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The righteous will see and fear; they will laugh at you, saying, “Here now is the man who did not make God his stronghold but trusted in his great wealth and grew strong by destroying others!” But I am like an olive tree flourishing in the house of God; I trust in God’s unfailing love for ever and ever. (Psalm 52:7-8)

Where is your trust rooted?  In God?  Or in your ability to provide for yourself? 

The obvious answer is that our trust is rooted in God, of course.  But I’m not sure it’s always quite so simple.  It takes a lot of introspection and questioning of our motives and heart before God and his word as found in passages like this to begin to suss out where we really put the weight of our lives. 

The conversation on power and privilege that has sparked to life recently has a lot to say about these culturally invisible places that we perhaps unknowingly put our trust.

Wealth, for instance, is a huge source of power and privilege for many who might be reading this.  When we speak about wealth as a privilege, it means that wealth is a special right or advantage that belongs only to certain people.  The poor would not have the privilege of wealth.  Wealth is not a right: it is a privilege which some have and others do not. 

The fact that some person has wealth means that many tasks and activities of life become much easier for that person simply because they have access to the funds to enact their desires.  They are therefore, privileged.  And when they use that privilege of wealth to enact their desires, they are exercising power—which is very simply the ability to exert force or influence. 

Hopefully this is enough of a set of definitions to make it clear that all of us are using our privilege and power in whatever form we might have it all the time, but in case not, here’s another example. 

I was privileged to grow up in an English-speaking context, making me a native speaker of the dominate global language and enabling me therefore to enact my will and desires in the world much more easily than someone for whom English is a second language.  I use this power every day.  The fact that I am male, white, married, educated, young and healthy, economically well off—all of these are aspects of the privilege I hold and the power I am therefore able to exert.

Once you begin to see the privilege you have and the ways that you use that privilege as power to accomplish the things you seek to do in a day, the next question becomes—how much do you rely on that power and privilege?  To what extent do you entrust yourselves to your own power and privilege—your own ability to accomplish what you want to in the world?

A good illustration might be the massive Roger’s outage this past weekend.  All of a sudden, many of us were unable to use the privileged power of communication or of our wealth to influence the world around us to accomplish what we wanted because the phones had lost connectivity, the internet was out, and the Interact payment system was down.  The privilege of our digital world was removed from us for a day, and we felt, well, powerless!  How much have we entrusted ourselves to the power of our smartphones and digital infrastructure?  How much to our wealth?  Our other bits of power and privilege? 

The call of the Christian faith and psalms is to place our trust firstly and firmly in the Lord.  Not in our great wealth.  Not in our ability to exert power.  So each day we have work to do to discern exactly where it is that our trust resides really.  In our own power and privilege?  Or in the Lord?  It’s a good spiritual question for times of daily prayer before God. 

The promise and reminder, of course, is that the Lord is trustworthy, indeed, he is ultimately the only worthy place to place our trust.