Learning to Trust Again

Another conversation.

Another rejection.

Another hurt.

I walked away already beginning to build my wall of protection.

"I'll never trust anyone with the truth about my life again."

That's how I would protect myself. That's how I was going to make sure it never happened again.

And that's what I did. For a long time after I told myself I would never trust again, I didn't.

And even when I began to trust people again . . . it didn't come easy. You had to prove to me that I could trust you.

It's almost like I threw some bit of truth about me at you. And then watched to see if you would catch it and what you did with it when you did.

If you caught it and handled it well according to me, then there would be more chances for the same thing to happen.

But if you didn't catch it, or if you didn't do what I expected with it, I wasn't going to trust you with anything again.

I thought it was the way to avoid being hurt again. I thought I was protecting myself.

The truth is . . . I was isolating myself. The longer I lived like this, the higher and thicker the wall I was building became. Only the wall was no longer doing what I thought it would do.

It wasn't protecting me.

It was isolating me. And I was getting lonely.

Something needed to change, but I didn't know how to do it anymore. This was how I'd lived for so long I wasn't sure I knew anything else.

But, then a weekend came. A weekend where God showed me how to trust again. How to let people have a look at what was actually behind that wall. And see the broken mess I really am, instead of the perfect looking place I'd created in front of the wall for others to see.

I still don't have this trust thing perfect. It's scary. I don't want to be hurt again.

That wall I've built is crumbling. It's starting to come down. It's taking time. I've built it so high and so thick. The wall has become a part of me. It doesn't come down easily.

But slowly, surely, God is taking down those bricks. Sometimes they come down one at a time. Sometimes it's like things just explode and whole sections of the wall disappear at once.

It's about freedom. Freedom to be real. Freedom to be honest. Free to be all sort of things I've written about before, but I'm beginning to realize I didn't fully understand, because I wasn't living them.

Freedom.

Trust.

They seem to go together. You can't trust without freedom, and you don't have freedom if you don't trust. It's hard, but worth it. Life will never be fulfilling any other way.