Don't Do It

Proverbs 3:

This is my husband’s favorite passage in the Bible:

Trust in the Lord with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He will make your paths straight.

I lean hard on my own understanding most of the time.  In fact, I lean so hard I downright fall over due to my understanding being so limited.  When anything happens in life, I try to understand it and make sense of it, within the confines of what I see and know and experience.

However, this passage says “do not” lean that way.

Instead, we are to acknowledge Him (remember the Lord’s prayer “Our father who are in heaven, hallowed be thy name…).  In other words, let him know that we know he is present, he is near, he is able, and we believe it.

To be acknowledged is one of life’s greatest pleasures, isn’t it?  When we’ve completed a job, we enjoy acknowledgement.  When we enter a room, it feels good to be recognized by the host.  And when we make a good decision, we like to be given credit.

God requires that we acknowledge him in our seeking, our understanding, and our walking.

He says that when we trust him, lean into Him, and acknowledge Him, then our paths will be straight.

What more could we want out of life than a straight path that leads to eternal bliss, instead of wandering, curving, and falling off cliffs because we tried to make it without his direction?