Full Confidence

             Her husband has full confidence in her and lacks nothing of value.  She brings him good, not harm, all the days of her life. (Proverbs 31:11-12)

When I’ve written about this passage before, I noted that Lemuel’s mother was giving him advice about the most important human relationship in her son’s life. If it had been written to a daughter, the pronouns would have changed.  So, granting that I am single, my husband can not have full confidence in me, but that’s immaterial. If I were married, would my husband have confidence in me? Am I the sort of person that others can have confidence in? Do I do those around me good, not harm?

If we do not practice being someone in whom others can place confidence, adding value, and bringing good and not harm in the moment by moment and person by person, it’s not likely that we will be someone in whom anyone can place confidence. We simply can’t be “perfection” for one person in the whole world and no one else. One person may be the most important, but who we really are leaks out past the masks we wear. It can’t be that restricted.

Of course, my temptations with verses like this are to put myself on the examination table and minutely evaluate… What exactly does it take for someone to be able to have confidence in me? And all the while I’m analyzing, I’m not being. And with the temptation to examine comes the temptation to “all or nothing” thinking. If I was not perfect, I’m garbage or worse. These get in the way of being a person in whom someone can have confidence because you can’t do good and not harm if you’ve got a magnifying glass in your hand and you’re trying to figure out how badly you failed this time. To do good, you need to be looking at the person you’re doing good to/for and at the good you’re trying to do.

And the confirmation will come, possibly in the strangest way. You see, when someone has confidence in you and trusts that you’re going to do them good, you can stop being the focus of their attention. If you can be trusted, you don’t have to be monitored. They don’t have to step in or check up on you as often.

I must chuckle, because I seem to have boxes on the brain over the past few days. One example of someone(s) having confidence in me is that the folks where I work know, or learn quickly, that I can be trusted to fold boxes. In fact, my boss can rest assured that unless someone has already gotten boxes for me, when he walks through the door, I’ll say, “I’m singing my song,” or I’ll move my fingers like I’m conducting a little orchestra, telling him he needs to bring boxes over for me to fold. Granted, there are times when my boss has pointed to the stack of unfolded boxes I hadn’t noticed, but I don’t think that actually dims his level of confidence.

Now, one last difficulty to face. We’re all failures. We all have weaknesses. I know with a great degree of confidence that while I will clear the plow-wake at the end of my driveway quickly after the plows go through, no one else on my street is going to go out at 11 pm, or 3 am, or whenever, to do so. Sometimes, our confidence must be realistic. It would be wrong for me to lack confidence in my neighbors because they didn’t clear the plow-wakes every time I did.