wouldn't our hearts be free to simply love the broken people we're doing life with? The truth is, none of us are perfect. Oh we want to be, we try to love well, but we fail all too often. We're broken people rubbing up against broken people. If we continue to demand & offer trust to each other, we'll continue to break each other.
When trust is broken, you have to choose whether to let them "earn" your trust back, or to protect yourself from that person - putting up walls and boundaries to keep them out. Neither of those responses offer love, they're both coming from a place of fear. Fear & love can't be present in the same place - they repel each other. Love doesn't require anything of the recipient, and building of trust always requires something. Fear takes God out of the equation, love puts Him smack dab in the middle.
I have this radical idea to stop trusting people altogether. I'm taking refuge in the Lord and trusting Him with all my heart. And it's changing everything. What I've discovered is that I've taken all the power that I've put in people, and giving it to God. If you'd asked the old me, I never thought I'd given people any power... but on the other side of it now I see more clearly. Giving trust essentially says "you have the power to break me". God is the only one who has that right, and can handle the responsibility. He's the only one with the power to lift me up or put me down. God alone can break my trust (and He never does). All the people that have broken my trust in the past - I get to just love them now. No strings. I am free to enter into relationship, free to give of myself, free to take risks and tear walls down. I trust God with my heart, I trust Him with my past and my future. I trust Him with what I offer to others and I trust Him to take care of the people around me. Forgiveness becomes a privilege, because I'm not requiring anything of the person who delivered the wound.
It's time to shift our motto from "Love God, trust people" to "Trust God, love people". This doesn't mean that you act foolishly, or become a martyr, or throw wisdom out the window. It's a simple shift towards letting God hold your trust and becoming free to love the ones in front of you. I dare you to try it!
