flibberty-gibberty

So, what’s the difference between trust and faith, apart from that trust is a verb and faith is a noun? The answer is that you can trust in things that you can see, but for things that you can’t see, you need to have faith.

What kind of things can we see? Well, that would be anything physical. This actually ties in nicely with the fact that trust in a verb – a ‘doing’ word (as they used to tell me at school). You can only do things with physical objects – things you can see or touch. And as I say this, I know that it’s not really true. You can quash an emotion, make a resolution or have a thought.

But anyway – what about the other stuff? What about the things that we cannot see? These would be things like virtues, values, qualities, thoughts, memories and other such attributes. I was going to say that you can’t do things to these non-things, that you can only describe them rather than interact with them. But that’s not quite true, is it?

Mind you, if we’re talking about having faith (a noun) in things – isn’t that a form of interaction? Are virtues, values, qualities, thoughts and memories the sort of thing we have faith in, regardless as to whether we can do things with them too? Yeah – that works for me. We only need ‘trust’ when it comes to physical objects, but we can have both ‘trust’ and ‘faith’ where non-physical things are concerned.

Actually, I don’t know what I’m going into all this stuff for. The only thing I want to say really is that the only ‘thing’ you can really trust (or have faith in, if you fell for any of that stuff I was just spouting) is God. All the rest is just flibberty-gibberty stuff that just comes and goes and so can’t be relied on.