WATCHWORD:
5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. 6 Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5-6 TLB
Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own. Listen for God’s voice in everything you do, everywhere you go; he’s the one who will keep you on track. Don’t assume that you know it all. Run to God! Run from evil! Proverbs 3:5-6 The Message
Meditation:
I Don’t Understand!
How often in your lifetime have you said, I don’t understand? Maybe as a child, learning stuff, you were confronted with the puzzle of finding the square root of something, and in the process of being taught, you missed something and you are left with an incomplete formula. Now you are confronted with a process that just didn’t work, and you don’t understand what went wrong.
Okay, so you don’t understand something. You turn to your teacher or a friend and ask for help and they answered with, “Think about it.” So, you think, and think, and think, and think until your thinker is sore and you still don’t have a solution. Your frustration grows, and the solution remains elusive. Your teacher or friend finally helps you, with a clue. Or, perhaps, as a last resort, you read the instructions. Ah, success, at last!
That may work with puzzles of the world, but what about puzzles of the heart, of the soul? The smartest person in the world could not think their way to peace of mind. Have you tried to think your way out of mild depression, or out of that frustration, or out of some anger you are dealing with, trying to get to calmness and peace? You want to forgive, but you just can’t get yourself there. Too often, in our frustration, we settle for the rewards of the world, the easy way out, while casting blind eyes to what exists all around us and within us.
Maybe, as a last resort, we turn to scriptures for answers to our frustration, and we recall those favorite verses, and remember “lean not on your own understanding…”, and maybe we ask ourselves what does that mean? We read “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life, and, because we are human, we jump to the Truth which is something we can get our teeth into, and the Life which is something we aspire to, but, for some reason, we miss what brings it all about, the Way. Jesus is the Way. He said, “I am the Way.” Not one of the ways, but The Way.
You say you still don’t quite understand? Well, my friend, go back to your “lean not on your own understanding” and read the first part. That’s right, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart,” that is the beginning, that is The Way. Now pray on that. Amen.
Bulletin Board:
Many of us are familiar with John 14, where Jesus tells His disciples that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. But what did that really mean for them, and what does it mean for us?
This conversation happens on the last night before the crucifixion, during the Passover meal. Before this, Jesus had washed the disciple’s feet, predicted his betrayal by Judas, predicted his denial by Peter, and told the disciples he would soon be going away (John 13). All of this prompted questions about where Jesus was going, and why it was that they couldn’t follow with him: By making this statement, Jesus is establishing that knowing Him is not only the ultimate meaning and fulfillment of life on earth, but the only way to really know the Father in heaven.
Closing Prayer:
Heavenly Father, open my eyes and heart to understand more of Your love, and help me realize that I don’t need to know it all and I don’t need to do it all. Help me to live in the full knowledge of Your love, which is enough for my life. Amen.
