A Matter of Trust

I have a dark secret to share and I'm just going to out myself.

I am a Survivor junkie.  

You know, the "reality" show where contestants compete to outwit, outplay, and outlast one another.  They usually begin with 16 to 20 individuals that form separate teams that perform in challenges with the losing team voting off a member.  This goes until the players dwindle enough to merge into one group where they begin to compete on an individual basis and continue to vote one another off.

I've watched every season for the past fourteen years on CBS.

Sometimes it can be kind of a train wreck of personalities. CBS seems to find success with putting some fairly unstable people in the mix in order to cause some fireworks - like when Russell Hantz burned another player's socks in the campfire while he was asleep just to sow dissension among the other players. 

Usually you have a lot of backstabbing in this game.  If you've ever watched the show, you know this is the case because people make alliances and then routinely break them in order to further their own part in the game.  It would be different if you could take your whole alliance to the end but the game is not constructed that way and tough choices have to be made.

The interesting thing is how people continue to be surprised when they are blindsided.  It is the mark of each season that someone completely trusted their alliance only to be voted out.

I'm not sure how you would trust anyone going into the game, knowing the nature of what happens in each episode.  I understand being hurt in the first few seasons but it seems like by now, if you are planning on participating in the show, you would have watched a few other seasons before you go out to a remote location to spend 30 days in the jungle with strangers all competing for the same prize.

I think that most people want to trust others.  It may be in our nature as social animals. We are hard-wired to trust one another - especially those we like.  When we feel a betrayal, it gets to the core of our human condition.

What does it mean for us to trust in God?  We believe that God will provide and at the same time we believe that God expects us to use our resources and will not hand us anything we are capable of doing ourselves.

We trust that God wants what is best for us.  

We may believe that God will allow us to fail in order to grow from it.

In these moments, do we ever lose our trust in God?

This Sunday, we'll see how Abram (before he started going by Abraham) trusted God to move his family to an unknown land and then wavered in his trust when he ended up in Egypt (as recorded in Genesis 12:1-20).  

You may have your own trust issues that you are working out.  If you come to worship this Sunday, I will do my best not to blindside you!

In Christ,

Sam