Quotes About Trust

What I am sure of is that friendship—not love, friendship—is as possible between women as between men, and that in either case it is often stronger for not having to cross sexual picket lines. Sexuality and mistrust often go together, and both are incompatible with amicitia.

By touch we are betrayed, and betray others.

Maybe that's what love is. Having someone who guides you through different experiences, coaxes you to try news things but still makes you feel safe.

All faults may be forgiven of him who has perfect candor.

If you cannot forgive because of hurt inflicted by others, you will be unwilling to be vulnerable for fear of being hurt again. Because people are sinners, you cannot love and you cannot minister without getting hurt.

How do you demonstrate a love for God and others in the heat of a contract negotiation in which you perceive the other party to be unreasonable? The Bible gives you no clear-cut answer. God designed the ambiguity in which you are forced to live in order to keep you trusting in Him.

To the degree that you know what God's expectations of you look like, you do not need Him. Seeking to apply positive commandments forces you into a posture of dependence upon God, which is right where He wants you.

Fellowship with God is for those who want to live under His authority.

Smile. Have you ever noticed how easily puppies make human friends? Yet all they do is wag their tails and fall over.

Greatest risk of all: to be vulnerable, to allow others to see us as we really are

We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone - but paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy.

God rested when he had left his creative power to itself in man.

The only way of knowing a person is to love them without hope.

The key insight is that honest talk transforms and emancipates when it is received in faithful seriousness.

Humanness depends on being faithfully heard. And being faithfully heard depends on risky speech of self-disclosure uttered in freedom before a faithful listener.

As we go to the places where we are called by God—sometimes gladly, sometimes reluctantly, always in anxiety—we are drawn into the newness of God's future.

Relationship with God is not immune to the surprises and costs of our daily life.

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

Even in the wilderness with scarce resources, God mandates a pause for Sabbath for the community:

In the prophetic tradition the continual insistence is that trusting relationships and not tradable commodities are the proper category for communion with God.

the threat of life, so palpable among us, is a threat that can and will be countered by the Creator who continues the work of governance, order, and sustenance. Creation faith is the summons and invitation to trust the Subject of these verbs, even in the face of day-to-day, palpable incursions of chaos. The testimony of Israel pushes toward a verdict that the One embedded in these doxological statements can be trusted in the midst of any chaos, even that of exile and finally that of death.

Thus the Sabbath of the fourth commandment is an act of trust in the subversive, exodus-causing God of the first commandment, an act of submission to the restful God of commandments one, two, and three. Sabbath is a practical divestment so that neighborly engagement, rather than production and consumption, defines our lives.

Second, the elders of the city (Bethlehem) are trembling. They want to know why he comes. They do not even know yet whose side he is on. They presume he is still an agent of Saul. If so, the Judeans tremble because Saul is no friend of southerners. Or if he is not an agent of Saul, it is even more dangerous, because then he may come to include them in an act of betrayal, which is more risk than they want.

Observance of the freedom God has to change causes a terrible unsettling among the faithful.