Faith Works 8-4-18

Faith Works 8-4-18

Jeff Gill

 

 

It's just a matter of trust

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Folks are moving in for the week out at the Hartford Fair, and I'm looking forward to leading a non-denominational Christian service at 8:30 tomorrow morning. It's a great way to start a Sunday with the sheep baa-ing and the pigs snorting and all the waking up soundtrack of the fairgrounds.

 

During the week ahead I hope to get out there a number of times. My family went to the Ohio State Fair last week, and it has its attractions, but our local independent fair is special. From the livestock barns to demolition derby (Tuesday night!) to the midway rides, the size and spectacle of it all is embraceable, comprehendible.

 

There's lots to see, many people to meet, plenty of food booths to check out, but you don't walk away feeling as if you've only seen small part of the whole. One lap around the big track, where harness racing and tractor pulls and concerts take place different nights (demolition derby on Tuesday night!) and you can hold the map in your head, and find that concession you walked past that looked tasty but you had just eaten most of a blooming onion.

 

The Hartford Fair may not be perfect, but I have enough of a relationship with it, connections around the grounds, that I trust it as a place I want to go.

 

Trust is a funny thing. You can trust a certain event, a nameplate, a brand of peanut butter, a franchise for hotel service, because of past history, a consistent pattern of service, a relationship you have with even inanimate or intangible objects. Break that pattern – find metal shavings in your preferred label product – and trust is gone, hard to get back. You might have rented cars from one company for years, but a single bad experience, and you're wondering about trying the next counter over.

 

It's well known, and the reason you see them knocking on doors even in the internet age, that people tend to vote for a candidate they've met. Let's be honest, it was maybe two, three minutes tops, and a hearty handshake, but you're rethinking your political affiliation and electoral pattern because you made direct eye contact.

 

Politicians are, however, infamously less trusted these days. Back under Eisenhower and Kennedy, the American public registered 80% trust levels in government to do the right thing. Today, that figure is under 20% . . . and the decline has been fairly steady from Johnson and Nixon down through Bush and Obama. Are politicians less trustworthy today than they were before the space program? I doubt it. Something else has changed.

 

To be honest, I don't trust much. I mistrust medical personnel, wondering if their recommendations are in my best interests, or more oriented around maximizing billing to insurance. I do not trust the phone company, which seems to be testing to find out at what level of irritation I will rip the whole thing out of the wall, rather than trying to serve my communications needs.

 

I don't trust food companies to not be conniving to stuff me full of empty calories and trigger my worst impulses with scientific product development. I don't trust news channels to be discerning about what is "breaking news" and what is "next up in our broadcast." I do not trust, at all, my computer to be a safe place for me to feel secure with my personal information, even though I do everything fiscal in my life on it now. I have to do it, but I don't trust it.

 

We paddle around in a deep ocean of mistrust, feeling connected and related and trustful of very little in our everyday social interactions, in person let alone online. Yet we still have to trust in order to live. Very few encounters happen most days, of any sort, where we have a long history and a solid basis for trust. The repair crew from the utility, the service provider on the other end of the phone call, the stuff you buy at the store ("huh, wonder who makes this? looks good…) all tends to require of us a measure of trust.

 

And in the church, as a minister myself and as someone who works with congregations and church organizations quite often and very broadly, I notice that we're all being bogged down by the weight of mistrust. It's such a general reality for us, this constant state of wary skepticism, that we're hard pressed to drop our guard anywhere. That includes faith based organizations, too.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he believes that the truth is important and valuable and often hard to find. Trust me, you can email him at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.