Trust

I believe in a thing called Trust. Trust is something that, regardless who you are, needs to be earned. Now, trust cannot be earned without a little bit being given first. When you meet a new person, you give them your name, and some vague info about you. If they take your trust and add to it, they give you some back. And the cycle goes back and forth until the new person becomes a trusted friend.

But trust can very easily be broken, and sometimes to the point of not being able to be repaired. If trust breaks down past that tiny bit that we are first given, it will never be able to be added to and built up. Trust is gone, and so is any potential friendship you might have had.

I am very big on trust, as well as things that go along with it. Oddly enough I feel me going into being vulnerable with our friends. We talked in the past about being vulnerable with God, because that is the most important thing in becoming who we are meant to be, and who we want to be the most. Now lets look at being vulnerable to our friends and how it enables us to be who God wants us to be.

I have many friends that I work hard to be trustworthy to. I keep secrets better than priests. I know things about people that make me feel so honored to know and I will keep those until I die. In the years I have also broken that trust of friends and lost people who were very dear to me.

Trust is an investment of time and love. It is to honor your friend, or whoever you are building trust with, and not only building a friendship, but you build that person as well. Trust, I believe is mostly built by allowing yourself to become vulnerable to the other person. 

As anyone who has read this before, I play World of Warcraft. In it, I find the ability to open oneself is magnified by the screen on which we view the world. Trust actually plays a larger role in the game than one would expect. Though it is on a small scale, when we run a random we are trusting the other people know what they are doing. If they ask, then we should try to help them learn the dungeon. But the skilled veterans of the game, we have played them before and we just hand out a small bit of trust to our tanks, healers and damage.

On a larger scale, we build trust and friendship with our guild members. We trust, as a Guild Leader, that when we are gone, our officers keep the guild working smoothly. As a guild member, we trust our other members to not ninja the bank. When you look at even a larger scale, you get into people who actually become your friend. We trust they are not actually pedophile old men, creepy little boys who screams "Pics or GTFO" in trade chat, but rather they are simply nice people looking to play a game they enjoy.

I met a friend on there we shall name Luna. We met through a mutual friend and since have become very good friends. Since we first began talking, I have been slowly opening my trust doors to her and every step of the way, she has done the same. We have the screen to give us protection, but soon we felt we didn't even need that. We were friends, and I trust her. The trust is strong with her.

I put myself at a vulnerable spot, where she met me. It blossomed into friendship, into a very good friendship. And this all comes to me so easy and willingly that it leaves me wondering why it is so hard for people to connect with other people. For example, why is it we cannot be open with our friends. Is it not the job of a friend to be there, to listen, to comfort and not to judge you? Sure it is. But not many people are willing to be good enough friends like that. What is it that keeps us from opening the gate to our emotions and truly connecting with people. Is it the vulnerability that it places us in, or is it worry that someone might think less of us?

Because of the hard work I put into trust, I have a few friends I trust enough to talk to about anything that is bothering me. I am lucky. But no matter how lucky I am there, I still feel this bit of hesitation when it comes to talking about my sins with them. Sin is one of those things we all deal with every minute of every day. Yet we try our hardest to push sin under a rug. Like in those cartoons when someone trashed a whole room, they push it all under the rug in the center of the room and the rug bulges up with so much sin. That is our lives and eventually that sin will spill out onto the floor and we won't be able to hide it anymore.

That is why being open, vulnerable and connecting to a small group of friends, or a single friend, is so vital as a Christian. We need to have people that will hold us accountable for our sins and build us up when we falter. I hope I don't sound too Catholic, but confession is good for the soul. Not just good, it is vital to our souls. Without confession the sin will sit and fester and rot us from the inside. But the problem is, we cannot connect to people to confess. It's so very hard to try to open that door to someone and they shut up and stare at us.

But when we can trust with all we are, our fellow Christians and friends, they can hold us accountable for our sins as the bible tells us to, and we can become more of what God has wanted us to be since he made us. I recently trusted a friend enough to confess to. Luna has only shown me some of the best a person can be and I opened up. When I was telling her, I felt so vulnerable and humiliated and scared. But she embraced me, though not literal, and told me it was OK and she would pray for me as I work through getting the sin out of my life.

It is a scary thing to allow that kind of trust with anyone. But in the end, I want to be the best I can be for a God who only deserves the best. So I urge you my friends and readers, embrace your friends and let them be open to you so that they may be better Christians and in turn, be open to you and you can become a better Christian.

Trust will always be a risk to ourselves. Though there is no real shield form the hurt if that trust is broken, we only have to remember one simple thing. We have God with us. So if people hurt us, we have the creator to fall back on and get comfort. He will always be there, waiting to pick us up when we fall, keep us steady when we are tired, and rebuild the bit of us that was broken when the trust was broken. If there ever was anyone you could trust with your everything, it's God.