I Want to Trust You, but I Don't: Moving Forward When You’re Skeptical of Others, Afraid of What God Will Allow, and Doubtful of Your Own Discernment

by Lysa TerKeurst

This person acts childish. They don’t think through the consequences of their choices. When they get caught, it’s always someone else’s fault. When something hurts them or they don’t get their way, they have temper tantrums or pouting episodes. Examples: They tend not to own the part they contributed to a conflict, saying, “But you . . .” in response. Their regular behavior tracks with someone much younger and less emotionally developed than their actual age and stage of life. They lack self-awareness and seem emotionally tone-deaf. They feel the consequences of their irresponsibility should suddenly become your emergency.

Red Flag #11: Inflated Sense of Self Someone with an inflated sense of self thinks they are so good or important that you could not manage without them. They will hold you hostage to their way of doing things because they believe they know best. In conversation with you, they strategically make sure you know you’re lucky to have them because you’re incapable of doing things as well as they do or that they are the best thing that’s ever happened to you. You’re the problem, and they’re the ultimate solution. Examples: Your coworker refuses to hand off part of a work assignment your boss would like for you to complete, because they don’t think you can do it as well as they can. The worship leader believes they are so uniquely gifted to play guitar and sing at church that they will not release control of their position and let someone else serve in this way too. They sometimes treat you like a child who needs to be bossed around and put in their place. They mistreat you and tell you that you need them because “no one else will ever love you like I do.” They believe they are the better parent and refuse to leave the children in your care until you agree to parent exactly like they do.

Remember: Red flags we ignore don’t typically fix themselves—they just get to be more and more of an issue. Discernment is an intimate way God cares for me, leads me, redirects me, warns me, and reveals things to me that I otherwise may miss on my own. Safety and connection are directly linked to the health of the trust in a relationship. Hyperdesire for safety can mean low levels of connection. Hyperdesire for connection can mean low levels of safety. There is a big difference between blind trust and wise trust.

Reflect: Is your heart making excuses or covering up for someone while trying to quiet down the warnings your brain is sending you? What are you saying outwardly that doesn’t match what you are feeling inwardly? In your own words, what is the difference between blind trust and wise trust? And why is this difference so important? What red flags might you be ignoring in your own relationships today? Pray:

there are some moments that will stay with me forever. I can recall them with such precision that it’s like I’m watching a movie inside my brain. I can tell you the smallest of details without missing a beat. I can feel what I was feeling, especially when the memory is around the unexpected heartbreak of a relationship not being what you once thought it was.

the more intense the emotion is at the time a memory is made, the more likely we are to remember it.

I whispered the only prayer I could: “Jesus, I love You, and You love me. That’s all I’ve got.”

I wish I could go back in time and tell myself that though the trust in this relationship could not be repaired, other relationships where the trust had been broken would be. Some friends would come back. Family members would too. My kids and I would find our way through the grief of loss. And there would come a day when we would start building a new collection of memorable moments. Good ones we didn’t see coming. Indeed, time didn’t get stuck in that season of heartbreak. If there is one thing that’s true about life after loss, it’s that it goes on. And as time goes on, some relationships will go on with us and some will not. Some will not, because they walked away. Some will not, because we made a wise choice to let go. Some will fade away. As seasons of life change, so do some relationships. Some will stay as strong as always. Some will be more complicated and uncertain, because trust has been broken. But perhaps instead of going away, they’ll stay. And you’ll stay. And now the hard work of repair must begin.

Though neither person can see the threads of trust with their eyes, they feel the strength of their connection in their hearts. The stronger the connection, the more assured both people are in the quality of the relationship. It feels so fulfilling to be confident you can count on key people you love. I think it’s one of the greatest feelings of safety to know that, even if everything else in the world falls apart, you still have a few people who will be right there with you.

