Why trust?

After Hebrews 6:13-20

 

Why trust, you ask,

why believe that

a promise made

eons ago will be

delivered? Time passes,

cries made in pain

seem met with

silence.

 

I tell you this:

the promise will come,

the promise is coming.

It was made

with an oath; 

it was made with

perfect character;

it was made with

the sacrifice

of the son. 

Photograph by Jannis Lucas via Unsplash. Used with permission. 

Some Sunday Readings

 

Debunking Four Retirement Myths – Kristin Brown at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics. 

 

Poetry: The Spiritual Terrain of David Middleton – James Matthew Wilson at The Catholic World Report.

 

Rome Is Not Our Home: Live Counterculturally During Election Season – Pete Nicholas at The Gospel Coalition.

 

"The Revolt of the Public" by Martin Gurri

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri was first published in 2014, and then the author added a rather extensive chapter entitled “Reconsiderations” in 2018. The addition didn’t revise or change anything from the 2014 book; it simply updated the information with the events of 2016 and after. And it is a very compelling, and disturbing, book to read in the first quarter of 2021. 

A former CIA analyst specializing in global politics and global media, Gurri’s thesis is relatively simple: that the age of information has seriously undercut traditional elites and hierarchies, to the point where trust and credibility by the public are gone. He delves into example after example – the Arab Spring of 2011, the presidency of Barack Obama, whose election repudiated the traditional elites in the Democratic Party (as Barnie Sanders almost did in 2016); Brexit, there the British public turned a deaf ear to the elites in government, academia, business, culture, and the media; the election of Donald Trump, which repudiated both the Democratic Party and the traditional elites of the Republican Party. 

 

Over and over again the public, armed with the staggering amount of information available on the internet, questions, rejects, repudiates, cancels, and ignores the traditional authorities created during the industrial age. Information networks and hubs have replaced hierarchal authority and experts. The problem is that networks can’t govern a nation state or even a region. But neither can the former authorities who longer have the consent of the governed. 

 

Martin Gurri

What Gurri is arguing certainly helps explain the paralysis that has characterized government in Washington, D.C. Politics increasingly exemplifies paralysis. People in political parties no longer trust anyone in the other party; they often don’t trust people in their own.  This idea of trust is critical. Resolution will only come when the public settles on new elites to govern, and that is a process that may take generations.

 

To be clear, Gurri is not talking about the public as the mob taking over parts of Seattle, rioting and burning in Minneapolis, or invading the U.S. Capitol. (In fact, he finds fault with a news media constantly amplifying tiny groups of people as representative of larger crowds.) No, the public is us, the people who read books, manage businesses, plow farms, drive trucks, work in hospitals, teach, sell cars, run factories, belong to and lead unions, and do a million other jobs. The age of information has taught us to mistrust authority, seek people of like minds in echo chambers, and increasingly think of opposing views as those of the enemy. 

 

And, he says, we may be floundering for a while. It’s really strange to be reading Gurri as he talks about the worst thing that threatened elites can do – repression – and see exactly that happening on the internet, in the news media, and leading American progressives talking about the need for re-education camps.

 

Gurri makes it very clear that he is anything but a supporter of Donald Trump. But he understands what gave rise to Trump and his predecessor, what created Brexit, what’s tearing at the fabric of the European Union, and what continues to create strife in the Western democracies. The Revolt of the Public is not an easy read, but it’s an important one for understanding the times we’re living in.

The pain shredded

after Psalm 13

The pain shredded

his soul abandoned,

alone

left alone, wrestling

with sorrow

the burying alive

the heart entombed

with a sepulcher

of silence

he cried out

still the silence.

Remembering the blessing

he began to sing.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

How Un-American: No Pleasing Without Trust

We came to a fork in the road. The road on the left was “Pleasing God.” The road on the right was “Trusting God.” The road on the left led to the Room of Good Intentions. And a dead-end. The road on the right led to the Room of Grace.

In The Cure: What if God Isn’t Who You Think He Is and Neither Are You, by John Lynch, Bruce McNichol and Bill Thrall, we learn that pleasing God is simply not possible without first trusting God. Pleasing God places our behavior, actions and thoughts at the center of our lives. In other words, it’s all about us. While that may have become the official flag of Western culture, it’s not the official flag of faith. It’s not all about us.

