Trusting God does not mean trusting everyone

Trusting God does not mean trusting every person or every situation. You get on a bus without knowing if the driver is good at their job. You board a plane without knowing the pilots. You eat food cooked by someone you have never met. You enter a building without checking if it is safe and stable. You start a relationship without knowing what the other person will do tomorrow. We constantly live in situations that we can neither fully check nor control. And at some point, you might reach a place where you feel you cannot trust anyone anymore.

Too much has happened, and too much is still happening. I remember this past year: a very painful breakup; being on the 20th floor when the earthquake happened in Bangkok; seeing that buildings were structurally damaged; many strange situations with people who lied to me; drivers who caused accidents, and dead bodies.

At some point, your body and your mind begin to react differently than you are used to. And it is no longer just a decision in your head. It is a reaction from your body, even before you can decide what to think. And then you are not sure what is right or wrong anymore. You start to lose trust in your own perception: Is this really a warning sign from my body? Or is it a protection mode trying to keep me safe? And why is this happening right NOW?

And once again, things become impossible to explain—unless you go into full psychological detective mode and dig even deeper into how everything is connected. But just because you have more logical answers and a better understanding, that does not mean they solve the problem.

And who is responsible for you when you are an adult, in a foreign country, alone in an apartment that is far too big for you, with new friends who do not know the real depth of who you are yet, and others who cannot handle it—while you feel like you are breaking, but you still have to keep a life and a business running? That was the question I eventually had to face. Because I could no longer carry this burden alone, but there was no one coming to save me.

Of course, people tried to help, and I am incredibly grateful for that — but it only helped up to a certain point, and then I was alone again. That certain point did not reach the depth I needed. And it was not as if I had never believed in something beyond myself before. I had. For a long time, I had trusted in something bigger than myself — the universe, a higher power, something I could not quite name. And for a long time, that had somehow worked for me. Until suddenly it didn't anymore. It felt as if the whole idea of life that I had trusted in was losing its hold. The concept of the "universe," which I had once put all my trust into — and which seemed to have worked — suddenly could not carry the weight of what was happening.

And I could not just force myself to believe in it more strongly, just because I needed it to work. If I was going to trust something bigger than myself with the things I could not carry, I wanted to know what — or Whom — I was actually trusting. And why in the first place? Because for a moment, I was afraid: What if there was NOTHING at all? And in that moment, life felt completely meaningless.

What if people were only telling each other that there was something bigger out there, and we only passed this idea along because it made life a little sweeter, a little easier to bear? But who really knew if any of it was true? So I started to dig deeper. Not because the thought of a higher power was new to me, but because I began to question what I had always called "the universe." It did not hold me anymore the way I needed it to in this situation. And at some point, I started talking to God, hoping that Something — or Someone — would hear me and let me know.

And He did. After I experienced something that I could not explain in any human way, something completely unexpected happened that brought me into contact with Jesus. So yes: He came to save me.

I also remember sitting on a scooter one day and thinking: Well, I never signed a contract to be here on this earth and know how to take full responsibility for everything that happens — for things whose reasons I sometimes don't even fully understand — along with all the consequences. And if neither I nor any other human being can ultimately guarantee my safety or carry the weight of everything that is out of my control, then I have to dig deeper and ask: Where do we come from? Who sends us here?

And if God really is our Father and our provider, then surely I can trust Him with the things my human nature is too weak for. Which—ouch—was hard to admit, because I was not used to seeing myself as too weak for anything.

I took a leap of faith and tried to believe it—supported by all the other signs that had brought me to a point where I felt I at least had to try. Not because God is responsible for everything people choose to do. But because I am not responsible for holding the whole world together and healing it either—especially not when I am already struggling to hold my own life together and function without losing my humanity. There are things I can control, and things I cannot control. That was hard for me to accept, and for a while, it even made me doubt God's goodness. 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 the burden of having to carry everything that might happen to me or to others. So I tried it, and I gave Him what I could not carry myself. I still did all my work—and there was a lot of it—but the weight did not crush me anymore, because I had help and I could feel it. I was no longer going through everything alone—and not with some impersonal universe either, but with Someone I could truly get to know. So yes, we enter situations that we do not fully trust.

But our peace should not come from trusting situations, buildings, or even other people. It does not come from believing that every person involved will do everything right. Our peace can come from knowing that God is there, wherever we are. And that definitely does not mean: "Nothing bad can happen because God will stop it." It simply means that He is there, wherever we go and whatever happens. He is already there before we arrive. He is with us while we are there. And He will still be there when we leave. I do not know what will happen.

I have no control over the person driving the bus. I do not control what happens on the streets where I walk. I have no control over whether every person I meet has good intentions. I do not control whether every building I enter will stand forever. But I trust God – in every situation that I cannot control. And the more I experienced and felt how He works, the more I began to love Him. Until at some point, another question came up: Why should I trust Him with what happens to me, but not with how He tells me to live?

Why should I trust that He carries me through situations I cannot control, but assume that He wants to keep something good from me when He tells me to stay away from something? And that gave me the desire to take up my cross and follow Him. Not because I owed Him anything for being there. But because I had begun to love the One I had learned I could trust – always. And the more I followed Him, the clearer it became to me that it was never about punishment or just rules. So many things that I once saw as limits and punishment now started to look like protection and love.

Protection from things that slowly destroy us, even if they look or feel like pleasure for a while. And not just look like protection – because of course I still had thoughts like: What if all of this is just manipulation by the elites to keep us small? I questioned it. But then, following Him truly brought my heart back to life. 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 to trust the One who gave them.

I began to see that the things I thought would make my life smaller actually made me freer. And I think this is one of the biggest changes in me: At first, I trusted God because I really needed Him. Then I began to follow Him because I loved the One I had learned to trust. And the more I followed Him, the clearer it became to me that trusting God does not mean trusting that everything around me is safe. It means trusting that I am nowhere without Him.

So, no. I do not trust the bus driver. And I never really did.

I trust God while I sit on the bus. And for most of my life, I was already doing that – I just did not know who He was.