Trust and Trials

This writer, when much younger, now 87 was not only a writer for several secular-professional-religious magazines (8 years editor of Southern Journal) but received much joy as a speaker.

One of my most memorable eulogies, the funeral of the first graduate of NC State University who died at the age of 100. I remember saying at this great man’s funeral, “A tree can be best measured when it is laying down”. Laying in front of us, at his church, most people there have forgotten the marvelous life this man had led… His many contributions to the community, because, most of us, are spent out of the spotlight in old age.

The most rewarding factor you can give to any other human being is the glorious evaluation that he or she was a person of trust. It is so rare to find trustworthy people anymore: politics, socially, in business, anywhere. Why would anyone hire an employee who could not be trusted? And yet, from many years of personal experience as a blind man, no one would believe how much of my property has walked out of my house. In fact, not just employees who you hire and pay to do things for you, how much trust do you invest in your automobile dealer, your doctor, your lawyer, even members of your own family. There is so much hatred among members of one’s family, over just stuff, when there is a death and it is time to divide the estate. children who sat with their feet under the same table often fail to ever speak to one another again over the division of “things”: fully knowing that at their own death, they will leave this world with empty hands. Usually, the smaller the estate, the more animosity is involved. In the community where I was reared, I so remember one family who owned just a patch of land, large enough for a house to sit on. But, not one of the survivors speaks to one another because of the division of the small amount of money for the worn out house.

One of the greatest misfortunes of my life, working as I did to become a doctor, then under the “Draft Doctor’s Law” of the Korean war, I served my country and those who needed my care returning as a totally blind veteran, 100% disabled. Like so many veterans, we trusted our government to take care of our disabled body. The VA never gave me a white cane, yet, there are thousands making the “big bucks” who never served a day, and who lived the good life… Attending sports events watching millionaires on the playing fields, watching millionaires play instruments in concerts, financially able to eat in the very best places. Of course many give some money for good causes “do-gooders”, off the top, tax deductible. It is like taking a tax deduction for money you give to your church. If you are truly giving to God, why a tax deduction? God is the perfect bookkeeper, the perfect scorekeeper.

But, God only expects trust from us. Most people I know want God to trust them more than they want God to trust them. We simply do not want to trust enough to be different from the unbeliever. We do not trust enough to spend our resources, only world steeped in need. More human beings are killed each year by mosquitoes than military forces killed in both WW1 and WW2. Then we wonder why only 4% of millennials have anything to do with the church. The mosquito-malaria problem should have been wiped out years ago. In my world travels, I saw native women walking for miles with jugs just to find drinking water. Wells for water, every village of the world should have been established years ago.

In England, Buckingham Palace, one old woman and one old man living in one old house have 75 bathrooms. I think about this every day of my life when I remember how few human beings in eastern North Carolina had any side plumbing, including my own family. Many of the diseases we found in practice could be directly attributed to this one public health problem… People needing to go to the bathroom; bad weather, ruining their bodies by putting going to the bathroom off. It is easy for us to see the creation of disease on the outside of the body but just think of what happens on the inside when toxicity destroys the normal homeostasis of life.

You will not be the first atheist or unbeliever I have said this too. There is not much you can trust in this present world, even family, friends, associates, certainly not your government. Your government loves you like birds love “roadkill”, what they can get from you. This is the reason I tell everyone to not stumble at foot of the cross. RATHER, cling to the cross, your only place of real trust.