Trusting God puts God at the center. It’s the critical step. Nothing matters, and nothing amounts to anything, until we do that. The authors of The Cure state it more directly: “Until you trust God, nothing you do will please God.” Pleasing God is not the means to the end. It’s a by-product.

If there is one underlying problem of Western and especially American Christianity, it is the determination to please God without trusting God.

For Americans, it’s cultural. We are the place where everyone comes to start over. Some come for riches, some for glory, some for political freedom, some for religious freedom, some for refuge, and some simply to start a new life. And America is the place you can do it. We could make ourselves in America, and not once but many times. This is what America has been for four centuries. We have been others things, too, but perhaps nothing has lasted as long as “the place to start over.”

In such a culture, the characteristics that matter include self-reliance, initiative, ability to take risks, the ability to spot opportunities, a willingness to change. These are all “self” characteristics. They are one reason why self-help books are always so popular.

The characteristics that matter in Christian faith are trust, community, forgiveness, and servanthood – the “non-self” characteristics. Christianity is about the other, not about the self.

As Christians living in America, we often translate what Jesus accomplished on the cross into “a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.” In fact, this is exactly how I led to believe in Christ. And it’s true, but it has limits. Our faith is not only about our personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Consider: If it had only been about Jesus’ personal relationship with God the Father, he wouldn’t have had to die on the cross.

But Jesus did die on the cross. He died for us, the “other.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Cure. This week finishes up our discussion of Chapter 1, “Two Roads.” To see what others have to say about the chapter, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Alex Grichenko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Who Are Your Assyrians?

I’ve been reading about the Assyrians, the people who had a much longer history than I had realized. And it’s a history that extends long before their highlight in the Bible and also long after their defeat and absorption into the Babylonian empire. If you’re not familiar with them, these were the people who defeated and destroyed the Northern Kingdom of Israel (roughly 722 B.C.) and then laid siege to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, where Hezekiah was king.

The people of the Near East certainly knew who they were – their reputation preceded them. Their capital was Nineveh, where Jonah was told by the Lord to go preach. Jonah didn’t ask for details; he fled, and for a very interesting reason. He knew the Lord would forgive them if they repented. He obviously didn’t want them to repent; he would have preferred to see them destroyed.

Their reputation? One article I read referred to them as the “Lords of the Massacre.”

If you opposed their expansion plans and were actually foolish enough to fight them, they would execute your soldiers after they defeated them. And the Assyrians were known for not losing.

Cities would be sacked and destroyed. The inhabitants, including children, would be beheaded and their heads placed on the city walls, or hung on trees like ornaments. Wealthy people and nobles might be packed off to slavery in Nineveh or elsewhere. The king would be executed. Women were automatically enslaved, with all that entailed.

This is what happened in the Northern Kingdom, its people (10 of the 12 tribes of Israel) killed or dispersed forever.

This is what Hezekiah and Judah faced – the most bloodthirsty and vicious army of its day or almost any day.

Hezekiah was one of the “good kings” of Judah, the Bible says. He followed the Lord. He was a reforming king. And when the Assyrians threatened, all thoughts of depending upon the Lord left his mind and he turned immediately to the Egyptians for alliance and support. That worked so well that the Assyrians surrounded and besieged Jerusalem, with no Egyptians anywhere to be found.

Hezekiah and Jerusalem knew what was coming. It was then that Hezekiah turned to the Lord, and the Lord responded. A plague broke out in the Assyrian army, killing more than 100,000 soldiers right at the walls of Jerusalem. What was left of the much vaunted army limped back to Nineveh. Jerusalem and Judah were saved – at least for another 125 years until the Babylonians arrived.

In The Fire of Delayed Answers, Bob Sorge recounts the basic facts of the Assyrians (without the gory details) and asks a rather startling question: who, or what, are the Assyrians in your life? Who, or what, fills with such fear or insecurity that you immediately turn to the wrong things for help? It is financial problems? Family issues? Your boss? (I identified with that one; I can safely say that because I haven’t had one since September.) Or might it be the threat of unemployment and layoffs, or the bully at church or school who has picked you out.

The fact is that we all have Assyrians in our lives, the people of things who strike right at our basic insecurities. And the temptation is also to run almost anywhere else except to where we should turn first.

