Reading: Basic Trust

By David Feddes

I was eating breakfast in a restaurant with a group of men. My companions were seven Christians who had been released from prison within the past five years, plus a few mentors from local churches. Most of the former prisoners had successfully adjusted to life back in society and had managed to stay out of trouble with the law. Our plates were loaded with bacon, eggs, hash browns, and toast. As we ate, we talked and laughed about various things. Then I asked a serious question: “What was the hardest thing for you guys when you first got out of prison?”

You might be surprised at the answer they gave. Guys getting out of prison face a lot of hard things: finding a place to live when people don’t want an ex-prisoner as a neighbor; getting a job when many employers don’t want to hire someone convicted of crimes; staying away from old cronies who might get them in trouble again; avoiding old habits and urges; adjusting to managing your own life after being imprisoned a long time with few choices to make. Those things, and many others, can be hard, but I got a different answer when I asked, “What was the hardest thing for you guys when you got out of prison?”

One guy spoke up right away. “Trust,” he said. “The hardest thing was to trust anybody.” Other heads nodded.

Trust Destroyed

Many people who have been in trouble with the law find it hard to trust anyone. This lack of trust often goes all the way back to childhood. A child learns not to depend on a mother addicted to drink or drugs, or on a father who abuses or abandons his family. If parents don’t keep promises, if they are cruel or unreliable, it’s hard to trust them. Kids don’t feel safe or secure. They don’t feel like they can count on anyone. They feel like they’re on their own, looking out for themselves. Some people in prison grew up in loving, secure homes, but many didn’t. Without trustworthy parents, kids often grow up to be untrustworthy themselves. They grow up counting on their own cunning, not trusting parents or other authorities.

Without trust or respect for authority, it’s a small step to crime and prison, and trust doesn’t usually flourish there. Guards and officials don’t trust people who are convicted lawbreakers. Inmates seldom trust other inmates. They expect the worst from each other, and they often live down to each other’s expectations. In some cases, any remaining ties with family members or friends on the outside are broken when somebody is locked up. When the date for release approaches, many prisoners feel that no matter where they go, they won’t be welcome. Prison tends to harden the habit of not trusting others. It also strengthens the impression that others don’t trust you and would rather have nothing to do with you. If anyone does show interest in you, you figure they must have a hidden agenda.

The ex-prisoners I was eating breakfast with said that when they first got out of prison, it wasn’t easy for them to trust even the Christian men who put a lot of time and effort into mentoring them and helping them adjust to life back in society. It also wasn’t easy to trust their employers, even though those employers were willing to take the risk of hiring ex-offenders and giving them an opportunity to make a living. But unless the ex-offenders somehow began to trust, they were bound to fail.

If you never trust anyone, you can’t be trustworthy yourself. But the effect also works the other way: if you’re not trustworthy, you tend not to trust others because you think they’re sneaky like you. Without trust, healthy relationships can’t grow. But without healthy relationships, trust can’t grow. If people don’t care about you, you can’t trust them. But if you never trust anybody, you’ll never be able to accept that they care about you, even if they do. It’s a vicious cycle.

Trust Reborn

But the cycle is not unbreakable. Around that breakfast table were men who had found trust the hardest thing. Yet trust had come to life and grown in them. At the deepest level, the source of trust was God’s grace in Jesus, touching their hearts through the Holy Spirit. They came to trust that God loved them, forgave them, guided them, and provided for them.

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. For some, trust got started as godly Christian chaplains showed genuine caring and taught God’s trustworthy Word. For others, a fellow inmate impressed them as godly and trustworthy. Another trust-builder was the way Christian visitors from outside the prison joined the men in the prison chapel during worship times. Upon release the men found it easier to trust these faithful, familiar visitors as mentors than to trust a complete stranger. God’s love, conveyed through people who love, helped prisoners to trust, to do the thing that many find harder than anything else.

Now, if people who have been convicted of crimes, who in many cases come from homes and settings that destroyed trust, who grew up untrusting and untrustworthy—if even such people could somehow get beyond their brokenness and grow in trust, then there’s also hope for others who find it hard to trust.

We’ve seen that some people with bad experiences in their family background and in prison find it almost impossible to trust, but with God all things are possible. A growing number are coming to trust God, to trust people who care, and to become people others can trust.

Some of us have a much more positive family background. We felt loved by our parents and had a deep sense of trust during childhood. I remember my parents hugging me. I felt safe and peaceful. I knew they loved me. I knew they were a lot bigger than I was, and they knew a lot more than I did. I knew they would look out for me and take care of things I couldn’t handle.

