Trust-building: Job #1 for leaders
Second in a series on trust:
Arabic cultures are notoriously low-trust. Turn your back on your neighbor and he may stab you. Convert to Christianity and it’s your family’s job to kill you. It’s tragi-comical to watch the American army trying to transplant our high-trust values in a low-trust culture. It won’t work. Trust is the glue that holds our families, churches, and economy together. Because we live in a high-trust culture, we assume that other nations behave as we do – we’re amazingly naïve about it.
Trust is what enables us to specialize and focus on honing one skill set to a fine point. The neurosurgeon can’t grow enough food for his family and the farmer can’t operate on his wife’s brain cancer. They have to trust one another. Just count the number of times you have to trust people in a given day. Every economic transaction – anything you buy or sell – requires you trust someone.
When children grow up in low-trust families where moms and dads show by their actions that it’s not safe to trust (divorcing or just not talking to each other), they usually acquire dysfunctional behaviors to compensate. If they marry, they will likely bring their own children up in this dysfunction. If they lead organizations, they will create a toxic, low-trust culture that is trapped in the realm of the superficial.
And saddest of all, they will struggle all their lives to trust a God who they feel abandoned them to their pain.
If you’re someone who has never learned to trust, it’s not too late. Here’s an exhortation: Press into the pain that formed this behavior in you. Choose to break the bondage of the past. Choose to create a different culture in your own family. Choose to trust people one at a time, a day at a time. Set them and yourself free. And if this seems like an impossible task, find a ministry like this one that specializes in helping you.
“The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.” Exodus 14: 14
In my next blog, I’ll list the specific actions a leader can take to build a culture of trust.
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“Love believes the best.” The Holy Spirit has consistently brought this maxim to me. Trusting also sometimes brings hurt and disappointment. But I remember Amy Carmichael’s words that it’s a greater sin and does greater damage to not believe the best of someone or suspect an ill motive than if they really had that ill motive.
In 1976, I had lunch Peter Van Woorden, Corrie Ten Boone’s(The Hiding Place) nephew while with YWAM Hurlach, Germany. Peter said to me “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not unto your own understanding.” Yes, it is in Proverbs… However, this was coming from a brother who experienced Nazi Germany’s concentration camps firsthand. Inside myself, I wondered how can this man trust God, or for that matter anyone? With years in loving and growing in the Lord, I have come to this same belief – to trust God. Also, to say with Corrie “…the pit is never so deep, that God is not deeper still…” So it is with trust & broken-trust…we must believe that Jesus is deeper than our broken-trust letdowns. He is able to heal and restore… I have found that it is not really about trusting people as much as it is about trusting the Lord. He places me with those around who are untrustworthy as well as those who can be trusted. The reason for them all is to know and love God. So, let the untrustworthy come, as well as the trusted ones…they are all gifts that I might know Jesus and Father God.
Amen St. Mark…Thanx Seth! Great blog.