TRUST

From Ting and I: A Memoir

Whom do you trust?

In a country with a fifty-percent divorce rate, approximately, for first marriages and for second marriages, one cannot have complete confidence in the fulfillment of the marriage vows. If you can’t trust your spouse, others become even more suspect.

Start with your parents. Were they honest? Reliable? Did they have your best interests, rather than their own, at heart? Extend the same questions to evaluation of your siblings. Extend it to yourself in your dealings with others.

As we consider people outside our family, with few exceptions, their trustworthiness becomes even more suspect. Friends? Better than acquaintances, who are generally better than those who hardly know us, who are generally better than those who want our votes or our money.

I think that there is currently less emphasis on being a truth-teller than there once was. Don’t believe all that is written or said, obviously.

Trust yourself, if you deserve to. Trust your spouse, with open eyes. Trust your best friends, cautiously. Trust people to be people rather than to be saints. Trust the universe to be neither malevolent nor beneficent. Trust God? He will have His way, which may or may not please us. Presumably, it will be for the best overall, not necessarily for what is best for us individually.

Judging from the experience of His “chosen people,” His ways are mysterious indeed.