Learning to Trust

God promises that we can trust Him.

Interview with “Catherine”

What is it like to be adopted? Well, I was twelve years old and I was pretty cautious about my new family. They said I could count on them, but I wasn’t so sure. Sometimes I hid food in my room because I wondered if we would have any tomorrow. I hid my true thoughts and feelings too. It took time to decide my family was trustworthy. It’s like that with God. We have to learn to trust Him as well.

For the kids at my orphanage, life had been pretty horrible in some way. For example, some of us had been beaten or left alone without food. At the orphanage, at least we got three small meals a day. Still, we learned speed eating, because otherwise a bigger kid would take the food off our plates. We learned to look out for ourselves, and we learned not to trust anybody.

Then suddenly I was adopted. I was living with new people in a strange place. Everything around me was different, and it felt uncomfortable. My family said, “Trust us.” And I thought, “Yeah, right.” It was a long time before I felt really safe, or confident that there would still be food in the fridge tomorrow and my things weren’t going to be taken away. It took even longer before I believed my family would still love me if I made a mistake or let them down.

Love and trust are easier for kids who grow up in healthy families. But for some of us, life is just too hard and too many people have let us down. We tend to push others away because we’re wounded. Sometimes we make stupid choices. Even then, God is still there, loving us. He doesn’t get mad and give up because we didn’t get it right the first time. He says, “I will never leave you.” It’s His definite promise to us. He’ll be with us and see us through, and He connects us with other people so we can help each other. There isn’t any hurt that He can’t heal. I’m a living example of that.

That’s the God I trust!