In a lot of ways, everything we do depends on trust. In school, you trust that your teachers are giving you information that’s both accurate and important. At home, you trust your parents in more ways than you can probably think of!
- Who can think of an example of ways you exercise trust on a daily basis? (Be prepared to give your own examples to help prompt discussion.)
- Does anyone you know trust or depend on you? (Answers will vary. Students may recognize that their parents trust them with tasks. They may discuss friends who have trusted them with secrets and teammates who depend on them during a sports event.)
Most of the trust we exhibit in our daily lives involves pretty ordinary things. Being trustworthy involves integrity, such as doing what we say we are going to do. Anything involving inputting our personal information online, such as online banking, requires trust that the companies and websites will store our data securely and not sell it to outside companies. But what happens when not everyone is trustworthy?
You may have heard a recent story of many people’s profiles on 23andMe, a popular genetic testing website, getting hacked. According to an article about this hacking by BBC News, “Hackers have been able to gain access to personal information from about 6.9 million users of genetic testing company 23andMe, using customers’ old passwords. In some cases this included family trees, birth years and geographic locations.”
Because these users’ accounts were accessed by hackers, much of their personal data about their ancestry and family trees was stolen.
- If 23andMe had higher security and more customer information about creating secure accounts, what could have happened? (Possible answers: accounts would have stayed secure, no data would have been stolen, etc.)
Today’s lesson is about how someone trusted God in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. Let’s learn more.