Promises are sometimes broken. People move away, fade away, pass away, walk away, and turn away. Sometimes there’s broken trust. Other times there’s just a slow erosion of connection, which diminishes trust. There are also sudden disruptions of trust where they say something you can’t unhear, reveal something you can’t unknow, or choose something you can’t go along with.

My personal definition of healthy trust with another person means I can count on them . . . to be who they say they are; to do what they say they are going to do; to show up with care and compassion; to tell the truth; and to use good judgment and biblical wisdom with their decisions.

They show consistency in how they treat you. They aren’t moody, unpredictable, or prone to angry outbursts. They are resourceful. You can count on them to be there for you. They have longevity in their other relationships. They have a good reputation. They are loyal. They treat all people fairly. They are humble enough to admit they are sometimes wrong. They are willing to be held accountable. They don’t dance around issues but instead are straightforward. They are available. They are cooperative. They don’t cut corners or cheat. They respect other people’s property. They respect your time.

High-impact broken trust will take a lot more time and a lot more work to repair. A friend once told me that in Alcoholics Anonymous there’s a saying: “Nine miles in. Nine miles out.” This makes me think of the lengths God went to so we would not suffer for all eternity for our sins. The greatest and most significant rip in all of creation is sin.

The deeper the hurt, the longer the journey will be to recovery. No part of repairing severely broken trust should be done quickly. It takes time and believable behavior to establish a new track record. Don’t rush past that. I want this to be one of the statements you forever carry with you: trust takes time plus believable behavior, along with consistency, so a solid track record can be established.

The thing that makes high-impact broken trust take so long to repair is that you’re not just having to address the hurtful behavior. The character and integrity issues inside the offender are the real driving force for why the behavior occurred in the first place. Trying to talk through the behavior may address the symptoms, but if their driving force isn’t addressed and worked through, it’s going to be difficult to rebuild trust with this person. Their choices are most likely an outward sign indicating inward problems that may require specialized therapy. The betrayal trauma they caused you will likely be the result of undealt-with trauma inside them. Again, my counselor wisely taught me, “What people don’t work out, they act out.” Don’t miss this reality.

But this should never become an excuse for bad behavior. We are responsible to get the help we need so we don’t continue to turn our past hurts into unleashed hurt on the people we do life with. And the person who betrayed you is responsible to get the help they need too.

If the person who betrayed you plays the victim, it’s probably not wise to try to rebuild trust with them until their underlying issues are addressed.

Again, make this list of needs your own, based on the unique circumstances you have experienced and what will help bring security and trust back into your relationship. They need to fully disclose what they did. Details aren’t always helpful (don’t go shopping for pain), but be honest about what you need. Disclosed information is so much better than continuously making discoveries of what else happened. take responsibility for what they’ve done.* seek to understand how this impacted you.* acknowledge what this cost you. welcome your questions and desire for clarification. give you space and time to grieve if you need to without making you feel guilty, annoying, or weak.

ask for forgiveness with a truly repentant heart.* seek ways to make restitution.* establish new patterns in their life that will support them making improvements in this area.* stay consistent, so the new patterns become new operating systems for them and eventually become the natural way of doing things.* follow through on the small things. welcome accountability. practice vulnerability. tend to their deeper issues with a trained professional, if necessary. be willing to go to counseling with you with a heart ready to fully participate. be patient with your triggers and ask what you need for reassurance. realize the greater the hurt, the longer the healing will take and to be willing to give this the time and attention required. be willing to cocreate a new future with you. You’ll both have to accept that a repaired relationship will mean a different relationship. Sometimes that means a stronger relationship than before. And other times, different will feel more like meeting someone for the first time, even though you’ve known them for years.

When someone consistently produces the fruit of the Spirit over time, they become less mysterious. They will feel less risky. Their presence will feel reassuring. Their absence won’t make you afraid of what they might be doing.

