When governments and institutions tell you it’s all about trust and it’s a trust thing, you know you’re in trouble and it’s time to take out some real cover.
In the movie "Open Range" some cowboys are playing poker around a campfire after a hard day’s droving. The youngest in the group is cheating. After the game one of the older cowboys takes him aside and gives him a piece of advice:
A man’s trust is a valuable thing. Don’t lose it for a handful of cards.
Don’t miss the irony, that trust could be questioned in a game built on the deception of a poker face and the art of bluffing.
Now the high end of the cycling world is spinning out of control with this latest aggravated twist on an ancient tragedy. And the man at the centre of the scandal is claiming he wasn’t cheating, just creating a level playing field!
Trust is such a valuable thing.
• We promise it in marriage
• We build it in families
• We reward it in business
• We honour it in friendship
• We assume it in religious leaders
• We expect it in sport
To experience a person’s trust is a blessing that can barely be bettered. To be a trustworthy person brings such blessing to others.
Trust’s counterpoint, untrustworthiness, is so soul destroying. Marriages implode. Families fracture. Business breaks down. Friendships fail. Religious credibility crashes. Sport is soured by suspicion.
Grief, trauma, anger, resentment and bitterness can boil away for years, or forever.
In the early nineties the rock star Sting sang a haunting song about the loss of faith. He sang about losing his faith in politicians, the military and televangelists. As tragic as these failures of his trust were, he went on to lament the more tragic loss of faith in close and personal relationships. He concluded:
If I lose my faith in you
There’s nothing left for me to do.
If I lose my faith, if I lose my faith,
If I lose my faith, in you
There’s nothing left for me to do.
Losing friends to death is hard and painful. Losing friends to disloyalty, broken promises, cycles of bullying, abuse and betrayal is a pain too hard to bear.
Many a spouse will testify to such pain. At least loss in death preserves a legacy of lasting memories that help, in time, to ease the grief. Loss in divorce or some other form of relational breakdown robs and ruins those memories and brings deeper dimensions of loss, trauma and grief that gouges deep into the heart.
King David knew this pain. He laments this loss:
If an enemy were insulting me,
I could endure it;
If a foe was raising himself against me,
I could hide from him.
But it is you, a man like myself,
my companion, my close friend,
With whom I once enjoyed sweet fellowship
As we walked with the throng
at the house of God (Psalm 55:12-14)
The Italian Calabrian born Australian boxer, Rocky Gattellari, expresses the pain of failed friendship graphically in his autobiography The Rocky Road (William Heinemann Australia 1989). In a title fight at the Sydney Showground in 1965 against another Italian fighter, Salvatori Buruni, Gattellari was canvassed with a right hook. He describes what follows (page 273):
I raised my battered face from the floor and
looked out at the joyous mob. I was hurt, but
not that badly. I was going to get up. But what
I saw shattered me. Some of my childhood
buddies who had fought and stolen food with
me, whom I had helped find jobs and buy
houses, to whom I had lent money that was
never repaid, for whom I had procured birds,
who had drunk my booze and eaten my food
at my parties and who still owed me for their
seats here tonight – these same hollow
Calabrese ‘friends’ were out there dancing
and hugging each other with joy at my demise.
Completely destroyed, I slipped back onto the
soft, friendly canvas, face down, and cried.
Just when he needed his friends to be there for him, to come through for him, to lift him back to his feet through their solidarity and support for him, what did he see? It wasn’t a lethal right hook, but the duplicity of friends that delivered the knockout blow. It wasn’t physical force but failed friendship that knocked out this real life Rocky.
Nowhere, however, do we see the contrast between trust and betrayal portrayed more starkly than in the final hours before Jesus’ death.
• The hostility of the once adoring crowds
• The denials of ‘to the death’ Peter
• The betrayal of Judas
• The desertion of all the disciples
We’re all there, somewhere, in that montage of human failure.
But such behaviour is set in such contrast to the constant love and commitment of the one whom, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising its shame, for the very ones who failed him at such a crucial hour.
A man’s trust is a valuable thing. Don’t lose it over a handful of cards.
Don’t lose it over an undisciplined moment of sexual insanity, an unguarded obsession that leads to greed, envy and jealousy, an all-consuming goal that seeks an illegal or a drug assisted edge, an unwise claim to omni-competence that demeans the contribution of others or a senseless surge of selfish ambition.
Jesus’ trust is the most valuable thing. He alone, is absolutely trustworthy and therefore worthy of our trust. He, whose once-for-all death upon the cross, provides forgiveness for our treachery and failure and makes acceptance with God possible.
Yes, it’s a trust thing. We are to turn away from our treachery and trust in Him and learn from this True and Trustworthy One how to be a trustworthy person.
Feature photo: thewebprincess
