When I was a child, I loved watching the movie Sound of Music. My parents bought the album and we enjoyed singing along. The album featured a photo of Julie Andrews running up a hill with the Captain’s children all dressed in clothes she sewed from the discarded draperies from her room. As a child, I imagined being part of that large family, dressed in the same clothes, holding hands and running through a meadow of the Alps, singing Doe a deer, a female deer. As I grew a bit older, my favorite scene in the movie became the one where Maria approaches the mansion of the Von Trapp family for the first time, singing with gusto to convince herself of her own ability to serve as a governess for the first time.
“I have confidence in sunshine, I have confidence in rain, I have confidence that Spring will come again, but most of all you see, I have confidence in me!” When clearly, she did not, but she was gathering her courage to trust herself to do a new thing. And singing helped her do that.
What does it mean to be a People of Trust? I think it means that we sing each other into courage to do a new thing. The new thing might be as simple and complicated as trusting yourself for the first time. Or trusting someone else on a deeper level. Being a people of trust means that we sing each other through discouragement, despair, and into the other side of loss where we become willing to reach out our hands to life again. Being a people of trust means that we share ourselves with each other even when our confidence is shaken. That we trust ourselves to heal after betrayal. Maria makes it look easy, but it’s not.