“Trust in the
Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his
will in all you do, and he will direct your paths. “ Proverbs 3:5-6
This is one of my favorite verses from
God’s word, but I find it one of the hardest to put into practice. I don’t even fully understand God and His
plans for my life, so how can I NOT depend on my own understanding? That’s all I have, really, my own understanding
of life and things from my years of education and experience in this world. So
if I interpret the verse correctly, it is saying I have to trust without
knowing anything for sure; I have to seek His will by faith alone (because even
when I think I know His will, I am soon dumbfounded by how off I have been in
my assumptions about His will for me), and I have to allow Him to direct my
path without a set of directions to follow and guide me. If I put this verse
fully into practice, all I will have to guide me is my faith and my trust in
Him. Okay, so if God is all I have been
taught, believe, and have experienced Him to be, than this should make perfect
sense and be easy for me to do. So,
what’s the problem? It’s terribly scary, that’s the problem, not knowing
anything, not being able to explain and understand the plans of our Maker for
our lives because He is so much more in every aspect of His character and being
than we could ever hope to be. He knows
all, sees all, and is able to put all of it into perfect perspective and lead
us throughout our lives in just the right way, the way that will use our
stubborn, selfish humanness to our advantage, allowing us to learn the most
from our positive and negative experiences and thus, assist us in coming out
the better for it in the end. He knows
it’s going to be scary for us. He knows the mistakes we are going to make. He
knows us so well that He is able to take our inadequacies, our insecurities,
our tendency to need to “go through” the experience ourselves to really grasp
it and decide it’s not what we really want for ourselves and turn these into
learning experiences that will really sink into our hearts and minds for the
long haul. And even though He knows all
this, He still worked through men and His own son to give us a manual for life,
the Bible, to tell us in great detail how to live successfully, peacefully, and
with love and joy always, knowing we would struggle against doing what it says,
questioning it and complaining that we just can’t understand what He’s trying
to say. Why would He still give us His word, knowing us as He does? I think He
did it because He still has faith in His creation, in His children, faith that
there will be even one who can understand and appreciate it, even one who can
live righteously and by “The Good Book,” so to speak. If God can have that much faith in us, His
sinful, scared, prideful creation…If He can still love us that much, to want to
teach us His ways and help us to find His peace, love, and joy for life, then
the least we can do is attempt to throw off our clocks of fear and put our
trust and our faith in Him and His plan, wherever it may lead us.
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