Faith and Trust

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Faith, the complete trust or confidence in something that not necessarily can or needs to be proven, and trust, the firm belief in something ~ are two similar, yet in some sense vastly different concepts...

Faith is often related to religion; having ‘a faith’ then says one believes in God. Having faith relies on a feeling of confidence that things will work out ~ even when we ourselves are not in a position to see our way through the situation we find ourselves in, we may have faith that somehow, someway, things will come to a conclusion that will work for us, or even be beneficial for us.

We could even have faith that through Divine intervention we can turn a certain situation, or even our lives around.

And in a sense, that says it all. We have faith in something that is outside of ourselves. Be it the Divine, the goodness of others, or just the other party involved doing the right thing ~ in each case we believe something outside of ourselves will help turn things around. Make our lives better.

So what about trust?
When we trust, we have the firm belief in, for instance an ability or the strength of something or someone. Trusting is a much more mundane thing to do...

Funny thing is that neither faith nor trust requires factual proof that that which you put your faith in actually exists, or that which you trust really is true.

As far as faith goes ~ well, you got to have faith!

But when we start looking at trust, things get a bit more interesting.
We can trust the strength or reliability of say a car. We can trust that another person is speaking the truth, or will do the job well.
Yet, as no factual proof is needed to put our trust into someone or something ~ how do we know who or what we can trust? How do we know our trust will not be betrayed?

In order to effectively trust the right people and the right things, we ultimately have to trust ourselves.
We have to trust ourselves to know when things are not adding up, when something is ‘fishy’, when there is more to the story than the other person is telling us... And as these are often not based on factual information, it comes down to ‘gut feel’, or intuition.
And then we have to trust our ‘gut feel’ or intuition to the point that we actually take steps based on this feeling we have inside. These steps may be something like doing research ~ in other words looking up the facts of what is at hand ~ they can also be the actual decision making process, like the decision to go left instead of right...

It is a good thing to have faith.
And when you trust, trust yourself first!
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