Trusting God Does Not Mean Trusting Everyone

Trusting God does not mean trusting every person or every circumstance. You get on a bus without knowing whether the driver is competent. You board a plane without knowing the pilots. You eat food prepared by someone you’ve never met. You walk into a building without inspecting its structure. You enter relationships without knowing what another person will do tomorrow. We constantly live inside circumstances we cannot fully verify or control. And at some point, you might get to a place where you feel like you don’t trust anyone anymore.

Too many things have happened and too many things are happening. I remember last year: a very painful breakup, being on the 20th floor when the earthquake in Bangkok happened, seeing that the structures of buildings had been damaged, many weird situations with people lying to me, drivers crashing and dead bodies.

At some point, your body and your mind start reacting differently than you were used to. And it becomes not only a choice in your mind anymore, but a reaction of your body before you can even decide what to think. And then you’re unsure about what’s right or wrong now. You start to lose trust in your own perception: Is this actually a warning sign from my body? Or is it a protection mode that wants to guard me? And why is it coming NOW?

And again, things start becoming unexplainable — unless you turn into full detective mode about psychology and dig even deeper into how everything is connected. But just because you have more logical answers and a better understanding doesn’t mean they solve the problem.

And who’s responsible for you when you’re an adult in a foreign country, alone in an apartment that’s too big for only yourself, with new friends who don’t really know the whole depth of you and others who can’t handle it, whilst you feel like you’re breaking apart but still have a life and a business to run? This was the question I was faced with at some point. Because I wasn’t able to carry that load alone anymore, but there was no one coming to rescue me.

Of course, people tried to help, and I’m super grateful — but it only helped to a certain point, and then I was alone there again. That certain point didn’t reach the depth I needed. And it wasn’t like I had never believed in anything beyond myself before. I had. For a long time, I had trusted in something bigger than me — the universe, a higher power, something I couldn’t fully name. And for a long time, that had somehow worked for me. Until suddenly, it didn’t anymore. It felt like the whole concept of life I had trusted in was losing its grip. The idea of “the universe” that I had once put all my trust in — and that had seemed to work — suddenly wasn’t able to hold the weight of what was happening anymore.

And I couldn’t just force myself to believe in it harder because I needed it to work. If I was going to trust something beyond myself with the things I couldn’t carry, I wanted to know what — or Who — I was actually trusting. And why was I trusting it in the first place?
Because for a moment, I was afraid: What if there was NOTHING? And for that moment, life felt absolutely pointless.

What if people were just telling each other that there was something bigger out there and we keep spreading the idea because it makes life feel a little sweeter, a little easier to carry? But who knew if any of it was actually true? So I started digging deeper. Not because the idea of a higher power was new to me, but because I had started questioning what I had been calling “the universe.” It wasn’t holding me anymore in the way I needed to be held in that situation. And at some point, I started talking to God, hoping Something — or Someone — would hear me and let me know.

And He did. After experiencing something that didn’t feel humanly explainable to me, something completely unexpected happened that introduced me to Jesus. So yeah, He came to rescue me.

Also I still remember one day sitting on a scooter and thinking: Well, I did not sign a contract to be here on this planet Earth knowing how to take full responsibility for everything that’s happening — things I sometimes don’t even fully understand the reasons for yet — and all the consequences. And if neither I nor another human being can ultimately guarantee my safety or carry the weight of everything that is outside my control, I need to dig deeper and ask: Where are we coming from? Who sends us here?

And if God really is our Father and our Provider, then surely I can entrust to Him what my human nature is too weak to carry. Which — ouch — was hard to admit, because I wasn’t used to thinking of myself as too weak to carry something.

I took a leap of faith and tried believing it, based on all the other evidence that had already brought me to a point where I felt like I had to at least give it a try. Not because God is responsible for everything humans choose to do. But because I am not responsible for holding the entire world together and healing it either — and certainly not when I’m already struggling to hold my own life together and function whilst not losing my humanity in the process. There are things I can control and things I can’t — which was hard for me to accept and even made me question the goodness of God for a while. There are things I am responsible for and things I am not.

And somewhere along the way, I had confused taking responsibility for my life with carrying the burden of everything that could possibly keep happening to me or to others. So I gave it a try and surrendered to Him what I couldn’t carry myself. I still did all my work — and a lot of it — but the burden didn’t bury me anymore, because I had and I felt help. I wasn’t going through everything alone anymore — and also not with some impersonal universe, but with Someone I could actually get to know. So yes, we enter situations we don’t fully trust.

But our peace shouldn’t come from trusting situations, buildings or even other people. It doesn’t come from believing that every human involved will do everything right. Our peace can come from knowing that wherever we are, God is there too. And it never means that “nothing bad can happen because God will prevent it.” It just means that wherever we go and whatever happens, He is there too. He is already there before we arrive. He is with us while we’re there. And He will still be there when we leave. I don’t know what will happen.

I don’t control the person driving the bus. I don’t control what’s happening on the streets I’m walking on. I don’t control whether every person I meet has good intentions. I don’t control whether every building I enter will stand forever. But I trust God with myself inside every situation I cannot control. And the more I experienced and felt how He works, the more I started to love Him. Until at some point another question came up: Why would I trust Him with what happens to me, but not with how He tells me to live?

Why would I trust Him to carry me through situations I cannot control, but assume that when He tells me to stay away from something, He wants to take something good away from me? And that made me want to pick up my cross and follow Him. Not because I needed to repay Him for being there. But because I had started to love the One I had learned I could trust — always. And the more I followed Him, the more I realized that He has never been about punishment or simply forbidding things. So many things I once understood as restrictions and punishment started looking like protection and love.

Protection from things that slowly destroy us even when, for a while, they look or feel like pleasure. And not only looking like protection — because, of course, I still had thoughts like: What if it’s all manipulation by the elites to keep us small? I questioned it. But then following Him actually started making my heart rise again. And that changed something. Because there is a difference between blindly accepting rules because someone tells you to and experiencing for yourself what happens when you start trusting the One who gave them.

I started seeing that the things I thought would make my life smaller were actually making me freer. And I think that’s one of the biggest things that changed for me: I first trusted God because I really needed Him. Then I started following Him because I loved the One I had learned I could trust. And the more I followed Him, the more I realized that trusting God does not mean trusting that everything around me will be safe. It means trusting that I am never anywhere without Him.

So no. I don’t trust the bus driver. And I never really did.

I trust God while I’m sitting on the bus. And for most of my life, I already did — I just didn’t know who He was.