Love replaces selfishness. Joy replaces angry outbursts and edgy frustration. Peace replaces demands for control. Patience replaces a quick temper. Kindness replaces rudeness. Goodness replaces selfish ambition. Faithfulness replaces incessant desire for self-gratification. Gentleness replaces a harsh approach. Self-control replaces unrestrained impulses.

the truth or the lack thereof comes to the surface. What’s on the inside of someone always starts to leak out. Even if they seem to be serious this time about reestablishing trust, just a little bit of dishonesty taints their intentions. Even if they tell you several truths and only one lie, deception is like drops of poison—it brings everything they said into question. You will be particularly susceptible to just a little bit of untruth causing big damage when a person is trying to rebuild trust with you.

Friend, all those painful memories of broken trust and hurtful deceptions—half-truths, omitted truths, withheld truths, and straight-up lies—will sometimes make their way into your present-day thoughts. Those betrayals will always be part of your past. Remember, they are just a page or possibly a couple of chapters, but that pain is not your full story. You might have had some moments when you did sink, but now it’s your time to rise. Here’s to better moments and more beautiful memories just waiting to be made.

The other indicator that rebuilding trust wasn’t going to work with this person was their reaction when I would question something that felt off or triggering to me. Sometimes they were patient with my questions. But other times there was animosity that only made my legitimate and understandable suspicions worse. Statements like “Seriously, you’re not over this yet? How much longer am I going to have to answer questions about what I’m doing and where I’ve been? I’m not doing anything wrong. You’re acting crazy.” What I wanted was a statement like “Based on the history of what happened before, of course that made you nervous when I wasn’t where I said I would be. What do you need from me right now for reassurance? Let’s get you the facts you need to feel assured. And let’s make a game plan so this doesn’t happen again.” Without compassion, honesty, humility, and true repentance on the part of the offender, broken trust will most likely stay broken. Trust requires both parties to be willing to work through the process of rebuilding. There will be times we have hoped for a person to be what we want them to be. We’ve waited for them to become trustworthy. We’ve given it our all, but sometimes it’s too much allowance. We wrongly think forgiveness means going back to them and their behavior. We hope. We keep giving them chances. This time they will be someone I can trust. But their actions, over and over, tell us they are not trustworthy. At some point, instead of listening to t...

Broken trust complicates every bit of the parts of love that should be comforting. Skepticism fades in the light of proven truth. You might have had some moments when you did sink, but now it’s your time to rise. God is not honored when you are being treated in dishonorable and deplorable ways. Distrust in situations of continued broken trust is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of great strength.

Considering what the other person did to break trust with you, ask yourself, Is this breach of trust an issue because of their lack of integrity? competence? reliability? care and compassion? good judgment? humility? stability? How would your outlook on life and relationships change if you were to apply the steps on pages 66–67 each time there’s a rip or rupture that needs a repair?

I felt lost in my aloneness. I felt odd, sad, awkward, and like I didn’t quite fit into the life we’d previously built as a couple. Alone doesn’t just happen when there’s no one around. Sometimes alone means you’re carrying the weight of something hard by yourself. People around you are supportive. But they can’t truly understand the gravity of what it feels like to be you. They can’t understand the full weight of being a single parent, taking on all of the bills and other responsibilities that used to be shared.

People genuinely care, but who wants to always hear a sad answer every time they ask, “How are you?” At some point, I just started saying I was good, because every other answer sounded like a pitiful broken record. I knew people weren’t pitying me, but constantly talking about my hardships made me feel small, incapable, and like the sum total of my life was the fallout from this divorce. Plus, some of their suggestions weren’t realistic. And sometimes their thoughts on what I should do felt void of a true understanding of how very broken my heart was. It’s hard to rally and just get on with things when every move you make feels so very risky, like you’re navigating a foreign land with no map and no guide. And with the intense fear of others judging you for not taking their advice.

Sometimes it just feels safer to keep your thoughts to yourself. And when you don’t have someone to process this stuff with, alone means a whole lot of hard thoughts and questions and fears staying all tangled up inside you. If you go to bed with confusing thoughts, you’ll wake up with confusing emoti...

