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.