The Speed of Trust

When I went to the Guilford College graduation in May, I expected to like the commencement speaker, Mandy Cohen, then the former Secretary of the NC Department of Health and Human Services who oversaw NC’s Covid response. I did not expect to carry away a thought I’m still chewing on. Speaking on lessons learned during pandemic, Mandy said, “Change happens at the speed of trust.” Transparency, integrity and working to build relationships are essential to creating trust. Holding myriad press conferences outlining the best information we had to date was one way she and her department were transparent. Since NC was ranked second in overall Covid response in the nation (just after Vermont, a state with a much smaller population), I’d say she succeeded! And I hope she can successfully take these lessons into CDC-land.

“Change happens at the speed of trust” could be posted in schools, churches and the halls of government as a reminder that true change isn’t ordered, coerced, shamed, blamed, guilted or legislated into being. Fear, shame and coercion might make people toe the line, but nothing changes inwardly. I think about my own reluctance to step into any forms of on-line banking. How do we trust what we don’t understand and don’t know/trust what’s on the other end? As scams proliferate, a healthy distrust seems quite reasonable. As I walk into this with baby steps—I finally trust my bank more than I distrust people who pull checks out of mailboxes—I understand better why others balk at new technologies of one kind and another. Zoom has opened quite a few new doors for me, but I wouldn’t entertain it before COVID, when necessity proved it trustworthy.

Think about how we try to change one another. However we justify it in our own minds, our moral superiority—if we’re using the word should, we believe we know better and are better than the one(s) we’re shoulding on—moves us at the speed of concrete. Moral superiority is really only good for making us feel better while keeping the whole situation stuck. We try to change one another with judgment, condescension and often contempt. Contempt, as I like to remind myself, is in the hate family of words. Those of us who believe love is all powerful need to be reminded of ways we operate out of motives counter to it.

I have cringe moments when I think about how, in the early 80’s, we would angrily insist people use inclusive language for men and women. We were taught in school that “man” refers to all humankind, and “he” is the correct pronoun if there is not a specific antecedent. We were not wrong that language matters. How much further we might have come, though, had we extended the benefit of the doubt—believing until proved otherwise that the person was not being willfully against us, but just hadn’t had the opportunity to ask questions or hear how another feels about it (without blame, shame, guilt or anger/rage). My fear of asking gender questions today feels like punishment for my own obtuseness back in the day. Change happens at the speed of trust. I am merely ignorant, not malevolent. I don’t want to be ridiculed or shunned for ignorance that simple conversations—and a little trust-building—might ameliorate. Conversations where trust is offered and built, not trampled right out of the gate. The content is different, and the dynamics are the same. And these dynamics never get us what we really want. And never bring true change.

I remember when we moved back to NC the first time, I asked God if I should go to denominational minister’s meetings. And if so, how did I speak as a feminist? The almost immediate answer I heard surprised me. Simply show up. Go without agenda and just be there. I kept showing up, except the few years we again lived out of state, until the split was forced a few years ago. To this day I don’t know what difference it made, but I trust the faithfulness mattered somehow. We build relationships. We do our best to be transparent with one another and to stay in the conversation. There were times it was really hard to be one of a few women (and sometimes the only one) in the room.

“Change happens at the speed of trust.” So any time we find ourselves being impatient with a person or a situation, we’re not creating trust. Any time we’re insisting on the way we see things being the way. We might be right in a situation, but even if we are, nothing will change if we can’t also build trust from those around us. What good is being right about, for example, climate chaos, if nobody can hear us? Like me going to all those meetings where I simply showed up, how are we putting in the effort to build trust and learning to be with and love those who see the world differently than we do? How can we be trustworthy for others?

And if change happens at the speed of trust, what difference might it make in our lives to stand in more and more trust of the One who brought us into being and who sustains our lives? How might our relationships change if we could trust we have everything we need in this moment? How might the world change for the better if we trusted we really aren’t supposed to be in control of everything?