Sunday, January 20, 2019

2 Nephi 2:24 -- On Starting with Trust

"But behold, all things have been done in the wisdom of him who knoweth all things."
2 Nephi 2:24


This is a really interesting idea and it gets into the juxtaposition or the push-pull in our lives between trust and mistrust, or faith and doubt.  I think we start out pretty faithful in life, and we tend to believe what our parents and others tell us.  Little kids are usually very trusting.  As we grow though, people laugh at us for being trusting... labeling it "gullible" instead, and we also experience the pain of having our trust betrayed.  Intentional or not, it can be a painful transition in our lives as we realize that our parents are not infallible, and that other people lie in order to manipulate.

Part of this transition is of course good.  We have to learn to tell the difference between truth and falsehood, and God assuredly doesn't mean for us to fall for every fake story someone posts on Facebook or tells us on the playground.  He wants us to learn to think, and evaluate, and he is always there to help when we are uncertain.  The part that isn't so good is the part where we can start feeling like our trust is broken, or that the world is broken and we refuse to trust anyone or anything, including God.

There is a certain amount of ambiguity or uncertainty pretty much baked into the human experience.  We have to be in the middle of competing priorities, powers, and possibilities--if everything were black and white and completely certain, we could never learn to choose.  If there were only good and not bad, same thing--we can't graduate to choosing between good and better until we learn the difference between good and bad, or understand the idea that there can be a wrong choice.

Realizing that part of life, and love, is risk and vulnerability helps us to not only appreciate it more when people trust us, but also to be more careful not to cause accidental emotional harm.  Our attitudes, and lives, can completely change if we understand the differences and the risks, but still *choose* to trust, or choose faith appropriately. 

Part of this is trusting others.  We have learned that people aren't always trustworthy, but instead of approaching everyone with a default of "I don't trust you, respect you, or give you any credit as a trustworthy human being until you somehow earn it" we can choose to begin with trust, and choose to assume that people are doing their best and that they are good rather than assuming the opposite.  Making people prove that they are untrustworthy rather than  trustworthy could be a better approach because we usually respond to people's expectations of us.  In schools for instance, if a teacher expects a student to do well, and another to do poorly, even if those assumptions are based on invalid information provided by researchers, the students tend to perform as expected.  Perhaps we've seen similar things in the workplace, and even in families.  When someone starts with trust they know that we can still be awesome even if we sometimes act like jerks, and treat us accordingly--helping us believe that we can live up to our potential, and forgiving us for our stupid mistakes.  Starting with and choosing trust can do wonders.

The other part of choosing faith is trusting God.  This verse is about starting with trust, applied to our relationship with God.  It's believing that God knows what he is doing, and  having faith that the things that happen and the way the world is going are part of a grand design and not just a big mess.  That is what faith is, and a lot of what hope is: looking around us and seeing the good, and the divine threads that are holding things together and helping us in our individual lives.  It's seeing God's influence in the world and in people's lives, and knowing that God can help us to change even when there is zero probability we can accomplish it on our own.  It's believing him and doing as he asks, even if we can't immediately see the outcome or the happy ending.  It's trusting him that it is there.

Today, let's start with trust.  Let's do it with other people and especially with God.  As we believe in people and in God's promises, and act on them, we will start to see more good in ourselves and in others.  Plus, I believe that we will be happier overall seeing the good than we would be always expecting the bad.

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