Classic Observer--Orig date 2-1-2006------TRUST

(Ed. note. The following is a rough recollection of an actual sermon delivered recently in Evansville.)

Recently one of our parish members was driving on HWY 14 to Madison. He was having trouble concentrating. Everything in his life was going wrong. His wife was sick. He had just lost his job. The kids seemed to be struggling in school. Things were looking pretty bleak. The energy bills were due to arrive next week. Dispair was deep.

Just then a Mercedes sedan pulled around him quickly. On the license plate was one word -------TRUST.

Wow he thought. Suddenly he felt that the Lord was speaking directly to him. "Well," he thought, "I guess this is just how the Lord works."

As the days passed by, things got better for him. He kept thinking of the word TRUST and he seemed to have one good day followed by another.

He had just assumed that it was a minister who had passed him in the Mercedes. There was a vague wonder though as to what kind of minister had a Mercedes coupe. So....he sent for a DMV and low and behold the car belonged to a TRUST Officer of a local bank.

One day on a whim, he stopped in the bank and spoke to the trust officer and laughed and related how important the license plate had been to him. How it had been a big comfort at a very vulnerable moment.

A week or so later a package arrived in the mail. On opening it, he found one license plate with the word TRUST on it. The loan officer simply said that he wanted him to have it as a keepsake since it seemed to mean so much to him.

In a lot of ways, we associate TRUST with religion, but the real deal is that it is imbedded in every aspect of our lives. Like every time we drive and hope that fellow driver follows the rules. O.K. there is HOPE in the case of some of you that have teenage drivers. But mostly it is TRUST. Even in banking it is about TRUST. It is an essential for our lives.