What A Charging Bull Taught Me About Trust

How Fear, Faith, And Life's Unexpected Moments Teach Us To Trust Ourselves And The World.

What if the moments that scare you the most are the ones that shape you the most?

We like to think trust comes first, then life proves us right. But it rarely works that way.

A tree doesn't know it's strong until the storm hits.
A person doesn't know they're steady until fear shows up uninvited.

And trust?
Trust is something you discover in the middle of not having it.

In the summer of 1996, I rode a bicycle across the United States, from the Kansas-Colorado border, up through Montana and Oregon, and down to Phoenix.

Why?

Because something in me said, "This is what you're here to do now."
It sounded romantic at first. A long, peaceful ride across the country.

It wasn't.

One early morning in Wyoming, I woke to the sound of something large moving.

Stomping. Snorting. Getting closer.

In seconds, I was out of my sleeping bag and looking through the tent flap, just in time to see an enormous white bull standing beyond the trees.

That was the moment I learned what fear actually feels like.

I ran.

I imagined everything I owned destroyed, my trip over before it really began.

From the road, I watched and waited.

And then something strange happened.

The bull walked past my tent straight to a small stream nearby.
Drank. Grazed. Wandered off.

That was it.

All that terror, just my mind filling in the worst possible story.

Right there, I had a choice.

Go back to a safe, predictable life, or continue forward, knowing something like that could happen again.

I chose to continue.

Not because I felt brave. But because I knew something worse than fear:

A life that slowly shrinks to avoid it.

And that moment wasn't an exception. It was the beginning.

There were nights in black bear country where every sound felt like danger.
Days in the Mojave Desert with no water left and miles of heat ahead.
Moments where things really could have gone wrong.
But something else kept happening too.

Every time things looked uncertain, something unexpected would appear.

A place to camp.
A stranger willing to help.
A solution I couldn't have planned.

One evening in Fresno, both my tires blew out, completely shredded by thorns.

No houses nearby. No money beyond my last $20. No plan.

So I did the only thing I could do. I stuck out my thumb.

Within minutes, a man picked me up, brought me to the campground he owned, shared stories late into the night, and the next day helped me get back on the road, including helping pay for new tubes.

Now think about that for a second.

That kind of thing doesn't happen in a world you don't trust.

Or maybe more accurately, you don't notice it in a world you don't trust.

But trust isn't just about the external world.

It's also about trusting what's moving inside you.

One night, I lay awake listening to people nearby laughing and whispering.

At first, I felt annoyed. Then I talked myself out of it.

"They're not doing anything wrong," I thought. "Just let it go."

Sounds mature, right?

It wasn't.

The next day, I felt awful. Heavy. Irritated. Something in me had been silenced, and it didn't like it.

Later, when that same energy came up again, it came out bluntly: "Stop that damn singing. I can't stand it."

Not elegant. Not spiritual. But honest. And strangely freeing.

Because trust also means this: Trusting that expressing what's real in you won't break the world.

(It doesn't.)

People often say the world feels unstable.

Too much change. Too much uncertainty. Too many things not going "the way they used to."

But how else do you learn stability, unless the ground seems to move?

How else do you discover strength unless something tests it?

What I began to see, over and over, was this:

Even when things looked uncertain, something deeper was always steady.

Even when fear showed up, something in me could meet it.

And each time I stayed with the experience instead of running from life entirely, something in me became more steady and less shaken by what was happening.

Not fearless. Just no longer controlled by fear.

Maybe the world isn't falling apart.

Maybe it's growing, fast.

And maybe what feels like chaos is actually pressure, shaping something stronger inside you.

Here's the real shift:

Trust isn't something you wait to feel.

It's something you choose, especially when you don't feel it.

And then life meets you there.

Not always comfortably. But often, surprisingly beautifully.

So what happens if you try this?

Just a little.

Not blind trust. Not forced positivity.

But a quiet willingness to say:

"Even this might be working for me."
Try it. Then watch what changes.

I'm curious:

Have you ever had a moment where something felt like it was going wrong, but ended up guiding you exactly where you needed to go?

Drop it in the comments. Those moments are where this becomes real.

If something in you knows there must be a better way to live than circling the same worries over and over... these are the practices you've been looking for.