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A Doorway Into Life

C Wess Daniels

May 17, 2023 • 6 min read

On Change, Trust, and Patience

Dear Friends,

Life has been humming along here in Greensboro. This past Saturday we celebrated commencement which is always a glorious occasion at Guilford (I will tell you a little more of that below). An update on my dad: he is still making progress and signs are more hopeful over the last couple of days. Thank you for your continued thoughts and prayers.

Thanks for reading this week and every week.

Below you will find a short reflection on Change and Trust, and an article, “A Doorway Into Life,” I wrote with two friends and colleagues here at Guilford about the college farm, a food and faith class we teach together, and the importance of trust and patience. I hope you’ll find both reflections work together nicely. This article was published in Friends Journal this month. The link below will take you to that webpage.

C. Wess Daniels

Haw River Watershed (Greensboro, NC)

A Few Photos from Guilford’s Graduation

The Speed of Change

Besides some of my favorite people graduating this year during Guilford “happiest day of the year (commencement),” one major highlight was meeting Dr. Mandy Cohen, who was one of our honorary degree recipients and commencement speaker. For those of you outside NC, Dr. Cohen was the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services during the pandemic.

She and her team did an incredible job which led to lives saved during the pandemic. North Carolina was ranked second in the country in terms of response, vaccination rates, lowest mortality rates, etc. Besides just appreciating what Cohen did in NC, she said something during her speech that I’ve been thinking a lot about. In her talk, she addressed the political challenges her team faced with rolling out the necessary supports to make sure people were safe. She said the main thing she learned through all of it was that “change moves at the speed of trust.”

Whether you are working in the public sector, non-profit work, education, ministry, creative work, or anything else, the same is true: change moves at the speed of trust. We cannot—and will not—move together if we do not first trust one another. Yet, so often we try to forge ahead and feel that the community building is too time consuming, too hard, or not worth our efforts if we can just force people instead (I have personally witnessed the fallout of this kind of “change management”). What if instead we saw change, at least the kind you and I desire, as not even possible without prioritizing deep trust work?

Dr. Cohen gave a few ideas about how she and her team worked on this. She talked about the importance of transparency and integrity. Those are necessary in any community and in all leadership, and yet, I find that it can be so easy to fool ourselves into thinking we are being transparent and acting with integrity even when truth is something drastically different.

I found a clue in something else she said. She talked about the countless PSAs she did and the question and answer forums she participated in. Cohen said that (eventually) she found a way to see even the most extreme questions as genuine signs that trust was not yet there and that they needed to continue to keep finding ways to build.

Following the pandemic many of our relationships feel even more fractured than they already were. I’ve recently written about some of this in, Friendship As A Spiritual Practice, because I see how much we need friends who can be honest with us and help us see ourselves, name our gifts, support us in difficulties, and help us point our growing edges. But before we can get there, we need something simpler: the low-threshold activities that can forge, repair, and rebuild our connections with each other. We’re so quick to write each other off. Move on too quickly because of how busy we are. Treat each person fleeting, as though they’re just a follower on social Media. It’s easy to sign someone up for a committee without first knowing the names of their children, sharing a meal together, finding a common passion, or laughing together. I make a deeper connections with someone over a cup of coffee, a story, maybe a vulnerability. Yet we tend to instrumentalize each other, reaching out if we need/want something. Or fearing the risk of rejection, we don’t reach out at all. This doesn’t build the kind of trust we need in order to rebuild for community. It might help keep the tasks moving in the short term, but it won’t bring about lasting change, friendship, and the trust we want and need.

I turn this to you: What have you seen? What is working? Where are their signs of life in rebuilding trust and helping communities that continue to foster change where you are, no matter how simple it might at first seem?

Queries (feel free to respond in the comments below or in the Nurse Log Chat):

What have you done or seen done that has built trust in your communities, organizations, families?
What are the complex to the simple things help build the kind of trust needed for change to happen?