The Trust Factor
A daily lesson that focuses on achieving unparalleled success in life using ancient wisdom in modern times.
We will be discussing critical concepts as they are laid out in the book Sha'ar Habitachon - The Gate of Trust. Written 1000 years ago, the author reminds us of the values and wisdom that have allowed humanity to thrive throughout history.
The concept of trusting in a higher power that exists purely for our benefit, puts us in the drivers seat with absolute confidence to achieve greatness.
Eliminate: Fear, Hatred, Anxiety, Depression, Jealousy, Greed...forever!
* Note that some terminology will be in the original Hebrew or Aramaic which I will always follow with the English translation.
The Trust Factor
Episode 26 - Faith becomes trust when you recognize the miracles in your own story.
Have you ever experienced a moment so perfectly aligned it could only be divine intervention? Those aren't just stories that happen to others—they're happening in your life too, if you're paying attention.
Today I share a deeply personal story that transformed my understanding of faith. After easily welcoming our first two children, my wife and I spent ten grueling years trying to have our third. During this challenging journey, our rabbi suggested that praying at the Western Wall in Israel offered our best chance of success. With no travel plans on the horizon, we filed this advice away—until an unexpected, all-expenses-paid invitation to Israel arrived months later.
Following our prayers at the Kotel, my wife became pregnant. When scheduling complications forced us to accept March 14th for our daughter's birth, we had no idea of its significance. Only later, while reviewing photos from our Israel trip, did my wife discover the stunning truth: we had prayed at the Western Wall exactly one year earlier—on March 14th. Our daughter arrived precisely 365 days after those prayers.
What struck me most wasn't just the remarkable timing, but how long it took me to fully appreciate it. We often dismiss as coincidence what might be the clearest evidence of divine presence in our lives. These personal experiences build the foundation of faith that eventually transforms into trust. When life brings you to those inevitable crossroads that test your faith, these memories become the evidence that carries you forward.
Keep your spiritual antenna tuned. Recognize the patterns. Embrace the stories that happen directly to you. They're building your capacity for both faith and trust in ways you might not yet fully comprehend.
Good morning everybody, happy Monday. We've been telling stories lately and we're going to continue along this path of telling stories. Why? Because we've said in the past, in order to build trust in your Creator, you have to start with faith. First you have to have faith and then you can move into trust. How do you build faith? Well, there's two ways to do it. One is to hear about it, to think about it, to investigate and study it. That's what we do when we tell stories, and sometimes those stories are very impactful and they help us build our faith in this concept of a creator.
Speaker 0:Now, when we hear these stories, sometimes we said they're pretty outlandish and they're far-fetched, and at least they seem that way, and some of them are very difficult for us to get our heads around and we think for sure these stories were made up just to inspire us. But oftentimes many of them are real and true and have happened to individuals. Sometimes the names and the places have changed, but these stories happen, and they happen often, and that only becomes validated for you when you've heard it from the horse's mouth. And so I want to share with you a story that hopefully helps you build a little bit of faith. It certainly did for me now. It took me a long time to recognize it and it took my wife a very short period of time to recognize it. But here's how it goes.
Speaker 0:It was about eight or nine years ago and we were trying to have our third child. Our first child was born 20 years ago and we've been married for 22 years. So the first child, thank God, came very easily, with very little effort. Our second child is 18. She came about two and a half years later a year and a half, no, about two years later, and again relatively easy, very little challenge. And then our third child is eight years old and it took us about 10 years to bring her into this world. And it's not because we weren't trying and it's not because we weren't interested. It just wasn't working out for whatever reason. And as time went on, we had a couple of opportunities in between where my wife was pregnant, but they never came to fruition. Where my wife was pregnant, but they never came to fruition.
Speaker 0:Eventually things got trying, more so on my wife as women are generally more sensitive to these issues, and so she started reaching out for help and talking to as many people she could talk to and getting all kinds of different opinions, until one day she reached out to our rabbi, who we've spoken to many times. Until one day she reached out to our rabbi, who we've spoken to many times but who'd only been over to our house maybe once or twice, and she invited him over for a conversation on the subject. And I remember that, after having discussed what we were dealing with and him suggesting a couple of different things, he finished off with the idea that our most potential would come from going to Israel and visiting the Kotel, the Western Wall, and praying over there for a child. He said you know, of all the things that you can do, this is going to be the one with the most potential for success. Now the problem was that it was nowhere in our cards. We weren't thinking about Israel, it wasn't on the radar. We had two young children at home and a growing family and it just there was nothing taking us there, and so it wasn't in the cards. So we thought, okay, we'll have to suffice with some other efforts in the interim until such time as Israel became a potential for us. We might expedite it now, knowing what we know, but it certainly wasn't in the cards.
