I have trust issues. I’ll be the first to admit it. I don’t always go around parading my trust issues on a big, grand, tissue-covered float, but they are there nonetheless…just beneath the surface.
I’m pretty good at appearing to be trusting. I nod my head when people say they love me, or care about me, or will pray for me, but somewhere deep inside, in the quiet places no one likes to talk about, I doubt everything you say.
Sure, you love me, Sure, you care about me. Sure, you’ll pray for me…right.
I mean, I want to trust you. I want to believe every single word you say, but it just ain’t happening. I don’t trust you. Here’s why…
I guess it all goes back to my daddy issues. Yes, it sounds a bit lame to blame it on my dad, but it’s kinda true. There is a reason God wants kids to have a mom and a dad. And a reason God wants both parents to be present and available. The disappearing father act doesn’t work and it certainly doesn’t produce secure trusting daughters.
No. It produces insecure, doubting, wary daughters who seek security in all the wrong places. It produces girls who want so badly to trust the Father God, but can’t because they think of Him in the context of their earthly father–a father who did only one thing consistently and that was let her down.
Trust is tricky. There’s no way around it. Trust requires more of me than I can give. That whole “Trust in the Lord with all your heart..” thing. Well, I believe in Him,no question, but my whole heart doesn’t trust Him. Dare I say even half of my heart?
Trust, at least for me, has to come via the Holy Spirit or it won’t come at all. It has to come when my flesh says “Run! So you don’t get hurt,” but the Spirit says “Yield…”
Trust comes when I repent of my wrong thinking that the Father God is anything like my earthly dad. Trust comes when I submit to my husband and accept him as the gift he is from my Lord. Trust comes when I get out of the way, but not because I’m hiding–but because I’m surrendering.
God wants me to trust. He wants me to trust men especially, when my tendency is to assume the worst and expect even less. God is not interested in me nodding and placating anyone. He knows my dad-issues. He knows I sometimes resort back to old patterns and begin to compare Him to my earthly father. But He also knows, that He alone, has the power to teach me how to trust. More than that, He is worthy of my trust.
Do you find it easy or difficult to trust God? Why or why not? Do you find it easy or difficult to trust man? Why or why not?
I find it interesting that you pinpoint your trust issues to having a father who let you down. My dad is the best dad a girl could hope for, and has never let me down yet, but still I find it hard to trust God. People? Fine, I’ll trust anyone, probably to a fault. But God, the most trustworthy of all, I find hard to trust. I think it’s because we’re called to trust Him with the big stuff, with our whole lives – and at heart, I’m a complete control freak who hates to let anyone else take the wheel.
Rachel,
I can say the same..I find it interesting that with a healthy father figure you still have difficulty trusting the Lord. Although I don’t think what you experience is all that rare. I think many of us find it difficult to trust God with everything, not just the things we pick and choose. Thanks for sharing!
Sorry… I couldn’t help but notice the italics and bold in that comment there Nicole. Is that HTML? BB-Code? Some other awesome thing-a-ma-bob? Spill the beans!
I wanna post awesome formatted comments like you and you know you want to read them!
P.S. I promise I won’t get addicted to off-topic comments!!! Last time(I hope), I just HAD to ask! :D
Chris,
You are so funny. I can leave all kinds of fancy comments because I respond to comments through WordPress. My “reply to comments” section has almost all the same options as when I am writing a post. Anyway, it is HTML. As far as I know, if you write out your comment with HTML and then hit reply, it should add italics, bold, or whatever else to your actual comment.
Hope that helps!
I’ve heard it said that your relationship with your biological father influences the way you view your Heavenly Father. Which makes sense to me. When I was a kid God was a far-away God that was kinda-sorta in my life, but not really. Then in my teen years I thought God was full of crap and I didn’t want anything to do with Him. It wasn’t until I was 17 I learned that God was nothing like my biological father.
