“I always worry a little bit when I’m not with them,” Megan said about our two boys. “I trust you and know you’ll take care of them when I’m not around, but still, I worry.”
Meg and I had this conversation just the other night. She had spent a night away recently for work. It was just us boys for the evening. All went well. I mean, they’re still alive. That’s a positive, right?
We’re big proponents of the it’s not babysitting if they’re your kids philosophy when it comes to dad handling the kiddos. But let’s be honest, my wife is certainly the more responsible of the two of us. If nothing else, her superpower is remembering all the things. Mine seems to be forgetfulness.
But I didn’t take offense. Of course she worries. That’s what moms do. That’s what parents do. I worry about the little guys when I’m not around, too. But I wasn’t offended because I know my wife trusts me. She proves it over and over. Because she takes it a step further than just saying the words “I trust you.” She actually entrusts things to me that are important to her. In fact, her boys are her whole world. I know how deeply she trusts me because she entrusts me with them.
Trust (as a verb) means “to place confidence in” something. Entrust means “to commit to another with confidence.” It’s a subtle difference, but I think it has huge implications.
You can trust someone. You can believe they’re capable, and honest, and responsible, and even good. But entrusting asks something more. It asks you to put something you care about in their hands.
Trust is one of those things that’s hard earned but easily lost. There’s no scientific formula for it. The only way I know to build it is by doing the hard work of being trustworthy. And the surest way I know to show that you trust someone is to entrust them with something that matters.
I trust a bunch of people in my life. But there are very few things that are important to me that I actually entrust to others. Maybe it’s about control. Maybe it’s fear. Whatever the case may be, it’s easy to get stuck in the same old routines. It’s not quite if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, but it’s pretty dang close.
And I guess that’s the whole thing. We don’t entrust things to people because we’re not quite ready to make that commitment.
It’s not that we don’t have confidence in people. We just don’t quite have enough confidence to act, to actually commit.