TRUST

Trust can be a complicated subject wherein trusting others requires a leap of faith, being on the receiving end often requires sometimes arduous effort on your part. It is easy to trust the guy behind the bulletproof glass at a local all-night gas station, as he has much to lose materially should he fail to keep his end of the deal and give you the correct change from your twenty dollar bill. However, as we pass a less fortunate soul on a freeway on ramp bearing a cardboard sign asking for spare change because he implies that he is a homeless vet, well, that is a different story. Many is the time I have caught myself making the automatic assumption that in truth, he was merely a drug addict or too lazy to support himself. Why is this, I wonder? No man is born above another. No man is more or less capable when given the same tools in which to build his life. Eg: a sound mind and body, a supportive family, perhaps a stroke of good luck once in a while.

And what of trust in our more guarded personal lives? Trust plays out its part based on simple fact and calculation. My husband once cheated on me and therefore can never have 100% of my trust again. I loaned my friend some money to get out of a jam but he didn’t pay me back as he promised. I loaned my tools to someone and now some of them are missing. Perhaps we can never truly trust anyone completely because we are all human and we all fail from time to time. The only thing we can do, that we truly have control over, is to make OURSELVES trustworthy in others eyes. Perhaps this is the most important act we can do, to accomplish the gaining of someone else’s trust in whole? If others fail us it is they who have lost a great deal, not we who trusted them not to fail, for we took the leap of faith and proved to ourselves that we are the better person, that we are moral men, and that we have earned, and deserve the trust of others.

Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.

TIME

What exactly IS time? Time is often referred to as an imaginary boundary, a man-made division of an ongoing immeasurable piece of fabric in our lives, but in reality, and in our daily lives; time is the most essential element we know. Without it there are no days, nights, months, years, etc… Without time there is no way in which to order our actions, leaving us in a swirl of meaningless void. Therefore I submit to you that time is real, that it exists, and that it is the primary element for which to base our every move, thought, and action upon. This makes time the most important aspect of our lives.

If we are to have meaning in our lives, we must both use this time properly, and above all, respect it. How a man uses his time is his personal choice, an act of free will per se, but the focus of this lesson is respecting time. If we choose to spend this all-precious commodity playing marbles, watching Andy Griffith, playing solitaire, and so forth, we disrespect time. We assign a lesser value to it. If we allocate a goodly portion of our time in effort to better our world, to enhance our lives and the lives of others, or any other worthy pursuit, we are then showing our love and respect to this special gift of time.

Let not others take this gift from you in meaningless unworthy chase. Nor allow yourself to squander it in petty amusement or for purposes of no true bearance of fruit. Remember that at the end of your days you shall be measured by that which you did with your time, how your gift of time was spent. Do not be that fellow on his death bed that looks at his hands and says “What have I done? Useless!”

And know that no man in recorded history ever said upon his deathbed “I wish I could have spent just one more day playing solitaire.”

Peace