Having Faith in Others

Have Faith (or is it Trust?) 

Relationships built on faith in each other consistently rise above those that are not built on faith.  You can have faith in each other without trust, but it’s a lot easier to have faith when you have trust.  we don't think you can have trust without faith.  It sounds more complicated than it is in practice. 

Any discussion of faith begs a deeper understanding.  It means something different to everyone.  You can’t get by with a summary paragraph.  Someone will challenge you on the finer points.  Some people think faith is the same as trust; but, they are different and we think trust is easier to understand.  In a children’s sermon once, the pastor wanted to explain faith in God.  He put a chair in the middle of the group and asked, “If you sat in this chair, would it hold you up?”  All the children replied, “Yes!”  The pastor said, “Well, you haven’t sat in that chair yet, how do you know?”  His point was that it’s possible to have faith in something that is untested.   

Conflating faith and trust is easy to do and it happens often.

Adults can reason that, having sat in chairs before, there is a pretty good chance of a chair holding you up.  Extrapolating from that assumption, it sort of backfires in the faith analogy.  I need to have been blessed and supported by other gods in order to believe the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob deserves my faith.  We can assume that the pastor made an honest mistake and would better serve his congregation by using the chair as an example of how to place your trust in someone or something.  Conflating faith and trust is easy to do and it happens often.  It's hard for people to embrace faith.  It goes back to social conditioning.  You must first decide what you believe about human nature before you can embrace having faith in others.   

Confucian Idealism 

There were two Chinese thinkers – Mencius and Xunzi who were contemporaries – and followers of Confucius.  Mencius, whose real name was Mang-Tzu, is better known and was an idealist who believed that humans are innately benevolent.  Xunzi earned a reputation as a black sheep because he rejected that idealism.  Their scholarly debates centered around using a tree as their thought construct.   

Xunzi believed that for a tree to grow, it should be carefully cultivated.  It should be given a precise mix of water and nutrients and grafted to a stick to ensure it grows straight.  Time and attention must be given to pruning, molding and shaping the tree.  Without this, it becomes a thorny, scraggly bush that no one would enjoy.  Mencius believed that you only needed good soil and occasional weeding to produce the best tree.  The sun and the rain will do the rest.  The right conditions keep the tree healthy, and the same applies to people.  He disagreed with Xunzi’s assertion that people are intrinsically bad and you must control them and mold them into being good.  This perspective refutes our ability to put faith in our fellow citizens.  If I think you are bad-spirited, I will not have faith in your ability to maintain a relationship with me.  

The easier argument is the idea that people are generally good.  Think about babies – have you ever met a bad baby?  I’ve met some precocious toddlers – my youngest daughter is one!  My friend’s son is an ultimate boundary pusher – but he’s not malicious.  Children don’t learn negative behavior until they encounter “bad soil”.  If you follow, you believe that people are mostly good, then you can connect the dots very easily to having faith in others.  If I’m generally a good person and I believe most people are generally good, I don’t have to know you personally to believe that you are a good person and vice-versa.  The law of probability allows me to put faith in my assumption until you prove me wrong, which doesn’t happen very often. 

Enter: FEAR 

We make poor choices when we are scared, stressed, upset or emotionally imbalanced but even then, we continue to be good people.  Faith in others means seeing the big picture of the human condition. We can always achieve more or be better people so if we agree on that: We can have faith in each other.  Free will gives us the ability to choose to behave differently, in spite of our circumstances or constrictions, to improve our lives.  If we were walking down a hall and there were two doors ahead – and I said, “If you take the door on the right, you will have a better life” wouldn’t you do it? 

A loving person has faith to lend us when our own faith is low.

You have faith in my goodness, and you want to have a better life, so it makes sense to go through the right-side door!   

People will challenge this position.  They see someone hawking self-help videos on the Internet or they have a relative who acts like a jerk every time they are together.  They cite mental illness or crime statistics and stories about victims of get-rich-quick schemes.  “See, people really are evil!”  In reality, they are likely people who have not had an opportunity to improve their lives and choose a better path. 

Lynn brought up the term, “borrowed faith” which means when we are struggling and we don’t believe in ourselves, we can access another’s faith in us to build encouragement, energy and positivity.  It helps us get over the hump, to a point where we can embrace our own faith.  Faith and love travel hand-in-hand.  A loving person has faith to lend us when our own faith is low: That’s the essence of faith, its expansiveness builds us both up. 

Have you ever said to someone, “I have faith in you!”  Maybe, your friend says they want to start a new business.  You are cheering your child on from the stands, “Go, Timmy!”  Your daughter is afraid of the diving board, so you jump in with her, in a show of good faith.  Maybe she’s not ready to do it today, but you have faith that someday she’ll go solo.  On the other hand, if your son is not interested in playing the piano, he’s never going to apply himself to learning the keys.  You can have all the faith in the world, and even push him into taking music lessons, but he won’t become a good piano player.  It’s not in his heart to achieve that goal.   

