I don’t know of any restorer or destroyer of human relationships greater than trust, given and broken. There is a vital connection between what restores and renews us in relationships and what tears them apart.
Trust opens the heart and the lack of it closes the same. Measuring our readiness to trust in any situation immediately predicts the nature of the relationships we have.
In loving relationships, we know that partners endure in love when they offer and receive from each other trust, trust that is new, renewed and renewing itself between them.
What about trust in service? What about those whom we serve in some way–whether through our work, our volunteer efforts, family obligations, or other social and informal relationships? Is there a trust that heals and restores in service?
Haven Trevino, author of The Tao of Healing believed so. He wrote this modern adaptation of the Tao Te Ching in the 1990’s from his perspective as he lived in the final stages of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He writes:
If you do not trust those you serve,
How will they trust you?
Share your heart.
It’s all you have
and all they need to learn.
I want to ponder those whom I serve today. Do I trust them? Am I sharing my heart with them? Is my heart, my trust, the thing of me that I tend to guard and parcel out all that they have to learn? Is this the way of renewal?
Bob Patrick
Note: You can find Trevino’s little book on Amazon. If you choose to purchase it there, use this link which will benefit the ministries of The Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Gwinnett.
