Jesus Said, “Trust Me,” and I asked him to Define what Trust was.

Do you remember when trust falls were a thing? Are they still a thing? I feel like I am totally showing my age on this. I remember going to a church camp when I was younger, and we would do “surprise trust falls” on our friends. They would always catch you. Or your group leader would have you trust your small group to catch you. Again…they would. Obviously, as we get into the high school and the adult years, trust falls slowly faded away (Unless you went to camp like in Pitch Perfect 2 and did team building exercises), but if trust falls were truly real, I feel like I’d have bruises now.

Somewhere along the way, I figured out you can’t trust everyone you come into contact with, and sometimes it’s the people we are the closest to. You would fall in hopes they would catch you, but instead, you found yourself lying on your back looking up at the sky, wondering what you did wrong. Here’s the brutal truth:

You did nothing wrong. You couldn’t force them to hold their arms out to catch you.

I have trust, but it has issues. So yes- I have major trust issues and that is both a good and bad thing. My walls are up, and I don’t trust people as soon as I meet someone. It takes me a very long time to actually trust someone because I need to see that they won’t hurt me (Hello trauma). But on the other side of this, the people whom I can truly trust, I tend to put them at arm’s length because I am scared again of getting hurt, which isn’t fair to those who want to be in my circle…more like a dot of trust.

Between the heartbreaks, betrayal, and disappointment, I am constantly waiting for the shoe to drop. It’s like I have my hand on a fire alarm at all times and ready to pull it to escape just in case I feel something going sideways. Trusting people is so hard…but you know what’s harder? Trusting God. How can I trust someone whom I can’t see? All I have is this book that has stories and accounts of God. Cool. Got anything else? How am I supposed to trust a book that was written so long ago? How do I trust God?

Recently, my trust issues went seriously sideways, and I watched as my husband and I struggled. I watched as my friends and I struggled. Not because they did anything or honestly because I did anything, but I just got scared and in my head, and for a split second I listened to the thoughts that the enemy put in my head..I listened to the doubt that was placed there that had literally no concrete evidence, but the enemy knows this is where I struggle. He knows my struggle is trust. He knows I push people away when my radar goes off about trust.

I don’t mean to push people away.

I don’t mean to hurt the people I love more than anything.

I don’t mean to question God when something feels off.

But here I am…doing just that.

Not because I enjoy being difficult. But because years ago, I figured out that distance felt safe. Because if I wasn’t close, then I wouldn’t be asked to trust people to catch me when I fell. I quickly taught myself how to catch myself when I started to fall- how did I do that? I built walls to fall back on. If there is a wall behind you, then you really can’t fall backwards. The walls weren’t built to be cold to people, but they were built to protect me.

People are always like, “It’s not bad to have trust issues. You’re protecting yourself.”

Yeah, that might be true, but here’s the thing..Do trust issues stay in their own lane? Nah. It swerves in your marriage lane. Your friendships? Swerve. Your walk with God? Hard swerve left and right with some whiplash. Talk about exhausting.

Your husband says, “I love you.” Your trust issues go ehhh, you sure? Your best friend says, “I am not going anywhere.” Your trust issues say Oh, she’s for sure ghosting you soon. So you have to have constant reassurance because you don’t know whom you can trust. The thing you built brick by brick to keep you safe is keeping out the people who have proven time after time that you can trust them. I can’t accept love without being some type of suspicious. Compliments? Felt like straight manipulation. Silence? The total trigger of my deepest fear of being abandoned or forgotten. Feeling silence from God? Hardcore abandonment.

Here is the kicker…I trust God with the bigger stuff. Heaven? For sure. I trust it’s real. Forgiveness? Yeah, that’s real. God’s miracles? I have seen some, so yeah, that’s real. Trust Him with putting GOOD people in my life? Ha nope.

It’s not that I just don’t trust people…It’s that I don’t trust that God could put people in my life to love me well. Love me like I deserve. I am waiting for the catch. The fall. Something. Trusting God with loving me is so hard. Trusting people that they love me. Impossible. Trusting that I am worth love…That’s not on my Life Bingo Card.

I remember praying, “God, please bring people into my life that I can trust. Bring people into my life who will love me for me. That I can have a true, honest, happy relationship with.” What did God do? He said Absolutely, here are these amazing people you can not only call friends but family as well, and what did I do? “What’s the catch?” Or “What do they want from me?” “Do they see me as a project?” “Did God tell them if they friended me, they would get a special reward in Heaven for loving me?”

