“Every one who comes to Me and hears My words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep, and laid the foundation upon rock; and when a flood arose, the stream broke against that house, and could not shake it, because it had been well built.But he who hears and does not do them is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation; against which the stream broke, and immediately it fell, and the ruin of that house was great.”
Luke 6:47-49
Trust is based on experience, either a person’s own experience or the experience of someone else they know. If a person just met someone for the first time, they would not trust them. Because trust takes time to build. The exception to that is trusting someone based on the recommendation of someone who is already trusted. For instance, if someone I trust makes a recommendation of a doctor I do not know but that they have worked with, I would trust their recommendation and put my trust in an unknown doctor. People also tend to trust professionals that they don’t know. For instance, someone drops off their child for school on the first day, entrusting their care and safety to an unknown teacher. But even this is based on experience. The child may have had other teachers, and the parent remembers their teachers from their school years.
There are building blocks to any relationship. One does not “love at first sight,” that is something of the movies. One may “lust” at first sight, but love takes time to build, and there are necessary building blocks in order for that to happen. The first building block is respect and safety. Before any relationship is built, one has to feel safe, they have to know they won’t be harmed.
Once a person feels safe, the next step is to find something you share in common with someone else, something to do together you both enjoy. That might be talking, or a shared interest like sports. We’re not just talking romantic relationships here, this is how any relationship is built. If an employee is going to trust a boss, or a boss trust and employee, that is built through the shared experience of working together.
The third step in a relationship is building attraction, again this is not just romantic attraction. One finds joy in working together.
The fourth step is trust. Trust, as previously mentioned, is based on experience. Having shared camaraderie or worked together for some time, trust begins to develop. You know what the other person is going to do, they start to think like you, and you start to think like them. You begin to count on them. And you know that when you are not around, they aren’t going to do something to sabotage the relationship.
The fifth step then becomes love. Love involves two specific things, sacrifice and joy. Love is when we take from ourselves and project onto someone else. We don’t take from ourselves and project back onto ourselves, that would be narcissism. The projecting onto someone else is sacrifice. We take our time, as an example, and give that to someone else. We take something we have and that we value and we sacrifice that for someone else. However, the sacrifice is made not with angst, or guilt or expectation. It is made with joy. We don’t keep score of what we sacrificed, we don’t let others know what we sacrificed. We just offer, and we do it with joy.
Which leads to the sixth step in a relationship, which is vulnerability or intimacy. We’re not talking about sexual intimacy, but rather a place where thoughts and feelings are expressed freely and deeply. Being able to confide in someone, knowing they won’t gossip or break our confidence is “intimate.”
Some relationships we have are purely transactional. For instance, I see the same tellers at the bank I go to. I give them a deposit, they put it in my account. I trust them to do this job, and that trust is based on their years of getting the deposits correct. But I can’t say I love them or am vulnerable around them. This is because the relationship is purely transactional.
We need more than transactional relationships in life. Everyone needs someone to confide in, to feel free and comfortable around, where words don’t have to be measured, where struggles can be kept confidential. And it takes time and skill to build these kinds of relationships.
When a misstep is taken in a relationship, one has to go back sometimes to the beginning block, and reestablish safety, build back trust and let love happen again.
Our relationship with God works in a similar fashion. In order to love God, one has to respect Him, and know that they are respected by Him. One has to spend time with God, one has to sacrifice with joy. And only after we love God are we able to become vulnerable and intimate with Him, to pour out our hearts in prayer, to come to Him in repentance, to open up to Him in confession, to completely trust in Him even when life gets hard. When God disappoints us, and He will at times, we might have to take a step back and re-establish trust and joy. This relationship all tilts on spending time with God in prayer and worship and sacrificing with joy. If someone rarely prays or worships, the relationship is probably more transactional than loving—we “transact” with God a couple of times a year. When one succumbs to the same temptation all the time, one has to question is there really a sacrifice for God? When one has been really knocked down in life, one might think that God is unsafe, and the relationship will need to be built back again.
The Bible verses chose for this relationship are about laying a foundation that will survive a storm. We know that a pyramid has a much bigger base than a pinnacle. And for a building, the foundation is thicker than the floors above. It is critical that in order to build up a relationship, the foundation has to be solid, whether this relationship is with someone else or with God. It takes time to build. One cannot love God if he or she hasn’t taken the time to know Him. Just like a person meeting someone and becoming physically intimate with them almost immediately doesn’t work out because they are putting on a roof without a foundation or walls to support it. In being called to love, God and one another, there are necessary steps in building a relationship, and all of those steps start with safety and then time before moving up to trust, love and vulnerability.
Lord, thank You for the relationships I have (mention someone of them). Help me to form strong and health relationships. Help me to see people I can trust. Give me wisdom so that I can be a trusted friend. Help me to avoid gossiping about things people confide in me. May I respect others always and have them feel safe around me. Help me to see those who I have things in common with. Strengthen my relationship with You, may I come to You with joy, with trust and with faith. Thank You Lord for the relationship I share with You. Amen.
A relationship is built with specific blocks assembled in a specific order—respect/safety, commonality (finding things in common), attraction, trust, love (marked by sacrifice made with joy), and finally intimacy/vulnerability.
