Proverbs 3: 5-6  — The Path

 Trust in the Lord with all your heart
    and lean not on your own understanding;
in all your ways submit to him,
    and he will make your paths straight.

Summary: Today’s meditation is a personal reflection on life and faith. 

I am going to share a story with you I do not tell very often. It is difficult to convey because it involves things we do not have words for. It is also difficult because it involves times in my life when I caused myself great pain.

As a young child, I accepted the world I lived in for what it was. Most of us do. I had questions, but I did not have many places to go for answers, at least answers that made sense to me.

Once, when I was about ten years old, our family doctor was visiting the house. He was chatting with mom about something and at one point there was a pause in the conversation. I jumped in with a question.

“Doctor, when do people start to die?” (Yes, even then my brain was traveling odd paths!)

The doctor had a practice in our small town and was a very down-to-earth kind of guy. He looked at me for a minute and then said, “As soon as we are born.”

I had not expected that. His answer shut me up and gave me something to think about.

When I went off to college, I allowed myself to explore all kinds of studies. Besides engineering studies, computer programming, and languages, I explored Political Science, philosophy, psychology, and Religious Studies. Most people seem to gravitate towards a particular theme in their studies. I was greedy. I wanted it all. The problem with my approach was that I was trying to lean on my own understanding.

If I had an infinite amount of time and energy, I still could not figure it all out. Every human endeavor is tainted by human limitations. The number of wrong paths we can travel is unlimited. Science, for example, is the process of testing ideas and eliminating the ones that do not work. Guess what? There are an infinite number of wrong ideas to test. Talk about job security!

“Every human endeavor is tainted by human limitations.” 

I was too impatient to follow the path of testing, testing, testing. I wanted answers and of all the areas I studied, Religious Studies seemed to offer the best prospects for finding the answers I was looking for. Unfortunately, there are as many ways to go wrong studying religion as there are studying anything else.

The one thing a secular Religious Studies program does not offer is a path to faith. It is all about leaning on our own very limited understanding. So, I learned about religion without faith and it almost killed me.

Years later, I found myself still gasping for spiritual air. I was hungry, but I did not know where to turn for food. It was during this time that I began to hear God’s voice in my life. There was something that I had been missing, but what was it?

The “it” I was looking for was something I could not see or touch, yet it is very real. It was my spiritual self. I had come to a place where I was almost entirely wrapped up in what the Bible calls “the world” or the “flesh.” My worldview did not allow for invisible, untestable concepts like spirits. Yet there is a part of me that is invisible. My thought world cannot be explained by physics or science. (Yes, I know that science is always making claims about this or that breakthrough in understanding how the mind works. That is akin to discovering the fuel pump on a car and claiming that you now understand how the car works.)

I still remember the day I realized that the invisible part of me was every bit as real as the visible, physical part. As soon as that reality dawned on me, an entirely new world of inquiry opened up. But I was still leaning on my own understanding. Learning to trust in the Lord has been a long road for me. I would not wish the mistakes I have made on anybody.

When Solomon tells us “lean not on your own understanding,” he is not saying that we should not use our brains. What he is telling us is that there are a lot of things in this life that we cannot know. We do not have enough time to learn everything there is to know. There are things beyond our ability to know. And there are some things that knowing requires us to die for.

Madame Curie is famous as the world’s first woman to win a Nobel Prize. A brilliant physicist, she was a pioneer in researching radioactivity. Being first to explore this amazing part of our physical universe, she was also the first to suffer radioactive poisoning, the likely cause of her death. But you do not have to be a famous physicist to die exploring the world around us. Sailors have been doing that for centuries. Astronauts do it. Even kids who fall out of trees sometimes do it.

Slowly, over the long years, I have stopped leaning on my own understanding. I am learning to trust in the Lord with all my heart. The more I trust God, the more I can submit to him, the more meaning I find in life and the more everything makes sense. Following Jesus, my path has become straighter. Not in any worldly sense of the word, but straighter nonetheless.

Perhaps, when we cut to the chase and get to what really matters, the “path” that we want to be straight is between our heart and God’s.

Application: Don’t waste your life chasing dead ends. Trust Jesus!

Food for Thought: What are some ways we can submit to the Lord?