Trust issues hurt me. I was stuck in survival mode. Not thrive mode. Even when I was completely safe, I was in survival mode, and it hurt my relationship with God because I was treating Him like everyone else who continued to fail me throughout my life.

Not only did it hurt me, but it also hurt the people who love me because they felt the arms-length distance I would keep between me and them.

I was driving to work, and it hit me…the wounds that other people cause, unfortunately, were shaping the way I approached not only my relationships here on Earth, but they were shaping the relationship between myself and one who has never left me.

Psalm 34:18 NIV

“18 The Lord is close to the brokenhearted
    and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

I recently started seeing the depth of love shown to me not only by my tribe but by God. I knew I had to start trusting, and while that scared me so much, I knew something had to change. Something HAS to give.

So what changed? I would love to tell you that I am healed. I have no trust issues. But that would be far from the truth-literally less than 24 hours ago, I was standing in my kitchen crying with my husband holding me, trying to tell me he loves me, that he won’t ever leave. My best friend is texting me, telling me she loves me, that she isn’t going anywhere..that I wasn’t a burden. So the issues are still there. But God…God didn’t heal me. God is changing me because if God just automatically healed, then how can we share the test that turns into our testimony?

God isn’t intimidated by my trust issues. He isn’t thrown off when we run the other way. He gets it. He sees it. He feels it. And yet He doesn’t run away from us. I am also learning that He loves us too much to let you live in a guarded state forever. He will start helping you take those bricks down one by one. Nothing too overwhelming, but slowly, brick by brick, because He knows that those bricks- they protected you when you needed it the most. When the hurt was coming from every direction. He knows that those bricks were safe, but now they may be protecting you from the pain, but they’re also blocking the love that is trying to reach you.

The truth of fighting trust issues…it’s a process. A very slow process that involves a lot of therapy, tears, raw conversations, and a lot of sitting in the feels.

What I am figuring out

I need to let God in.

Proverbs 3:5 NIV

Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;

I need to let my people in: God has reminded me in this verse that community isn’t optional, it is essential.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 NIV

9 Two are better than one,
    because they have a good return for their labor:
10 If either of them falls down,
    One can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
    and has no one to help them up.

I need to be intentional about the process, even when it is so scary and honestly exhausting.

I am learning:

When a friend checks in, respond. No more isolation.

Believing my husband when he says he loves me and that it doesn’t come with a cost or stipulations.

and the toughest..letting my guard down when I am praying long enough to say “God, I don’t know how to trust you, I am scared to trust you, but I want to trust you.” I need to trust that God is big enough to hold all my questions and insecurities while He is gently leading me towards healing.

I want to leave you with this…maybe it’s more that I am leaving this for me to come back to later when I am struggling with trusting.

You are never too broken to belong.

Psalm 147:3 NIV

“3 He heals the brokenhearted
    and binds up their wounds.”

You are not too guarded to grow.

And you are NEVER too far gone to be held by God and by the people He has put in your life.

Maybe it’s time to build a door in the wall you have carefully put together and open it. You can keep the wall, but let’s add a door, and it’s okay if it’s just cracked open right now. A slight opening is better than nothing. It’s progress.

You don’t have to be completely and totally healed to start trusting…you just have to be willing. You have to be willing to trust God enough to teach you how to trust again, because people are far from perfect, but because He is, you can trust Him completely.

To my family,

Thank you.

Thank you for staying when it would have been easier to walk away. Thank you for loving me through the walls that I built so long ago.

Thank you for loving me when I shut down without warning.

I know my trust issues are never pretty, and they make me go silent and maybe even distant for days. I know they can be difficult, but you never stopped showing up. Thank you for not forcing your way in but standing by the walls, talking to me, throwing things over to help remind me that you are still there and you are never leaving me.

Your patience and love have been a true answer to my prayers, even when my prayers were silent.

I may not always say it or even say it well, but I see you. I am grateful to you. I am learning (at a sloths pace) that I don’t have to protect myself from the people God has placed in my life to love me and cheer me on in my healing process.

Thank you for helping me heal.

I love you more than my silence ever showed.

Always and Forever.