TRUST

Trust is such a simple word, but it has the strength to hold personal relationships together, or to command the loyalty of a nation’s people.

We learn to trust our lives to our parents as children, and as we get older we add complete strangers whether they are doctors, military officers, police, airline pilots, or the engineers who design our bridges and skyscrapers for example.
When we trust, we are saying that we believe the “trusted” individual to be being honest, forthright, reliable, and will not cheat or betray us. Sometimes trust must be earned, but more often or not, we implicitly trust people simply because that’s what we have been taught at home and are used to.

Funny thing about trust, though. Once it has been betrayed, it is virtually impossible to gain it back 100%.
We can try to forget, but there will always be at least that sliver of doubt and what a traumatic and emotionally painful event that can be.
Thus we must make sure to closely guard the trust bestowed on us by others and hope that others will know us and deem us to be trustworthy.

We know that there are those who prey on the trust of others. The business man who deceives trusting clients, those who fabricate the trust for personal gain and , the cheater who betrays a lover; these are all people who take advantage of the trust others put into them and break that trust for personal financial interests or temporary satisfaction.
They have sold a piece of their soul to get there.
This is not what Freemasons do.
One cannot be a true Freemason if he behaves like this toward others, particularly toward Brother Freemasons.
Being Freemasons, trust is ultimately the reason we take the obligations we do, and commit to a life of spiritual living & growth.It is part of standing uprightly as a Freemason, something we swore to do when we took our obligation as an Entered Apprentice.
When we are recognized by our fellow Brothers as Freemasons, they must know that we understand and appreciate the promises that we made and we are living by those valuable tenets of our Institution (the same ones they made) and so we can be fully trusted.
And as long as we live by those tenets, we can never find ourselves to be proven untrustworthy.
Taken in part from an article titled. Trustworthy By Wor. John L. Ciccotelli