No, really, it’s not.
If you want to be trusted — if you want to build confidence, and if you
want to establish a lasting relationship — you need to first express the truth in words, then you need to embody it. Or the other way round, if you
like. But when we want to send a message and have it understood, our testimony
and the evidence to back it up must go together. One or the other alone will
not cut it.
That first aspect of
communication is expressed in scripture this way: “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word.”
Right. Verbal expression is critical in building trust.
He Never Said He Loved Me …
How many times do you hear a child complain
bitterly that “my father never said he loved me.” Often it’s at dad’s funeral,
and by then it’s too late. In some cases, sadly, it’s because dad genuinely didn’t
care. In others, perhaps, dad was not naturally given to verbalizing affection
and incorrectly assumed his message was getting across without using his words.
But actions on their own are ambiguous,
even though many people believe they communicate everything required. As one
forty-something woman puts it:
“I heard it said once, ‘I shouldn’t have to say “I love you”; my parents never told me, and my kids should already know.”
Should they? Even apparent
kindnesses can spring from all sorts of motives.
Motives and Actions
The guy one desk over in
my Grade 9 English class kept trying to initiate conversations with me. “Cool,”
I thought. “Maybe we’ll be friends.” I hadn’t many at the time. As it turned
out, he was trying to sell a drum kit. He needed a couple hundred bucks and he
needed it fast. When it turned out I wasn’t interested, it turned out neither
was he.
Oh well. Lesson
learned. People can be nice for lots of reasons, not all of which are
immediately apparent. Ask the saleswoman if she “loves” the ladies she’s trying
to sell her product to. Of course not. But she’s sure nice: “That looks
absolutely FANTASTIC on you! Very flattering.” Meanwhile the prospective
purchaser looks like nine miles of bad road ...
That serpent in the
Garden of Eden was a perfectly pleasant fellow too, come to think of it.
He was full of all kinds of helpful tips.
Actions don’t tell you
much apart from an honest expression of intent.
Evidence and Ambiguity
Happily, the fact that
people’s motives are not always obvious from their actions doesn’t mean we are
always doomed to guess wrong. “I think he really likes me,” says the teenage
girl, correctly adding up the sum of her boyfriend’s acts toward her. Likewise,
one can draw certain limited conclusions about God in the absence of revelation. But doing so is risky, and those conclusions are faulty more often than not. We may quite correctly observe that God “makes his sun rise
on the evil and on the good,” but it would be a mistake to conclude that God has no preference how we behave.
Real love is a complex
thing. It doesn’t always present in the way its recipients might expect.
It is only the accompanying statement of intent (and sometimes the passage of
time) that makes love fully intelligible. In a good parent/child relationship, for
instance, it’s not outrageous for a verbal expression of ongoing commitment and
goodwill to accompany painful correction. In fact, it’s quite appropriate — otherwise punishment may be thought to be merely an arbitrary expression of parental
pique. Not so: “Those
whom I love, I reprove and discipline.”
Back in the day, when my dad would call me
into his study and start into his “This is going to hurt me more than it
hurts you” routine, my first thought was that he was a bit confused. Today,
as a father myself, I totally get it.
A Model for Building Trust
But even the most
apparently-heartfelt expressions of goodwill are not much use without consistent evidence
to back them up. The violent, guilt-riddled spouse who repeats “I love you”
over and over again as you’re applying the bag of frozen peas to your black eye
is going to have his work cut out for him selling that story.
If we want a model for
building trust, we need to look carefully at our Heavenly Father’s example. He
speaks, and he acts. His words explain his actions, and his actions provide the
evidence for his words. “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” he declares to Israel, “therefore
I have continued my faithfulness to you.”
“God shows his love for us in that while we were
still sinners, Christ died for us.” “God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days
he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed
the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world.”
Words and actions. Testimony and evidence.
“I’d Still Like to Hear It”
Not all of us are naturally verbal, and many
of us in our upbringing have not experienced love expressed with words on a
regular basis. Some have incorrectly concluded that aspect of communication is
unimportant.
The father in the story insisted, “I
shouldn’t have to say ‘I love you’. My kids should already know.” His
daughter replied, “I'd still like to hear it.” Most people would.
God hasn’t let us down on that score. We
shouldn’t let each other down either.
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