In God We Trust?

“In God We Trust” simply has not gotten us very far. Practically every time you turn around you hear about someone cheating, lying, scheming and manipulating. Why? They are concerned about their own self-interest rather than the interest of the “whole.” In order for our society to ever truly “evolve” we need to stop focusing so much on our own self-interest and start focusing on what is in the best interest of everyone.

What is in the best interest of everyone? Being able to trust each other. How can we start trusting each other? By making the individual decision to be honest. If you are reading this and telling yourself that you are honest. Think again. Start paying attention to the embellishments and half-truths that are coming out of your mouth. It requires a lot of self-discipline and self-awareness to be honest. But it is work well worth doing.

Who is God anyway? My personal belief is that “God” is the collective conscience…. the sum of all individuals. This makes sense to me. Perhaps there is a little “Jesus” in each one of us. In order to find the “Jesus” in each of us we need to start taking a look at ourselves and identify how we are contributing to the problem. Are we taking responsibility for our own behavior or are we blaming others? Are we consciously making an effort to be honest or are we taking the easy way out? It is much more empowering to start working on yourself rather than the helplessness you feel by praying to God. Sure… continue praying but you can be working on yourself in the meantime. You can work on being kind, honest, considerate, thoughtful, and sensitive to other’s feelings. Everyone could be doing something to work on themselves.

I have been having a pretty difficult time for the past couple of years so one Sunday I decided to go to church and get some “guidance.” I left completely upset and frustrated. The priest stood before the congregation and said that he read an article in the paper that he thought would be helpful to the congregation. Then he said, “so of course I snipped it out of the paper really quick before any of the other priests could get a hold of it.” The whole congregation started laughing. I didn’t think it was funny. There I was in desperation going to church on Sunday to try and find some solace and some guidance and the last thing I needed to hear was the priest making jokes about his own greed. If he thought that article would be helpful to people, he should have made copies for the other priests so they could also share it with their congregation. The priest was not really concerned about helping people, he was concerned about getting the glory and getting a laugh. To make matters worse when I got in my car to leave nobody would give me the courtesy of letting me back out of my parking space. Everyone was just concerned about themselves and getting out of there.

I like the phrase, “In God We Trust.” But, what it means to me is that “in mankind I trust” because I believe that all people are basically good and that with the proper guidance they will, in fact, “step up the plate.”

If you have questions or comments about this article, please share them with me at beth@empathylessons.com.

- Elizabeth Fink, September 22, 2008