Orientation 4 - What to expect? Whom to trust? ...

Thursday, July 15, 2010. What can I expect from life? What do you expect? What are your plans? What is it that you want to reach? How is a world you would like to live in?

Perhaps you have goals for your immediate future. We make plans, we would like to be promoted. We are looking for a job or a partner or try to find a new flat or a house. We make plans for ourselves, like to finish some training, to finish studies or a PhD …

What can I expect from others?

I am currently waiting for some contract to be signed. In principle, everything is clear. But I had a little discussion with my wife about this and I realized that I do not trust the thing fully yet. Even if there is a clear agreement, I am still in a waiting mode and think: “it could all go down the drain, and then it is again my own responsibility to make things work somehow …”

This seems to be a small thing, but it shows a very basic question. What is it we can rely on? Can we rely on the promises or word of other people? There are situations where we can rely on others. In fact we need to rely on others, without creditability and trustworthiness our life and our society would not work. Yet, we also have other experiences. Things do not work out. People do not hold their word or they cannot hold it because administrative processes make it impossible.

What can I expect from others? My experience shows that I cannot necessarily expect much. Responsibility is something which is rather rare. And even if you have people who act in a responsible way, often their hands are bound and they cannot do much. This experience often includes the employers we work for, it includes the banks which manage our accounts and the “credit rating” organizations which rate our trustworthiness. You cannot necessarily trust them. The employers are partly just big administrative machines which sometimes work well, but often follow inadequate rules and make many things impossible which would be highly needed to effectively do the job. It is an important and far reaching question: Whom can I really trust?

Whom can I trust?

I should orient my life towards something or someone, who is really trustworthy. I should build my life on a rock, not on sand. That is important and crucial for my personal orientation and focus. I should be careful with my trust and focus and rely on the right thing.

The central biblical insight is that you can trust in the Lord. It is Jesus who is truly trustworthy. Do not rely on other people, they will let you down. But rely on the Lord, since he is trustworthy.

The biblical insight into reliability is based on important and deep insight into how our world is built. Why should we trust the Lord, but not rely to deeply on others? It is not because the others would never be trustworthy. There are many people who ARE reliable, indeed. But humans are not in a position to be trusted with our life, with our faith, with our existence. They are just weak humans, with their strength and their weaknesses, they are just grass and will pass away. But the Lord remains forever. So we should expect to find life and reliability with the Lord, we should go to God if we want someone to entrust our life and our future. ... more texts