If you ever have had your trust in someone broken, chances are the wound of betrayal took some time to heal.  Repairing the damage will not be done overnight.

I know two individuals who had their companies stolen from them by underhanded co-owners; both ended up claiming bankruptcy. Some of my friends have caught their spouses in adulterous relationships.  Death, they say, would have been better.  Recently, I sat with a friend who shared that she caught her employees stealing from her.  When she confronted them, they lied about it.

Our three sons are in the restaurant business.  Jeff, the eldest, runs them. When they first started out, Jeff was warned by other owners in the dining business about how easy it is to have inventory stolen.  It took Jeff little time to find out just how true that was.  When Debbie, my friend in Mazatlán, Mexico, bought a restaurant, she was shocked at how much of her inventory ended up in employees’ car trunks.  Only when a parking lot security guard told her what he saw late at night did she have reason to fire her workers.

Debbie’s friend Lisa, another restaurant owner, told Debbie that she had a chicken disappear every day for a year.  When she finally realized that her head chef left work every night with his chef’s hat on, she demanded he remove it.  Sure enough, there sat a frozen chicken, resting atop his head.

Whom do you trust? My daughter-in-law Kira is a flight instructor in the Colorado mountains.   A couple of months ago, she was teaching an older gentleman how to fly.  Part of the instruction is that the pilot has to stall the plane mid-air and then bring the plane out of the stall (one of several reasons I have no desire to get my pilot’s license).   Kira teaches her students the proper technique, but this man failed to do what he had been taught.  Kira had to take over to prevent a crash.  The gentleman seemed unbothered and later said that he trusted that if something went wrong, Kira would make it right. Fortunately for him, she did.

If we’re going to trust, that person needs to earn our trust.

My daily Bible reading is in the book of Job.  We all know him as the man who lost everything…except his nagging wife and three, know-it-all friends.  Job questions God, imploring Him to explain why this has happened to him.  In Job 29, he reminds God (and his “friends”) that he is a good man.  He has helped the poor, the fatherless, the widow, the blind and the lame, and now they all have turned against him.  God remains silent, even when Job’s buddies remind him how he obviously has done something to irritate God.

For 38 chapters, we read the verbal tug-of-war, and then God speaks.  He doesn’t answer “why” Job was asked to endure what he did.  He simply reminds Job of Who He is, of what He is capable of doing, and how no one should contend with him.  In chapter 42, God admonishes the three friends for their lack of trust in Him and reminds them that Job has remained faithful.

God does not need to answer us when we question His ways.  He has a greater plan and purpose that we may never understand.  When I am tempted to ask the “Why” questions, I need instead to trust that His ways are not my ways.  They are far greater than anything I can imagine.

Rom 11:34-36 is confirmation: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor? Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever.  Amen.

People will fail us, but God never will.