Who do you trust?

“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in Me.” John 14:1

When I was a child, the people I trusted most were my parents. But as much as I trusted them, I still felt scared when they left me. I always feared that they would not come back. I remember one time that we went to the store right before Christmas. We were living in Madrid at the time so I must have been 8 or 9 years old. The store had a childcare center in the basement, where they would show cartoons. They left me there while they went to do their shopping. I was not happy. I didn’t enjoy the cartoons at all. I just kept looking towards the door, waiting for them to return. After what seemed like an eternity, they came back. I allowed my fear to place a doubt on my trust in them.

Many times we try to place our trust in people or in the things of the world, thinking that the world will provide us with the happiness that we are seeking. We think that if we buy the latest car or the biggest house we are going to be happy. We place our trust in material things, and those things will never make us happy. We think that if we travel to the most exotic places in the world we will be ecstatic. But then we realize that as pretty as that destination was, it didn’t fill us with the joy that we were expecting. We trusted the marketing that said that we were going to have the most amazing vacation, only to realize that the joy was fleeting. We think that if we have a lot of money, we are going to be happy, but money can’t buy happiness. We should not trust money to make us happy. A lot of people place so much emphasis on making money that if something goes wrong, they are completely devastated. In extreme cases, it has even led to people ending their lives because they had turned money into their god, and once they lost it, they did not have a reason to keep on living. 

If we place our trust in the world, we are going to come up empty. The only One that I know I can trust without having second thoughts is God. He will never let me down. Even when He takes His sweet time to answer my prayers, He has my best interest at heart. If He doesn’t answer me right away is because He knows that the timing is not right. But I can trust that He hears me, and He is working on granting my petition, as long as it’s good for me. 

The only way we can be truly happy is if we place God at the center of our lives. If He is in charge of everything that we do, then we will not need to buy things or travel or have a lot of money in order to be happy. We will find happiness in the little things, because our joy will come from God.

If we place our trust in other humans, even if they are our parents or other family members, they may let us down even if they don’t do it on purpose. We humans are imperfect creatures, so we cannot be trusted unconditionally. We all have a hole within our hearts that cannot be filled by humans nor the things of this world. The only One that fits inside that hole is God. Until we realize this, we are always going to feel empty. We need to place our trust in God because He is the only One that can make us feel whole again.

My parents would have never abandoned me, but my fear became more powerful than my trust. The same thing can happen with God. We want to trust Him, but the fear that He may not answer our prayers can turn into an obstacle to trust Him unconditionally. Let’s set aside our fears, and listen to Jesus: “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust also in Me.” John 14:1

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