These times are tough on us. Where there is chaos, lack of order, there is pain, uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, and disloyalty. The experience can make us feel shock, disbelief and confusion about what is healthy and “whole”.

Our hearts cry out and we can easily get stuck in a sense of helplessness. What can help us in these difficult and confusing times? Maybe we need to look again at something that got lost in the last years due to the constant crisis mode: trust and hope.

Trust is the basis of all healthy relationships. But how is trust developed when we feel insecure, when we have to go through changes we did not initiate or want?

Change can feel like loss. We actually have little control over many changes and losses, for example loss of a loved one, a job, but also loss of identity, purpose, wellbeing and finances. Those losses erode our sense of trust.

Psychologists say that in order to develop trust one has to experience reliability and connection, as well as secure attachment in early childhood. If young children feel they are truly taken care of and loved, they can more easily develop trust in their later life. If not, it is harder for them to develop trust and more challenging to experience lasting and fulfilling relationships.

It’s perhaps helpful to “name it to tame it”. What exactly am I feeling? For each of us that can be very different.

However, that is not the end of the story. It can take a little more work and sometimes even risking “blind trust” to learn to trust and take the risk of being vulnerable.

Jesus went to those who would probably been in the category of “I have difficulties with trusting others”. Matthew, the tax collector, was one of those (Matthew 9). He was short of stature, and people did not like him, and they had their reasons for that.

He was collaborating with the Roman occupiers, and he overcharged the travellers and people who wanted to take their goods into the town. Because he did not have much trust, he had to make sure to have enough to not rely on others.

Expressed in modern terms, he thought having a full bank account would give him security and independence, maybe even freedom and happiness.

When he heard about Jesus coming into his town, he wanted to see that man everybody talked about, one who healed the sick, preached God’s Kingdom to the poor, and had a new and unconventional approach to life. But people did not like Matthew and blocked him from the roadside. His money did not help him. Matthew could not see anything, so he climbed a tree to get a glimpse of Jesus.

Then the unexpected happened. Jesus approached him, called him by name and invited himself into Matthew’s house. Of all the people, Jesus chose Matthew, the despised tax collector, the little man without friends, the greedy, rich crook.

Jesus does not say anything critical to him. He does not pay attention to others around him, who self-righteously must have been upset about that. They may have asked: why doesn’t Jesus go to the local rabbi, or the pious Pharisees or Scribes, or at least to a decent family home?

Matthew surely did not show any religious behaviour before his encounter with Jesus. However, Jesus saw the human being Matthew, even with all his shortcomings, and he saw his needs.

He wanted to relate to Matthew, whom God had created like all those others. God had created Matthew to love him, too. But something went wrong in Matthew’s life, and he tried to hide these deficits behind his tough business behaviour and poker face. He was attempting to compensate, with money and political influence, for what he was lacking in relationships and love.

Matthew had never learnt to trust anybody enough to dare to open up, to lower his defences. He had learnt he had to be tough and unapproachable.

And then the unexpected happened. Jesus reached across the distance that Matthew tried to maintain. He saw Matthew for who he was deep inside. It was this core of Matthew Jesus was addressing.

Every human being is worthy of love and caring and each one of us is uniquely created. Jesus had the courage to extend a hand in friendship even before Matthew showed worthiness of any kind.

This experience actually changed Matthew. He found new purpose and hope. It changed him completely. He paid back to the people he had taken advantage of, left his profitable toll booths behind, and followed Jesus into a new beginning. He became one of the 12 disciples who were closest to Christ. He was a changed man.

Christianity is all about relationship and new beginnings. When Jesus was asked about the highest commandment he quoted from the Old Testament: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And “Love your neighbour as yourself.”

He claimed that all the law and all the prophets are included in this double commandment of love (Matthew 22). This love is active love, not passive receiving love. True love is not the response to the love we receive, to those who are “worthy” of our love, but love is a risk of trusting and it is built on hope that love will grow.

The church reformer Martin Luther once said that when Christ asked us to love our neighbour he meant, our neighbour is not a wild beast like a bear or wolf, but a human being.

So what keeps us from trusting each other? It might be the fear-mongering around us. When we listen too much to the news and hear about all the evil that could happen, it creates mistrust in us.

Due to that fear and mistrust, we isolate ourselves more and more and in the end live without love and relationships. It is like a fascination about negativity, about what is wrong, and a fascination about death instead of letting life fascinate us.

There is so much beauty and love around us. We have a choice to embrace life, to be fascinated about the good things around us.

With every child that is born there is God’s message of a new beginning. Fear, doubt and mistrust is the enemy of imagination, while faith is trust that enables the hope necessary to return to a sense of joy and healing in our lives. This makes relationships possible and rich again.

Yes, we might get disappointed at times. Relationships can get damaged. But we lose even more when we build walls around ourselves, when we isolate ourselves. Love, not just the romantic love of two individuals, but the love that sees the human core in our neighbour, is worth the risk.

Jesus knew about the human heart. After he just had said that the human heart is evil (Matthew 7:11), he gave the Golden Rule as an antidote in the next verse (Matthew 7:12, New International Version): “So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets.”

We have may not have the power to control everything that goes on in the world. But we have the power to choose how we react to it.

May we choose life and love and practise contentedness, both in the light and heavy parts of the journey, which is full of twists and turns.

May you find peace with yourself and your neighbour and with God. May you shine your light to inspire others when it gets dark around us. We can make our world a better place for all.

• Karsten Decker is a German theologian with a double degree equivalent to an MTheol and MDiv. He studied in Marburg (Germany), Knoxville (USA), and Toronto (Canada) and comes from a united church of Lutheran and Reformed Churches. He was the pastor of Peace Lutheran Church in Bermuda from 2010 to 2017, and after returning from Germany is now the temporary pulpit supply at Centenary Untied Methodist Church in Smith’s