Have a Little Faith in Me

No matter how in-control we believe ourselves to be, the fact is, we are still essentially clay, wholly at the mercy of the Artist's hand. Can we trust the Master Potter to make this clay into something beautiful?

A teacher asked her class of fifth-graders to write about their personal heroes. One little girl brought her essay home and showed it to her parents. Her father was flattered to discover that his daughter had chosen him.

"Why did you pick me?" he asked proudly.

"Because I couldn't spell DeCaprio," the little girl replied.

How many of us make choices in life, not because they are our "first picks," but because we're afraid to pick them or don't know how to enact our picks.

The top business guru in the United States, Tom Peters, argues that the missing pick or what he calls "The Missing X-Factor" in corporate America is "Trust" (see his Liberation Management [1997]). In a world where "relationships really are all there is," says Peters, our inability to "trust" each other is the Achilles' heel in our current national prosperity and economic "boom."

Evidence of our "mistrust" of one another is everywhere. A few years ago a significant symbol of mistrust was erected in our nation's ...