We’ve been reading The Fire of Delayed Answers as part of an online discussion group. To see more posts on this chapter, “The Assyrians Are Coming,” please visit Jason Stasyszen at Connecting to Impact.

Illustration: a painting of the siege of Samaria by the Assyrians.

Saturday Good Reads: Why We Don’t Trust Companies

Speaking from (too much) personal and professional experience, I can testify that massive amounts of information, data, and research exist on the subject of reputation – corporate reputation, to be specific. Public relations and marketing firms have practices devoted to reputation management. Book after book has been published on the subject. And who can quantify how many billions of dollars have been spent by companies seeking to improve their reputations?

It’s not exactly comforting to know that, after all of this effort and expenditure, people trust corporations (and CEOs) only marginally more than they trust Congress.

Which is the same thing as that they don’t trust corporations at all.

This past week, I read three articles by Charles Green at Trust Advisor, a consulting firm that focuses on the subject of trust. What caught my eye (and I have to say, my heart), was this statement: “Most companies confuse trust with reputation. They view it as a communications problem, something to be handled by PR, especially in times of crisis. Trust problems are addressed by amping up the messaging.”

That first sentence bears repeating: Most companies confuse trust with reputation.

Another way of saying that: if you have a reputation problem, the problem is not your reputation.

I went back and reread the article. And then I read Part 2 the next day, and Part 3 the day after that.

After 40 years in the organizational communications business, I can say that I have never read more common sense – and truth – than I did in these three articles.

Part 1: Why We Don’t Trust Companies

Part 2: Why We Don’t Trust Companies – the Three M’s

Part 3: Why We Don’t Trust Companies - Risk

It’s not about reputation.

It’s about trust.

Monday Update: 

Part 4: Why We Don't Trust Companies - The Solution

Top photograph by Alex Grichenko via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A child's heart

It doesn’t matter whether we go to his house or he comes to ours. Our grandson Cameron has learned to connect his grandparents with some fairly definitive things.

One is dancing. My wife has a CD of children’s songs by Chad Stuart called “Don’t Argue with an Elephant.” As soon as Cameron spots my wife or me, he runs for the CD player, and bounces up and down until we turn it on. Then we dance.

A second connection he makes with us has to with books. He loves being read to. One of his favorite books is Five Little Monkeys. There are several others. He loves hearing the stories read aloud, over and over again. And his grandparents are only too happy to oblige.

A third connection is blocks and Legos. The two of us build stuff – mostly towers. And we see how many blocks we can place on our heads. Cameron likes to knock the towers down, so we can build them anew.

What these three activities – dancing, reading and building – have in common is that Cameron gets our undivided attention.

This past Sunday, we went over to my son and daughter-in-law’s house for an hour, to drop off my son’s birthday present. Cameron was getting better from a bout of respiratory crud, but he perked right up when we walked in the door. He grabbed my hand, walked me to the pile of blocks and Legos, and pointed.

He trusted his grandfather enough to know that I would immediately sit down and start building a tower.

He’s learned that his father is already ready to play and horse around, and that his mother is there to hold him when he’s sick. His grandmother will always have cherry tomatoes stashed away (Cameron loves cherry tomatoes. And salad.) His grandfather packs a BlackBerry in a holster, and Cameron always wants to see it, because the wallpaper on it is a picture of – Cameron.

In short, this little boy who’s almost two has learned he’s surrounded by love. He has his moments of unloveability like we all do, but he knows that regardless of what he does, he’s loved.

He has that’s child’s heart that’s full of trust based upon consistent love.

Is it any wonder that Jesus said “let the little children come to me?” Is it any surprise that it’s the kind of heart – a child’s heart – that he wants all of us to have? It’s not that our hearts are pure and good. He knows better.

But it is that our hearts are full of trust for Him, because we know better.

To see more posts on trust, please visit Bonnie Gray, who’s hosting a blog carnival today on trust at her blog Faith Barista.

Photograph: Cameron Young watching Monsters Inc. on television, by Stephanie Young. Notice the blocks in the foreground.

Trust and Worldviews

Trust is one of those words one sees a lot these days. Whole books have been written about how to achieve it. The power of two social media networks – Twitter and Facebook – are supposedly built upon it. Corporate mission and values statements usually have one reference to it.

