Faith Gives Permission to Live and Love Fully

Faith gives us permission to live and love fully. As it takes the sun’s rays to open the petals of the flower, so it takes faith to open the human heart. To live and love fully requires a leap of faith in positive outcomes.

To love another, you have to risk believing and trusting in that person, which means to risk becoming vulnerable to sorrow as well as joy. By so doing, you let the other into your heart, in order for the fragile, living connection of caring to grow between you.

Faith has two interwoven components, belief and trust. Belief is the objective component, and trust the subjective. Thus, you believe certain things about your loved ones, things concerning their character and behavior. Based partly on these convictions, you also risk trusting them. You let them into your heart; you disclose yourself to them; you render yourself vulnerable to them.

Psychologist Erik Erikson says we largely determine whether to trust on the basis of our family of origin experience in our first year or so of life. That private decision on our part establishes for us the trustworthiness of other persons and life itself. While we can still learn to trust after these first years, trusting gets more difficult as we age, and the longer we go without a successful love relationship.

We enter into new love relationships already with a history and attitude toward trust. For some trusting comes easy; for others, it seems well-nigh impossible. Due both to our history and personality, our nurture and nature, we trust others in differing degrees and rates of speed. Being either too trusting or too cynical, however, will eventually get us into trouble.

Trust is the last thing to be developed in a love relationship, and the first thing to be lost should the relationship go awry. This is as true for men as for women, for there are no significant differences between the sexes regarding the capacity to trust. Yet it is more difficult for men to permit themselves to become vulnerable to other men, than for women to open themselves to other women. A man showing vulnerability to another man, can render him weaker to the other. This is not true between men and women, perhaps because men don’t usually compare themselves competitively women.

When I have counseled a married couple, whose relationship was wounded, I told them that if they were going to succeed at reconstructing their marriage, they would have to rebuild their faith in one another. And that can only happen in stages. It’s like beginning all over again, but with the major difference that they have pain between them to resolve, degree by degree, just like healing the body after it has been wounded.

I told them, “If you say you will do something, or be somewhere at a certain time, you’d better be true to your word.” Their marriage had entered a probationary period, wherein they would have to prove themselves to one another – maybe even to themselves.

When you have faith in another, you believe that they truly care for you and do not want to hurt you; that they are loyal, honest, consistent, confidential, committed, understanding of and sensitive to, you. You trust that the other is there for and with you, and will not easily reject or abandon you. There’s no greater risk, nor greater satisfaction, than such heart to heart connection. And of course, such faith and trust must go both ways.