Speaker 0:And then, suddenly, within a few months, something very out of the ordinary happened. We got an invitation from somebody in the family who was having a bar mitzvah for their child, and it was an unsolicited invitation, one that was very out of character to invite us to come to Israel on an all-expense-paid trip to celebrate our nephew's bar mitzvah. And so, after much debate, we agreed to it, and we soon found ourselves on an airplane, our entire family flying to Israel to celebrate. And this was just within a few months of having that conversation and being told that that's where we should be. And I remember getting to the Kotel and celebrating a beautiful bar mitzvah, and my wife asked me to go and pray and she was going to do the same thing, and that's what happened. We spent a beautiful day at the Kotel, we spent a beautiful week in Israel, and we came back A few months later we determined that my wife was pregnant, but we were cautiously optimistic because we knew that we had a couple of false starts leading up to this, and so we were cautiously optimistic.
Speaker 0:Then, thank God, we closed in on our ninth month and it was time to book a C-section. We had called the nurse, and we're booking a date for the section. I remember my wife being on the phone and talking to the nurse and we were planning a date towards the end of February. My English birthday is the 26th of February and so we thought if we get to choose a date, then it might as well be as special or significant as we could make it in that timeframe Something connected back to Judaism, spirituality, and so there was nothing really at that period of time but my English birthday, and so we said, okay, listen, if we can make it for the 26th of February, then great, we booked it.
Speaker 0:And then we got a phone call from the doctors or from the nurse saying no, the doctor's going to be away for a couple of weeks and that's not going to work and we're going to have to do it somewhere in around the second week of March. We said, okay, let's look, let's see what's happening, and it turned out that around the second week of March was going to be the holiday of Purim. The holiday of Purim is a very joyous occasion. It's in the month of Adar, which is in that month that we're supposed to increase our happiness. It's a very happy month for the Jewish nation. So we said, listen, let's book it on Purim, that's a no-brainer. And so we tried for the date of Purim in the Hebrew calendar and the nurse said that it wasn't going to work because the doctor was still away. And we said, okay, at that time my Hebrew birthday was the day after Purim, which is called Shushan Purim, and so we said maybe we could book it for my Hebrew birthday. So we tried and she said no. And then you could see, at that point she was frustrated and said the only date I could give you was March 14th. That was the day after my Hebrew birthday. So that's it. That's all. We've got the doctor's too busy and we can't come up with a time here. So in her frustration, she booked March 14th. We stuck with it and we rolled with it. Thank God, on March 14th our beautiful daughter was born, thank God, happy and healthy, and she continues to be, and she should continue until 120, god willing.
Speaker 0:But we had our third child that we've been trying for for so long, and I don't think that it was coincidence that it was right. After we'd come back from Israel, we were at the Kotel praying for our third child. Now, story doesn't end there. Fast forward a little while and my wife decides that she wants to make a photo album and she wants to commemorate that trip to Israel, which was an amazing trip. And so she goes online and she uploads all the pictures and she puts little captions below all the pictures. And then she creates this photo album of our trip.
Speaker 0:And then a few months later, when we have looked at it probably three or four or five times, or maybe even a year later, after we'd looked at it so many times, my wife makes a startling discovery. She looks at the picture in the photo album of her praying at the Kotel on the day of the bar mitzvah and below it she writes a caption saying bar mitzvah day for our nephew, march 14th. It happened to be that the one day that we were at the Kotel a year earlier for our nephew's bar mitzvah was March 14th In the early afternoon. She was taking that picture of her praying for a child who came in the early afternoon into this world exactly 365 days later. She came into this world Now my wife clued into it, probably about a year or days later. She came into this world Now my wife clued into it, probably about a year or so later, and she spent the next few years in awe of the story, telling it to anybody who would listen.
Speaker 0:And when I heard it I thought that's kind of cool. But again, it didn't really resonate with me, not until maybe a year or two ago. And I thought what if this had happened to somebody else? What if I was hearing this story in its detail, from somebody else about a story that happened to them, that this incident happened to somebody else? I would be very, very impressed and moved by it. And here I'm happened to them that this incident happened to somebody else. I would be very, very impressed and moved by it. And here I'm thinking to myself it happened to me. Why did it take me so long to think and to feel how unbelievable this could be? I could easily have written this off as coincidence and in my mind maybe I did for so many years until I actually said it over in third person I thought to myself wow, that's an unbelievable story.
Speaker 0:That's one of those faith building stories that you cannot explain away, that you cannot refer to as coincidence and that you have to embrace.
Speaker 0:You have to embrace these stories when they come in. You have to make sure that your antenna are dialed in, they're tuned in, they're pointed in the right direction and the radio is dialed in. You have to make sure that your antenna are dialed in, they're tuned in, they're pointed in the right direction and the radio is dialed in, and that you're ready to receive. Because it's when you receive these firsthand accounts of the things that happen to people that show the hand of God in their life that you have to hold on to them, because they are what helps you to build your faith. And eventually you will hit that fork in the road where you're asked to test your faith. And eventually you will hit that fork in the road where you're asked to test your faith and when you pass that test you'll know that you have acquired trust in your Creator. That's our class for today, my friends. Tomorrow we pick up with the material benefits of trusting in God. Have an amazing day.