Now that I’m a father of eight children, one of my favorite times is the end of the day when my little ones sit on my lap and become quiet. Their day has been filled with playing and fighting, laughing and crying, and asking tons of questions. But after all that action and noise, there comes a quiet time. The little one slumps quiet and content, listening to me read a story, or dropping off to sleep. As I hold a child in my arms, my heart swells with tenderness.

Moments like that are special for parents, and vital for children. People who study child development often emphasize the importance of basic trust, the feeling that you are loved and safe, that you can just relax and leave everything to your parents, and they’ll do what’s best for you. This trust is either built up or broken down from the very moment of birth. Developing basic trust at an early age lays a foundation for wellbeing as an adult. Those who grow up with little affection or sense of security can have many difficulties as adults.

All of us need this sense of trust and calm, and we need it far beyond childhood. Even if you were blessed to grow up in a secure, loving home, you may find that those carefree times are only a distant memory. Now that you’ve grown up, you face many worries, you struggle with questions you can’t answer, you’re so busy that you never have a chance to relax. Maybe you long for the days when you could just curl up on your mom or your dad. But those days are gone. You’re not a child anymore.

But even if you’re not a child anymore, there’s a quiet place for you, a place where you can stop being an adult, where you don’t have to have all the answers, where you can forget your worries and simply relax in the arms of Someone bigger and wiser than you are, Someone who loves you, Someone you can trust. You can rest in God’s wisdom, God’s love, God’s power. You can relax in God’s arms, like a child with its mother.

Childlike Trust

Psalm 131 is prayer of basic trust, of childlike faith, of resting in the quiet calm of God’s care. Psalm 131 says, “My heart is not proud, O Lord, my eyes are not haughty. I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.”

When you pray that prayer, you know some things are too big for you. One thing that’s too big to achieve, and too wondrous to figure out, is salvation. You can’t earn God’s approval or make yourself live forever in joy. But God takes care of that through Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. You and I can’t understand exactly how this happens, but it does. You just have to trust him. Jesus says that entering the kingdom of heaven happens through becoming like a child (Matthew 18:2). Jesus says that God hides things from the wise and learned but reveals them to little children (Luke 10:21). When you rest in God’s arm like a child, without trying figure out or control matters that are too much for you, you often see deeper into the heart of God than the smartest, most educated people do.

Basic trust, childlike trust, means finding rest in the Lord—whether you grew up in a fine family or were mistreated as a child and got into trouble as an adult. You can trust God with your eternal destiny, so you can surely count on him for your daily needs. Whatever your background, whatever your situation right now, you need to relax and trust God’s love in Jesus. And love isn’t the only thing about God that you can trust. You can also trust his wisdom to know what’s best for you, and his power to make it happen.

I remember talking with a little girl who asked me, “Do you think that someday you’ll get to be as big as my daddy?” Well, I I’m about six foot six, a lot taller than this little girl’s daddy. But I told the girl, “Well, maybe someday I’ll be as big as your daddy.” As far as that little girl was concerned, her daddy was the biggest guy around—and I didn’t try to tell her otherwise. Her dad was big in the ways that mattered, even if he didn’t happen to have my height.

Little children with good dads sometimes overestimate their father’s size. Unfortunately, we grownups sometimes make the opposite mistake with God—we underestimate how big he is. All sorts of questions and problems may loom larger in our minds that God’s reality and power. But our Father in heaven really is bigger than everyone else. He can handle anything.

Childlike trust in the Father may be especially hard for people who grew up with untrustworthy parents. They can’t just go back into their mother’s womb and do life over again. They can’t erase the bad experiences of childhood. They can’t make their parents perfect the second time around. They can’t undo their own crimes or make the past go away. They can’t go back to the womb—but they can still be born again, born from above. This new birth comes along with faith in Jesus. This new birth brings a new heart and a new spirit, made alive by God’s Holy Spirit. Those who are born of the Spirit sense in their own spirit that they are God’s children. They trust their heavenly Father in a way they could never trust their earthly parents.

If even people who went through childhood traumas, who committed crimes and endured prison life, can be born again and become as little children in God’s arms, it’s also possible—and necessary—for the rest of us to be born again, to have childlike trust in the Father. So come to the quiet place. Become a little child. Relax in God’s arms of love. That’s basic trust.