Superman had only one weakness (other than his crush on Lois Lane)—Kryptonite.
If he was in the presence of this material, he would become as weak as a child.
My kryptonite is lack of trust.
Why do I get so defeated when someone doesn’t trust me?
This is such a huge issue in my life and it seems to have been getting worse with each passing year. When someone doesn’t trust me, I want to just give up.
My trusting family
I grew up in a home where my parents trusted me and my sister implicitly. In my home, my sister and I were the best, the smartest, the most capable, the most athletic children my parents had ever seen. My parents had high expectations of us because they had high esteem for us. We were trusted.
To this day, I still believe that I had a wonderful and supportive family life growing up. I hear people talking about dysfunctional families, and I just have to say that I think mine was fully functional. Oh sure, we had our family issues, but we dealt with them all in a healthy manner. From the way my parents led the home to the way they punished disobedience, I feel it was done with love and sensitivity.
The one thing they never made me do was earn their trust. Seriously, they gave me their trust completely. Sure, they had rules for our household, but I wasn’t one of those kids who was looking for ways to get in trouble or break rules or stretch the boundaries, so they just trusted me.
I can’t tell you how affirming that was. But my problem is that to this day, I don’t know how to deal with any situation in which people don’t trust me.
High School Basketball
When I was in high school, I had an interesting experience on the basketball court. Throughout much of my elementary basketball experience, my father had been my coach and for one reason or another, I had often been placed in the position of point guard. From my earliest days, I can recall people telling me that I was a leader, and the basketball court was no different.
When I got into Junior High, we had another man join my father in coaching our basketball team, and that man wanted his son to be the point guard. The end result was that I was a co-point guard with Ken, but I didn’t mind too much because with Ken on our team, we actually won some games!
However, when I got to high school, I expected to be placed in a secondary (read bench-sitting) position which I was for my first year. However, the coach saw a lot of potential in me, I think, and he placed me in the game even as a Freshman for strategic purposes like defense. I was pretty good at that.
My sophomore year was where the really interesting stuff happened. That was the first year my school had a Junior Varsity basketball team, and the coach thought it would be a good idea to bump me down from Varsity so I could get more experience and playing time. I was initially disappointed in the thought, but when I got bumped down, I also was given the position of point guard again. All of a sudden, the trust of the coach was placed in my hands again, and I had the greatest season of my life! I scored in the double-digits almost every game and even had a game when I scored over 20 points which for me was astronomical.
The next year, though, we got a new coach. I was bumped up to Varsity, I was given the position as a starter, but I was always the first one to be substituted out halfway into the first quarter, and I would sit on the bench for much of the rest of the game. My coach didn’t trust me (or something) and I lost my drive to excel.
My dad, however, would constantly remark to me after each game that I should have gotten more playing time and the coach should have done this or that differently. I came to believe that my dad was right and my coach was wrong. My dad trusted me.
I’ve never earned trust
So, throughout my life because of my skills in various things, I can’t remember a time when I have earned someone’s trust.
I know there are at least two feelings that go around in my heart when I’m aware that someone doesn’t trust me.
- I feel that if someone doesn’t trust me, he or she is just wrong.
- I feel that if people don’t trust me, it’s not worth my time or effort trying to change their mind—I’ve got better things to do.
As a result, I can’t think of a time when I earned someone’s trust. Either trust was given to me by someone, or I didn’t bother with that person.
Trust empowers me
In the past few years, my life has been shattered in many ways, and one of the key things that has been a defeat for me is the awareness of an increasing number of people who don’t trust me.
But when I first came to NWBC, it was so different. When I first came to NWBC, I was handed a key in a public gathering. I remember thinking to myself that perhaps the church had bought me a car! However, the announcement was made as I received the key that the key was not to a real car but to a metaphorical one. The church was the car, the people were the engine, and I was to take the key and be the driver.
I still have the key hanging on a hook in my wall.
I have never felt so affirmed in my life as I was at that moment. My trust meter was off the chart, and I felt so empowered that I immersed myself in sermon preparation, personal growth, and church leadership. I was on cloud nine for months until the first family expressed an extreme lack of trust in me and the downhill slide began.
Lack of trust defeats me
Just the same as having trust empowers me, whenever I sense that a person is disappointed with me or has lost their faith in me, I feel completely defeated.
Part of me wants to crawl under a rock and just die there. Another part of me wants to slap the other person around and curse them for not trusting me like I think they should.
When I finally meet with a counselor, I will try to deal with this because I am completely flummoxed. I don’t know what to do about it.
How do you build trust?
So this is my question, How do you build trust with another person? I’ve never had to do that before. In my past, trust was always just given to me, and if it wasn’t given to me, I would just discount the person who withheld it, and let the issue die in my mind without a second thought.
However, as a pastor and leader, I’m feeling a great sense of burden that if people don’t trust me, I can’t do what God is calling me to do.
What is the worst for me is this sense that if I am who I am and who I believe God wants me to be then I will continue to have people who don’t trust me. I used to be okay with that, but I don’t know anymore.
As I see it now in my skepticism and near depression there are only two ways to “earn” trust from another person.
- Do what God wants me to do and be who he made me to be with such consistency, integrity, and excellence that over time, I will win over the other people to my perspective, and once won over, they will trust me.
- Modify my behavior and values to the point where I am consistently behaving according to the expectations of others to prove to them that I can be trusted.
What is the right perspective to have?
My shame, my anger
In some respects, I feel completely shamed by these thoughts and feelings. After all, I’m just a human being and am not really worthy of anybody’s trust. I want people to trust in God and put all their hope in him. But at the same time, I feel like the pastors and leaders that God establishes in his church act as his representatives / his agents and should be the earthly recipients of the trust that people give to God.
But when I put myself into that sentence, I am struck with a sense of both how prideful that is and yet also how biblical it is. The war between the two causes me great anguish whenever I allow it to, so often I just avoid thinking about it.
More than anything, though, I have become aware of how angry this has made me as a person. I feel that great injustice is being done to me, and I am powerless to do anything about it.
Of course, I know that somehow I need to learn to earn people’s trust because I trust other people enough to believe what they say about it and I trust some of the people who don’t trust me.
But it makes me mad!
My life as a pastor is all about helping other people change. I also want God to continue to change me, but there is something about this trust thing that is just too close to my heart and the emotions are completely blinding me from being objective—and I hate that.
So I’m angry.
Lord, you know exactly what’s going on in my life, in my heart, and in my mind, and I trust that you are the one who can truly bring about healing and restoration to me. Please help my heart.
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