In my case, I didn’t want to get back the person in my past. I wanted to get back the innocent thoughts I once had about my marriage. I wanted to get back the feeling of knowing I had a person. I wanted to get back the feeling that I could trust a person to have my best interests in mind. I wanted to get back the feeling of safety that what this person had invested in our life together was enough that they’d protect our vision because they wanted it as much as I did.

When we have our trust broken, it’s tempting to replace trust with control. Alone doesn’t just happen when there’s no one around. Sometimes alone means you’re carrying the weight of something hard by yourself. It’s hard to rally and just get on with things when every move you make feels so very risky. It can be scary to trade the predictability we want for the risk of relationships with no guarantees. Sometimes when you get shockingly bad results from past decisions, it can make you hesitant to trust that you’re capable of making wise future decisions.

What my mind can’t understand, my heart tends to distrust. When I can’t understand what God is allowing or I feel confident He will do something and it doesn’t happen, doubts can easily turn into distrust.

will have to trust God with what I cannot see. I will have to trust God with what I do not know. I will have to trust God with what I fear. I will have to trust God with what I want and, even more so, with what I do not want. I might have to bear what I desperately do not want to bear. I may have to face what I desperately do not want to face. I may have to go through what I desperately do not want to go through.

Another way to understand straight is that God is able to see into the future and to make sense of it. My understanding will never allow for this. So I must submit to Him the way I think things should go. And then trust Him enough to walk in His way.

I’ve felt like I had more faith in my fears coming true than in God coming through for me.

When life pretty much looks like I expect it to and feels relatively good, I am tempted to get satisfied with where I am and not continue to grow deeper and deeper in my faith. Or if I’m just letting others sprinkle some biblical wisdom on me through their sermons and podcasts but I’m not digging into God’s Word and going deeper in my application, then my roots will be shallow. That all seems okay until a storm comes. And storms always eventually do come.

Sometimes the pain of today feels like a declaration of what my whole future will look like. These thoughts don’t seem like that big of a deal one by one—just like you would never look at an ant and think it could possibly take down a huge oak tree. Please hear me: it’s not wrong to have these thoughts, but it is dangerous to get consumed by them. To get hollowed out by them. To get even more vulnerable to the storms around us because of thoughts that erode our only true stability. Each doubt we have will cause us to either press into God or pull away from Him.

don’t always want to leave room for the mystery of God. I want faith to operate with the speed of my eyesight. Like when I say, “I hope my keys are on the counter,” and all I have to do is look at the counter for physical confirmation that the keys are there. I am desperate for visible evidence, so faith doesn’t feel so risky.

What if a big part of our exhaustion and anxiety around hard circumstances is that we are constantly trying to remove faith from our relationship with Him? When we trust people, we are looking for evidence we can see with our physical eyes that trusting them is safe. Faith doesn’t work that way. Faith will always make us anxious and unsure unless we are confident in the goodness of God. If we stand firm on His goodness and know everything He allows is somehow flowing from that goodness, then we will have a lot less fear in trusting Him. Faith in God means to be assured of His goodness even when what He allows doesn’t feel good, seem good, or look good right now. Faith is our confidence in what we hope for. Faith is our assurance about what we do not see.

What if I wrote down each thought of distrust so they don’t stay all jumbled up inside me as a big feeling of fear and anxiety? I fear trusting God with ______________, because He allowed ______________ to happen in my past. I fear trusting God with ______________, because if He doesn’t come through for me in the way I want Him to, I will suffer ______________. I fear trusting God with ______________, because I don’t think God will really ______________. I fear trusting God with the suffering and heartbreak I’ll go through if ______________ happens, and I fear I won’t ever ______________. What if expressing my true feelings to God is a beautiful act of trusting God?