The demand for trust is high, possibly because the supply is so short. In today’s world, we don’t trust business, politicians, Wall Street, the news media, news pundits and commentators, elected officials, school boards, teachers, unions, organized religion, disorganized religion, universities, the health care industry, doctors, tort attorneys, movie stars and the President’s birth certificate, to mention only a few, unless they happen to agree with our own perspectives. It seems, however, we do trust a small circle of people in our networks of friends and colleagues, especially the ones whose opinions we share.

That’s the common denominator – we trust the people and institutions whose worldview we share. We don’t trust those with whom we disagree. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ll find that the concerns we have about trusting others is actually a result of living in a me-centered world. And I’m as guilty of this as the next person.

I trust you if you agree with me. And I’ll believe just about anything you say if we share the same worldview.

I had an email exchange with a person who was tweeting on Twitter absolutely unbelievable things about the company I work for. After pointing out how what she was saying was wrong (and giving her references), I asked her where she got her information. A friend told her, she said, a friend she trusted. The fact that the woman who was tweeting this was a Christian, who actually had a full-time ministry for helping Christian women gain wisdom, somehow made this worse.

I have friend in Chicago named David whom I met years ago when he edited a newsletter. We’d talk on the phone, see each other at conferences, and exchange emails on a fairly regular basis. We now follow each other on Twitter and we have each other’s blog listed in our blogrolls. Politically and religiously, we are night and day. We are about as different as you could imagine – we could be the poster children for blue states and red states. We do not in any sense share the same worldview. And yet I have tremendous regard for his writing, his thinking, and his often brutal honesty. I love how much he adores his family (yes, even liberals love their children). He’s utterly fearless in expressing his opinions.

I inherently trust him. Why? For some the same reasons Guy Kawasaki talks about in Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. David trusts others. He’s a mensch – a real human being. He’s completely open about his own interests, beliefs and biases. He helps and encourages others (including me). He’s knowledgeable and competent.

And I’m blessed to count him as a friend.


Over at The High Calling, we’ve been reading Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment. This week’s discussion is on chapter 3 – “How to Achieve Trustworthiness” – and chapter 4 – “How to Prepare.” To see other posts based on this week’s readings, please visit the site.

Trust: The Long View

(Peter Pollock and Bridget Chumbley have started a regular blog carnival, inviting bloggers to post on an assigned one-word topic and then link to their sites. Two weeks ago, the word was obedience, and the various submissions were amazing in scope, diversity and strong, creative writing. This time, the word is trust.)

We hunger for it, this trust thing. We want to be able to trust, and we want to be trusted. And yet our human experience shows us exactly how fragile trust is – so hard to achieve, so quick to be damaged or destroyed.

We’ve all got examples of how our trust has been betrayed, and if we’re honest with ourselves, how we’ve betrayed others’ trust. Trust is born over a long period of time but can die in a flashed moment of violation or hurt – a comment, an implied criticism, a raised eyebrow, a confidence shared with someone else. That’s all it takes.

Why do we believe, and why do we know, that trust is so important? Why is there such a hunger for it?

I suspect it has to do with how we’re constructed. And I suspect it also has to do with related needs and desires – fellowship, belonging and security. In other words, it’s the desire for relationship that God wires into each of us, a desire that can truly be met in only one way, because everything human will always fall short, will always disappoint.

And in that sense, trust requires the long view. Look at Jesus and his disciples.

Jesus picked the 12 disciples. He knew their shortcomings and frailties. In Gethsemane, the darkest night of his soul, they couldn’t even stay awake. And what a record of achievement they had. One betrayed him into the hands of the authorities. One denied him, three times. All of them disappeared and hid after his arrest. They had walked with him and been taught by him and loved by him for three years. He had poured his love and trust into them. And they vanished at the first sign of trouble.

We’d do exactly the same thing. And Jesus knew that – he knew that about his disciples and he knows that about us. But he loved them, and he loves us, anyway. As untrustworthy and unfaithful as we are, he loves us anyway.

It’s because he takes the long view. He knew what his disciples would ultimately do, and he knew how many of them would willingly go to their deaths for him. (And think about Paul – not one of the 12, but about the last person one would trust with the critical mission of reaching the Roman world.) Jesus knew that his teaching and encouragement and love for the disciples would ultimately change the world.

When we fail someone’s trust, or when someone fails us, perhaps we, too, should take that long view.