Travis,
I don’t know about you, but I am SO thankful that God isn’t like my earthly father. If He was, I too, would continue to have a distant strained relationship.
What happened? You have been killing it lately with the good posts.
I want people to trust me but I’m not much of a truster myself. Trust is very close to belief. For me it’s where I start to falter at times too.
Well thanks Ken. My newborn is now 8 weeks old, so I think that my brain is less scattered and my life is starting to settle into a routine. Maybe that’s why I have been killin’ it lately. wink wink.
I find it interesting that you said you want others to trust you, yet you do not necessarily trust them. I wonder how much that correlation affects your relationships? Does our ability to trust others allow us to be more trustworthy ourselves? It is something I will be thinking on. Thanks for sharing Ken.
The truth is I think it makes me seem distanced or at times aloof. Especially when those trust issues are of a more tangible type like offering to help me do something or loan me something I need.
We have cycled through various stages of culture shock in our 3 years here in Paraguay. One thing that comes up repeatedly is trusting the locals. Being foreign we draw attention, good and bad. God has stretched me. I try really hard to put aside my “survival” wariness and learn a new person before not trusting them. We have had some bad experiences but we did in the States too before we moved. It’s the state of a lost world.
I’m usually pretty good when it comes to trusting God. People are my problem. I don’t think it has anything to do with my dad, who was always around. I’m pretty sure it has to do with my ex-husband and his secret life that I didn’t know about for six years and the fact that he left when I was 5 months pregnant. Enough time has passed that I have dealt with most of those issues and have found healing, but I still have a hard time trusting people.
Jenn,
Wow. I can say with certainty that if I had suffered that kind of betrayal, I would have a hard time trusting people, as well. I’m blessed to know that you have found healing from that situation. I’ll be praying that the Lord continues His good work in you and brings you the freedom to trust others again. Blessings to you Jenn.
I think that if I’m brutally honest with myself then I like you can trace much of my difficulty with trusting God to my “fathers” nonexistance in my life. I can trust people to an extent but mostly I’m wary of their intentions, follow through and just generally trustworthiness. Intellectually I know God is more than worthy of my trust but my heart has been so walled up in an attempt to keep out the hurt of disappointment and rejection that I’ve known since childhood that I sometimes (most of the time) don’t know how to allow myself to trust God.
I can so relate. I have said almost verbatim what you wrote. Like you, intellectually, I know He is worthy of my trust, but living that out is something quite different.
This is what I ask myself, however, when I begin to question God’s love or goodness towards me: Has He ever let me down? Ever?
I know I can give a resounding “No!” He hasn’t. This always comforts me and helps me give Him a little more trust. Praying for you to feel the same…
These are some important thoughts. Thanks for sharing so deeply from your experience. I find that I can say “I trust God” in general theory, but when it comes to a specific issue, I start to doubt, worry, and try to control my situations. I pride myself in leading an orderly life, which I think stems from growing up with divorced parents where I was always trying to make things calm and not… insane. When God starts to stir the pot in my life, I want to settle things down.
Ed,
Thanks for sharing, as well. I think you touch on such a key point for so many of us–the need for control. I’m from a home of divorced parents too. I do not like the feeling of driving blindly, so to speak. Although, I suppose when we really place God at the wheel, we aren’t driving blindly.
[sigh] At any rate, I empathize. Here’s to trusting God and giving over control, even when we would rather cling onto it for dear life.
I also had the biological father that was rarely in the picture as well as an ex husband who had an affair. As someone who always says “bad things happen get over it” I can’t seem to get over my lack of trust in people, it will only happen through God’s power. I have finally learned to trust God but people are another story.
I don’t feel so alone with my struggle today. Thank you!
Julie,
I’m blessed to know you were encouraged and reminded (however small) that you aren’t alone at all. You are so right too. Healing can only happen through His power! Blessings to you!