Try writing a little more. Fill in these blanks: I sometimes doubt that God will ______________, because ______________. I feel ______________ right now because God is (or isn’t) doing ______________. What I really want to see happen is ______________. And if this doesn’t happen, it will cause me to feel ______________. I don’t want to feel ______________, because I don’t think I could handle ______________. What if I looked at Scripture in a new way? Too often, I read God’s Word to try to make sense of what I’m facing. But what if the Scriptures are really inviting us to see in part how God sees things?

Suffering can shrink our perspective. When we feel pain, we can become hyperfocused on fixing the source of the pain. We can think the only good move God could make is to take away the pain. And if that’s all we are looking for, then we will become more frustrated and distrustful of God.

When I read this verse, I see suffering isn’t only this awful pain. Suffering is also a way to ______________________________________________________. “Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance.” (Romans 5:3) “When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.” (Isaiah 43:2) “I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong and take heart and wait for the LORD.” (Psalm 27:13–14) “The lowly he sets on high, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.” (Job 5:11) “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.” (John 16:20)

Write down some ways you’ve personally experienced the goodness of God in the past. I felt God’s goodness when He ______________. Just the fact that I am ______________ now is evidence of His goodness when I went through ______________. I sometimes forget that ______________ never would have happened in my life apart from the goodness of God. What if I don’t trust God? And what if I do?

What my mind can’t understand, my heart tends to distrust. Sometimes I can have more faith in my fears coming true than in God coming through for me. There will always be a gap between what we see and the full story God knows. If I don’t feel like God is coming through for me today, it’s so hard to trust that surrendering my future to Him is a safe thing to do. Suffering doesn’t mean that trusting God is too risky.

Identify some of the reasons you might resist trusting God enough to surrender the outcomes and your plans for how your life will go. Be honest with yourself: Do you see God as trustworthy? How has this chapter helped you better process this? What did the story of the ants and the tree reveal to you about “ants” in your own life? List some of the simple pleasures that serve as evidence of God’s goodness to you. Which ones are your favorites? Pray: Father God, I confess that I often attach my willingness to trust You to how my life is going at the moment. When things are going my way, it’s easy to believe You are trustworthy. But when things fall apart, my trust in You wavers as I struggle to understand what You are doing. In the truth of my quiet moments and time in Your Word, I know You are good even when my life isn’t. Today I choose to trust You with what I cannot see, do not know, do not want, and am afraid of. I surrender to You the outcomes and plans I have for the way my life should go. In Jesus’ name, amen.

In the thick of the hurt and pain and shock of broken trust, the lack of tangible evidence that things will eventually be made right causes big questions to rattle about inside me. Is this world even set up in a way where there’s motivation for people to be trustworthy? Or is it only set up for people to get what they want, no matter the hurt they cause others? Am I setting myself up for more pain when I trust people? If people seem to get away with what they do, then is everyone eventually going to be so self-preserving and self-serving that only fools dare to trust? It can feel like if I’m a trusting, giving, and honest person, then I’m going to get hurt. But if I succumb to looking out only for myself and trusting no one, I’ll live a very lonely existence.

Just because these doubts are where our thoughts are today doesn’t mean this is where our thoughts should stay. We must keep fighting to make sure our first words filled with anguish aren’t our last words filled with bitterness. And the best way to fight through our toughest questions about God’s justice is to create space in our thoughts for more of God’s perspective.

I don’t need a friend to jump in and tell me that what I’ve been through justifies retaliation. I need a friend who will say this is really hard and acknowledge the depth of unfairness that seems to be at play here. But then I need her to remind me that the absence of justice isn’t evidence of the absence of God. I want her to acknowledge my struggle but not jump into my spiraling thoughts with me. Oh, and if she’s there in person and brings a slice of chocolate cake with her, that’s good too. Her presence helps me feel God’s presence.

But another thought came to me: The beauty of the ocean comes with the reality of the tide. I started repeating this sentence over and over until there was more to it.