“Trust is just a name on a bank” Richard Dreyfus as Paul Hunham in The Holdovers

I am so proud of my family. Our son is a college graduate living in Charlotte, NC. He has found a job doing something that he is very passionate about in the digital marketing space. Much to our delight, he has a wonderful girlfriend whom we hope that he’ll marry someday soon. 🙂

He is buying a car; a used car specifically or, as the dealers state in their literature, a “preowned” vehicle. And as most of you probably already know, the process of looking, driving, discussing, and deciding can be a nerve-racking experience. We talked a few times and texted many times as he shared information about the cars that interest him.

One topic that keeps coming up is trust. Can we trust the information provided by the seller or dealer about the car? Is the mileage correctly stated? Are they fudging a little on the vehicle maintenance history? Are there any hidden flaws that are not being disclosed?

To be certain, trust is a critical component in our relationships with others. I struggle with trust. Not with daily things like trusting that someone will accomplish a task or show up to an appointment. 60+ years of life experience has taught me that people will sometimes turn out to not be so trustworthy. But we have to be able to trust loved-ones in our lives to, well, stay in our lives even when that isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. My struggle with trust stems, in part, from what I will always consider a tragic loss when my wife decided that she could no longer honor her commitment to our marriage.

But my story has taken a wonderful turn. A few years ago, God blessed me with a new bride. There have been a few times when I look at my wife – a wonderfully smart, passionate, beautiful person with a deep, abiding faith in Christ whose commitment to our marriage is unquestionable – and wonder when she’s going to leave. The trauma of receiving the “Dear Karl” letter and the immediate physical, emotional, and spiritual separation that occurred to this day can still send me spiraling down a dark path of doubt, fear, and anxiety.

My son ended-up purchasing a car. He took steps to mitigate his trust issues by doing extensive research about each car he considered. He test drove them, asked a lot of questions and sought documentation that confirmed things like maintenance history and a clean Carfax report. Let’s face it; life teaches each of us that trust must, unfortunately, be earned, validated, and revisited in our relationships with others. Much of human suffering is derived from humanity’s inability to be trusted.

Trust is a critical component of our relationship with God. The Bible, a trusted authority¹ on the God of the Jews and Christians, speaks about the importance of putting our trust in a God who created each of us in his own image. This biblical principle is called “imago dei” and serves to place all of humanity, as His image bearers, on equal footing with our creator. We are all loved by the God who created us and desires for us to love Him right back. A person’s relationship with God is perfected when he or she trusts in the claim of the Gospels (The books of the Bible written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) that Jesus, through his death on the cross and resurrection, gives every single one of us the right to claim eternal life.

Common synonyms for the word trust are “belief” and “faith”. John, one of Jesus’s early followers and the author of the Book of John in the bible, uses the word belief numerous times to describe the state of our engagement with Christ. John actually quotes Jesus who tells Nicodemus, one of the Jewish teachers and a supposed expert on Jewish law, that by believing, a person is saved to eternal life². Then there’s Paul: a Roman citizen who persecuted those who trusted in Jesus but who, through God’s direct physical and spiritual engagement, came to be one of God’s greatest attesters of biblical truth. In a letter written to the Christians in Ephesus, Paul asserts that it is by God’s love for us (His grace) that we have been saved to eternal life (otherwise known as salvation), through a person’s faith (belief or trust) that Christ is whom He claims to be.³

While trust in others may oftentimes let us down and lead to disappointment at best, and tragedy at worst, trust in Christ leads a person to glory. Trust me on this! 🙂 Can’t wait to write to you again soon!!

Love, Karl

1. I’ve always been interested in Christian Apologetics which, put simply, it is the rational response to objections people bring up about the Christian faith. In future blogs I plan on discussing why the Bible is a trustworthy source. ↩︎
2. See John 3:16; John 4:53; John 5:24 ↩︎
3. See Ephesians 2:8 & 9. Paul is adamant that salvation is a gift from God. Everything is done for us by Jesus. As Eugene Peterson states in The Message, the saving of humanity “…..is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!” ↩︎