Humans are designed to radically Trust.
From our first cry, we call out to be held and comforted and above all, we call out to be loved. It is as if love is our breath. It is our Life. Can we truly live without it?
It is almost maddening and definitely saddening in the moments when, even before we had words to describe the exquisite pain of separation from those we considered our love/lifelines, we screamed out into the vastness of everything wondering if one moment of their absence was the precursor to an infinity of loneliness.
Screaming for attention, many of us unconsciously repelled the ones we wanted to be the closest.
Not enough time. Watched by people who didn’t really know you. Trying to provide for our material needs, our emotional and psychological needs are forsaken. And we hold our breath just waiting, hoping, and–if we had the language for it–praying for the emptiness to be filled.
And then, something miraculous happens. Our survival instincts kick in. Some cocktail of hormones and adrenaline and whatever biological brain juices, that God cooked up in the Creation laboratory, come together and we’re intoxicated by a new superpower that, we don’t know until we take a freshman psych class, is called projection. BLADOWEE! It is like magic.
All of a sudden, the powerlessness we felt from the misplaced trust we put in these people who refuse to live up to our expectations is gone. We’ve taken it back. And now, we are projecting it onto a stuffed animal, a red balloon, a cartoon character, or whatever we can because we just have to trust something. Trust is in our DNA.
Unfortunately, like any drug, the more frequently you use it, the stronger doses you need to get your fix. And so you upgrade from inanimate or imaginary objects and move on to other people who essentially YOU empower to give you YOU. It can be anyone from a teacher to a crush to membership in a group like some institution or some nation or—don’t make me say it—a political savior. You are going to misplace that trust into something. Because trusting and loving yourself is what psychos do. Am I right ?
It’s just an impulse to put yourself into something that can never live up to your expectations. “It’s normal.” Though, it still leaves you feeling just a teeny weeny bit icky even in the best circumstances doesn’t it? But, you ignore it like any committed person would.
And then, as a sign of loyalty to whoever or whatever you project onto, you’ll distrust anything you imagine is its opposite because you fear that if the thing you projected onto thinks you’re disloyal it will throw all the YOU you poured into it away and you’ll be back to emptiness.
So, you try to guarantee staying in this thing’s good graces by auditioning 24/7–even when it isn’t around—trying to prove you’re worthy of it giving you back just a squirt of all the love and trust you put it into it. The only problem is TRUST OFFERS NO GUARANTEES!
Like a gambler sitting in front of a slot machine that he just put his mortgage payment in hoping to hit big, those chemicals have you all juiced up swearing, “Any minute now I’m going to get back everything I projected into this thing and more.” Sadly that feeling that you think is Blessed Assurance is called Gambler’s Fallacy. And you got it bad.
You think it’s faith. But you’re just high and in denial. And you’d rather stay that way than consider the possibility that you might lose this gamble. Because if this thing doesn’t pay out, guess what?
You’re going to eventually—probably at “Rock Bottom”—have to look into that mirror and reflect on all that projection you’ve been doing and admit what too few of us are willing or even able to do without help since this thing started before we could speak—“I did this to myself even though I didn’t realize it. And now only I can get me out of it.”
If you go to this link, https://itsallinme.com/2024/03/03/trusting-the-process/, you’ll find a poem that I wrote a few days ago born out of some reflections I engaged in while feeling pretty sick. There’s also a video that I made that digs into the idea of trust, especially as it relates to trusting in God. The main message though is the notion that TRUST–by its very nature–OFFERS NO GUARANTEES WHATSOEVER.
I go to some extremes to make this point. But, I do so because I see how bad we’re struggling as a society right now. And while I know that trying to find the right folks to blame and get rid of them sounds like a workable strategy for the planet, TRUST ME when I say, that is not going to work. What the world needs right now is as many of us getting sober and getting off these survival brain juices and reclaiming what we came into the world with–infinite capacity to trust and love, the unspoken knowledge that we deserve to receive it, and the desire to give out trust and love to the world.
The Roofless Church 
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