We put faith in people, not in outcomes.  If we are attached to a particular outcome, it’s based on our own fear and all the faith in the world will not produce an achievement.  If your daughter never dives into the pool herself, it confirms your fear: She’ll fail the class, she’ll be an embarrassment, and she’ll never be a good swimmer.  You’ve attached your fear to her outcome, and you don’t have faith that she will achieve what is right for her in the end.  She’ll sense that you won’t give grace because her performance didn’t meet your expectations. 

Fear asks, “What if they don’t?”  Faith asks, “What if they do?” 

When you believe that people are trying to do their best, you believe they'll make the best choice that’s available to them each time.  Then if someone's not making their normal-level optimal choices the correct conclusion will be that there is some outside pressure limiting their ability.  You could refuse to sink to the assumption that they are slacking, or purposefully trying to tank the team.  They might not perform optimally today, but they’ll work at it again tomorrow. 

Here's another analogy – have you ever heard the phrase “in a box”?  When you don't have faith in others you are limiting them to acting according to your current expectations.  You aren’t giving them a chance to grow and be different people than they are today.  

Another daughter story from Ben – because they are always great illustrations of our point!  His oldest daughter decided this summer it was time to go to the park with her friends, and with NO adult supervision. It was terrifying!  It took most of the summer to get to the point where Ben could say yes.   

Her very first question was, “Why don’t you trust me?”  I think she really does understand (after several discussions) that it’s not really about her at all.  I told her that I’m working through my fear, my attachment, and that’s not a statement of her capability but if I'm gonna have a peaceful afternoon I'm going to have to know that if she gets into trouble, she has the safety plan.  I run through it in my head.  She's with her friend and she's on a bike.  I don't let her walk down to the park because you can't outrun a kidnapper but you can usually get away on a bike.  So, you're on a bike, you're with your friends, you’re here at the local park, not a faraway park.  Yeah, and you have a plan so that you know one of you will leave the other one behind and run or ride for help.  You’re not going to try to be a hero and fight it out at the moment. 

We had to talk through all of that for me to be able to agree to let her go.  I still run through it in my mind: OK you can go to the park that is four blocks away; it's a big park and very popular.  There are enough people that if a child starts screaming someone will hear.  We worked through it – mostly, I worked through my fear – and she’s gone a few times, now.  I always had faith that she could do it, and now my trust is emerging because it has been a good experience for all of us.  I know that without faith, I would never have said yes. 

Pool Time! 

Contrast that story to yesterday’s events.  Two of our children were playing in our little plastic wading pool.  They glanced over to the neighbor’s yard where they have a bigger pool, inflatable, three feet tall, WOW!  They decided that it would be a lot more fun over there, so the toddler asked if she could go next door and play in the pool. My youngest doesn’t know how to swim yet.   

Queue the Dad Talk.  So, my first question was, “Is there an adult over there?”  Yes.  OK, you can go and ask the neighbor if you can come over and play in their pool, but if they say no, don’t argue, come right back.  Honestly, if I was the neighbor with a pool, I don't know that I would want to watch over the other guy’s three-year-old who can’t swim. 

So, after I’ve said yes, and put my faith in their honesty, the older one finds a life jacket for the younger one to wear before they go and ask the neighbor.  I didn’t tell them to do any of that, I just had faith that they would act responsibly whether the answer was yes or no.  The little one had a great time just bobbing around in the life jacket.  I was proud of them both. 

Now, of course, I'm also a worried parent, so I sat in the den with the window open, listening and reading a book for the next two hours but they didn't know that, right?   (Following this admission of parental paranoia, Lynn tells us about the time she cautioned against the children choking on a jawbreaker and was criticized for being overly protective.  Ben’s retort was to bring up the emotional gumption he needs every time the kids go out on the pontoon boat!  He admits to an irrational fear that they will drown even though two of them are swimmers and they all wear life jackets.  Both stories were funnier when we were talking; well, as funny as choking and drowning stories could be.)  As parents, we might try to hide these fears from our kids, because we don’t want to project onto them, and create timid, fearful offspring.     

Back in the Box 

Let’s revisit the concept of boxing someone in.  If we were keeping people in boxes, Ben would have shut down the toddler’s request to go next door immediately.  What three-year-old goes to the neighbor’s house to ask to get in their pool?  Don’t be so weird.  What kind of neighbor lets the toddler go next door and ask?  Do decent people just let their kids wander around and expect the neighbors to be responsible for them?  What is the neighbor going to think of me as a Dad if I let this happen? 

This is an example of social conditioning and Ben realized he didn’t have to succumb to it.  He decided, “What’s the harm, the neighbor can say no.”  So, he let the kids go over there.  They got in the pool.  Must have been OK!  By the way, the same neighbor came over the other day and said, “Hey, I'm gonna take my kids to the park you want me to take yours, too?  He wandered off with a gaggle of kids – so many that they had to take a headcount before they left – to make sure they came back with the same number of kids!  So, it has turned into a fairly decent relationship with them.  Faith in positive intentions.