What can we trust?

Trust is a key ingredient in the well-being of individuals and communities. Whether we’re talking about global responses to water security, shared values across nations, or questions of how much confidence to have in local government, we start with a basic trust that progress and working together are possible. And yet even when trust is broken, the conviction that good is powerful and real is the reason we take the difficult road of working to gain back trust – in others, in institutions, in ourselves.

The highest trust is putting our faith not in human circumstances or other people but in God and divine goodness. When we place our confidence in God, we find stability and safety and can act accordingly. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take” (Proverbs 3:5, 6, New Living Translation).

Christian Science teaches that confidently leaning on God expands our spiritual understanding and frees us from being influenced and governed by worldly expectations and from conforming to limited, matter-based models of life. Our thinking turns toward Spirit, which is always trustworthy because Spirit is God. When we trust God, we find goodness to be real and forever ongoing because it is God-inspired, God-established, and God-maintained.

We trust and depend on gravity even when we’re not conscious of it. We can similarly count on God as Love, Truth, and Life – as the foundation of our lives. This foundation supports and sustains all that we do, and as we rely on it, we find God to be completely trustworthy.

Fear – of getting hurt, of losing control, of being outside of good – gets in the way of trusting the power of Spirit. However, since fear is unknown to God, Love, we begin to let go of fear by leaning on Love and growing in our understanding of our divine nature. The pinnacle of trust is being utterly confident in the goodness that comes from God. We strive, step by step, toward this goal by knowing our oneness with God, which cultivates an even greater reliance on divine Love.

As spiritual understanding fills our consciousness, fear fades. When we have confidence that all good has its source in God, we don’t fear losing it. We find the reliability of divine Love manifested in sound relationships, health, finances, and other elements of daily life. Like a little child holding the hand of a trusted parent, it is our nature as God’s children, Love’s self-expression, to rely wholly on God, as Christ Jesus did. The more we lean on God, the more we are inspired by the ever-present love of our divine Father-Mother.

In a passage that describes two different approaches to trust, Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, explains, “In Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English, faith and the words corresponding thereto have these two definitions, trustfulness and trustworthiness. One kind of faith trusts one’s welfare to others. Another kind of faith understands divine Love and how to work out one’s ‘own salvation, with fear and trembling.’ ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief!’ expresses the helplessness of a blind faith; whereas the injunction, ‘Believe ... and thou shalt be saved!’ demands self-reliant trustworthiness, which includes spiritual understanding and confides all to God” (“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” p. 23).

The first type of faith is illustrated in a Bible account of a man whose son was afflicted by convulsions and who uttered that cry to Jesus to “help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24, NLT). Though this father felt helpless, he didn’t run away from the problem. His admission of humble yearning to trust Spirit, God, more fully was recognized by Jesus, who, through the power of Spirit, rebuked the disease, took the son’s hand, and lifted him up, healed. We’re not left wondering about the result of the man’s desire to have his trust in spiritual good strengthened.

Whenever there is a need for us to trust more, we have the ability to rely wholeheartedly on God. We may still have far to go before we become consistently conscious of God’s kingdom of harmony, and fear may try to pull us into doubt and suspicion. Yet our help is in knowing ourselves as God’s spiritual idea and reflecting God as divine Principle, which is unerring. Then, when bumps in the road occur, we don’t have to lose faith, because we can trust in our unbreakable relation to God.

Adapted from an editorial published in the Oct. 30, 2023, issue of the Christian Science Sentinel.

Inspired to think and pray further about fostering trust around the globe? To explore how people worldwide are navigating times of mistrust and learning to build trust in each other, check out the Monitor’s “Rebuilding trust” project.