Steele (the Day)

I’m joining sweet tweep Bridget Chumbley today in her “One Word at a Time” blog carnival.

Today’s word:
trust

We are born trusting souls, dependent on someone else for our every need. As we mature, our human failures become all too obvious. Who and what can we trust?

The first thing that came to mind when I heard this week’s word was “Guard your heart…” Seriously, how trusting is that?

It’s so easy for us to distrust both people and things.

Inanimate objects are very easy to distrust, because we half-way expect them to let us down. A flat tire. A broken dryer. Mere “stuff” is known to fail us on several levels, even if it works all the time. In the end, it’s still stuff. Stuff with no heart.

When people let us down, the failure goes much deeper. It’s heart failure.

“Guard your heart…”

And therein lies error of our ways, because our hearts are not perfect. People, no matter how close they are to you, are simply not perfect. Worse, we are unmistakably flawed. And only the ultimately perfect can be trusted.

Our most trusted friends have let us down with gossip, greed, or envy. Our families will let us down with broken promises, little white lies, disrespect, and less-than-full disclosure. Trust that takes years to build can be destroyed in a moment.

Trust me on this one.

Because I have been that friend.
That wife.
That mom.
That daughter.
And though I’m as loyal as white on rice, there have been times that I know I have let others down in their eyes and they felt some level of betrayal, no matter how unintended it was. I’m a work in progress.

With our relationships, we take the risk of rebuilding and regaining that trust. It demands faith, hope, and guts. And a bit of heart-guarding until you feel safe and secure again. We want and need to trust again. We will trust again. In order to do so, it begins with reminders of simple scrawled words of a small child, and a lot of help from Above. Because only the Perfect can be implicitly trusted.