Trust Won’t Leak

Trust.  Have you noticed how many things carry this word in their titles and mottos?  Financial institutions, insurance companies, car dealers, book titles, etc.  The word is used because they want to convey a message to us that we can feel confident in working with them, placing our money and treasures with them.

Even disposable diapers want us to trust they won’t leak!

Side Note:  Personally, my relationship with disposable diapers was not always so secure.  Every new & improved diaper style brought new hope they would not leak.  In the diaper realm, when trustworthiness is lacking, the result can be a real mess!

To trust is to feel secure, to be hopeful, and to be bold in placing our confidence.

Trust is the most important factor in any relationship–work, friends, spouses, families, and business. When trust is present people are drawn together and work in cohesiveness in their efforts. When trust is absent people are separated, each going their own direction, resulting in lack of purpose and eventually chaos.

Trust is established by actions that align with our words.  It is reliable follow through; doing what we say we are going to do.  Trust comes when we speak genuine encouragement into others and do not tell what we have heard secondhand or what we think we know about people.

When the winds of someone’s poor behavior blow and we have opportunity to expose our knowledge about them, we must consider our motivation for sharing this information.  Is this an attempt to help another individual not get burned? Or, an attempt to exact a passive/aggressive and manipulative type of revenge by changing someone else’s opinion of another, thereby creating an “us against them” alliance?

The wisdom of Solomon tells us that a person who goes around as a talebearer–a gossip, a slanderer–reveals other peoples’ secrets, but a trustworthy person keeps things to himself. (Prov. 11:13)  A trustworthy person does this for the purpose of not hurting other people with their words.

The things we share about others affect our relationship with the person we are discussing (who is not present), our relationship with the person with whom we are sharing, and their relationship with the person about whom we are speaking, and all the other ripples that will go out from that conversation.

When we have established trust with people and our words and actions continue to align with that, we are safe to place the treasure of ourselves with them and they with us.  With that, we avoid the leaky messes and successful positive and productive relationships will indeed be the result.