The Difference Between TRUST and FAITH

What do you trust?

You may trust your partner, your best friend, or even yourself. When you trust someone, usually it’s someone you have gotten to know over a long period of time. When you trust someone, you are comfortable being vulnerable around them.

Who do you have faith in?

What does this question even mean? When we hear the word “faith” many of us think of religion. We think of people who have faith in God despite not having any concrete evidence that he exists. Faith is often seen as “woo-woo”, while trust is seen as logical and evidence-based.

Trust and faith may appear the same on the outside, but they couldn’t be further apart. While both have a necessary part in our lives, one is rooted in FEAR, while the other is rooted in LOVE. Because they have different roots, they have drastically different impacts on our lives. Keep reading to find out which is which…

Trust… Does it Protect us or Hurt us?

Think about how you feel after someone breaks your trust.

You feel uncomfortable around them. You show them only your surface level self. Maybe you even pretend to be someone you’re not in order to shield your real identity even more. If they have done something severe to break your trust, you may even fear them. You see all their actions through the filter of mistrust and suspision. No matter what they do, you assume they have negative intentions. Why does this happen?

It happens because our previous image of them has been destroyed. We once assumed that they always had the best intentions, so we didn’t need to have our guard up around them. We could relax, be vulnerable, and not think so much. This is a fundamental part of a healthy relationship. When our trust for another person has been shattered, we feel the need to protect ourselves around them. It was once believed that they would protect us and accept us, but this belief has been uprooted.

In many cases, we have good reasons for mistrusting someone. They have shown evidence of being a different person than who we thought they were. As humans, we don’t want to be hurt, physically or emotionally. It’s only natural that we shut down and go into self-defense mode when we feel like we are in danger.

With that being said, trust has it’s place in keeping us safe as well as removing harmful people from our lives.

Trust engages our LOGICAL side, forcing us to look at the evidence that is in front of us. If someone/something has hurt us more times than not, our rational mind says: “We aren’t going to trust this person because the odds are that they will hurt us again.”

What Happens when we Mistrust LIFE

Now, you have thought about the effects of mistrusting a person, but what happens when we don’t trust LIFE?

Mistrusting life is a fundamental fear of the unknown. This sense of fear and paranoia underlies every relationship we have, including our relationship with ourselves. Even if someone has proven to be trustworthy, we may still mistrust them because of our deep rooted mistrust of life.

The interesting thing about our relationship with life is that it makes perfect sense to mistrust it. Life is unpredictable. It throws things at us that we don’t understand and there is no “logic” to the way it acts.

Our logical mind hates this because it wants things to be predictable. Think about it. If we could predict everything that happens in our lives, we could avoid the pain, the heartbreak, and the failure. Everything could go exactly like how we want it to.

This is not reality though. Life cannot ever be predictable. By nature, it is complete chaos. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It’s because of this unpredictability that we are able to experience intense love, joy, and curiosity.

This shows how trust is rooted in fear. Fear comes from a desire to control, but an inability to do so. This is why we fear other people who may hurt us and we fear life, which could completely turn upside down at any moment.

What is Faith?

Faith, unlike trust, is rooted in an acceptance of the unknown. We can have faith in something without trusting it at all. This is because faith surpasses our own desires and fears.

When we have faith in something, we are essentially acknowledging that it COULD hurt us, but choosing to love it and lean into it anyways. Instead of closing ourselves off and becoming cold, we open up even more and welcome the unpredictability. We accept the fact that we can’t control it, which instantly gets rid of our fear.

All humans desire to surrender and let go in some form. The issue is that many of us go about this by trying to control everything. We feel like if we control everything, then we will finally be able to trust everything. Once we trust everything, then there will be no more stress and no more pain. Unconsciously, we are all playing out this story.

The suffering stops when you choose to have faith in life. You don’t need to trust everything. All you need to do is have faith that wherever life takes you, you will always end up exactly where you need to be. And if you genuinely believe this to be true, it will be true. It will also open you up to having the deepest, most expansive experiences of your entire life.

The Cost of Not Having Faith

Most of us live our lives completely numb on the inside. We are numb because we don’t have faith in anything or anyone. The external world is seen as a cruel place because of the suffering that exists all around us. Our fragile hearts cannot handle all of this, so our mind creates a barrier that seperates our hearts from the rawness of life. This barrier seems like it protects us, but does it really?

When we refuse to allow our hearts to experience real love and pain, we lose our humanity. We become completely disconnected from the flow of life. The flow of pain and joy, love and heartbreak, gain and loss. This disconnection has become an epidemic that affects most people on this earth in some way or another.

The solution to all of it is faith. Complete, unwavering faith in ourselves and the universe. Open yourself up, even if it’s bit by bit. Experience life in all it’s realness.

Rediscover your soft and innocent nature that has been covered up by protection and hardness.