Nicole, I agree with The Barba–you keep amazing me with important and powerful topics you bring us. I have always been able to trust God but had to learn that I could not trust all people–a sad lesson to learn. I know without a doubt that God loves me perfectly and is ever present with me, knowing my circumstances and my mind and heart, and that He uses His Word and His Spirit and the body of Christ and the trials of life to make me more like Jesus. It has been painful at times, but necessary pain for my growth and for my good.
I wish that I were as wise and powerful and faithful as God always is, but I am not. Still, I wish to live my life in such a way that people will trust me. My great desire is that others will be able to trust me so that I can lead them to trust my Father and my Lord. Perhaps I need to ask a follow-up question: What are the things I do or fail to do that cause others to trust me or to mistrust me?
Dad,
Your comment was encouraging to me. As I was reading your words, I realized that while I intellectually know those words are true for me, as well, I don’t always act that way. it is easy for me to nod my head and say I know what God is suppose to do, meanwhile still doubting if He actually will. It was encouraging because it reminded me that I am not somehow exempt from His goodness and faithfulness. He does not play favorites, however tempted I am to believe otherwise.
I think the question you pose is a great one for all of us. I wonder how concerned most Christians really are with not only projecting an image of trustworthiness, but also living it. Thank you for commenting and blessing me.
This is such a tough topic–I love that you’re writing about it though! (And so pertinent to what is going on in my life currently.)
This weekend we had the high school kids from Scottsdale Bible up north for camp and we spent the whole weekend talking about and praying through injustices and our often sinful responses to them (i.e. unforgiveness, passivity, fear, shame, bitterness, anger, etc). God came through in so much power and brought freedom to so many students! It was really incredible!
Boy, have I dealt with this in just about every way you could imagine in the past couple of years. I have trust issues, always have, and in some ways they’ve become worse and not better. I’ll admit right now that there’s a big part of me that doesn’t care. I’ve been burned in a huge way and many days the lesson I want to take away from that is “You can’t trust anybody. A.N.Y.B.O.D.Y. So don’t worry about it.” I went through an intense struggle a couple of years ago, and I learned after getting out of it that I had completely confused my guilt with God. I couldn’t trust God in the middle of all the crap because I was not seeing Him clearly. Once I did finally get out of it and could see where God was, and really learn WHO he was in a new and more truthful way, that relationship turned around. However, my best friend for nearly 20 years decided I was not really dealing with the problem. Really, I wasn’t dealing with it in the way she thought I should. She said I wasn’t acting the way I had in high school (15 years ago, mind you) and I had changed too much for her to accept. So she turned her back on me. The pain of that rejection has been harsh and deep. Healing is happening, but I am so on guard it’s not even funny. I think I want it to stay that way for awhile.
I find it difficult to trust people after they’ve failed to meet the expectations I have of them. For example, if someone is my friend, I think they should call or initiate interactions with me. If they don’t then I feel like they’ve let me down. This makes it so that my defenses go up and I end up stopping to trust them. The problem with this pattern is that the people don’t even know they let me down & I have a hard time forgetting about it.
This then does translate to how I view God too. I know in my head that he is trustworthy and He never fails, but getting that into my heart is something I can’t do. I think they Holy Spirit is the only one who can teach me that.
I loved this part about parenting. Great point! “There is a reason God wants kids to have a mom and a dad. And a reason God wants both parents to be present and available”
Oh man Malisa, did you just describe me exactly! I do the same thing with setting unspoken expectations on people only to be letdown when they do not meet them. But how could they? They didn’t even know these expectations were set…sheesh. It’s exhausting. And you’re right…only the Spirit can reach that part of us.
Tell me about it. Talk about something that comes up everyday for me. In the moments when I actually catch myself, lately, I tend to start reminding myself of who God is–protector, comforter, healer, redeemer, warrior, Lord–and that begins to give me a better frame of reference/heart disposition.
P.S. I’ve missed the discussion here. I’ve been reading some of the posts I’ve missed, and you’re just as relevant and God centered as ever. Hope you’re doing well Nicole.