Proverbs 3:5-6 — Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.

The company I work for is reinventing itself which means a lot of new initiatives, new people, and need for reorganization. Sadly, a few people are working hard to protect themselves and their own positions while the rest of us are putting our minds to making things work.
The issue, of course, is one of trust. Not all the parties are convinced that everybody is simply working in the best interests of the business … I don’t want to go into any details, but it did provoke me to consider who we do trust and who we should trust.
Yesterday I wrote about the marvelous abilities babies are born with. It struck me as I thought about this matter of trust that we are born with two other attributes. We are born trusting … and we are born to sin. Of course the two things work against each other — as we learn to sin we lose the automatic capacity to trust.
As we get older we start to rebuild trust. And the next thing that came to mind was “I wonder how we should do that?” One factor, of course, is proximity. In principle we trust those who are close to us — first our families, and then our neighbors and then we meet and interact with regularly — at school or work, socially or, perhaps best of all, at church.
The next reasonable seeming factor was time. I know that there are people who somehow seem trustworthy (or the opposite) from the moment we first meet them — but in general, the longer somebody’s track record of doing the right thing, the more we should trust them.
Does it matter? It does. I like what American author and activist Barbara Smith said : “Trust is to human relationships what faith is to gospel living. It is the beginning place, the foundation on which more can be built. Where trust is, love can flourish.”
This all leads me to God. How does He meet my basic criteria? Better than anyone else, of course! “A man that hath friends must show himself friendly: and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” (Proverbs 18:24). God is always the nearest person to us … and His track record goes back before the beginning of time.
There’s another way to build trust, of course. It’s by recommendation. I trust those — more or less — who are trusted by those I trust. Combine that with the knowledge that trusting God with all my heart just make sense and then I see that those I can trust best are likely to be those who trust Him best.
There’s just one more thing I’d like to add. Trust yourself! No, I didn’t say trust your understanding … my favorite proverbs, at the head of this piece, make that clear. abut trust your integrity. Israeli prime minister Golda Meir nailed this one, saying “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” If you can’t trust yourself, it’s probably impossible to trust anybody — even God.
With all this in mind, as to what happens in my company — I’m giving everybody credit for trustworthiness … until they prove me wrong!