IN ALL YOUR WAYS

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.  In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths.” – Proverbs 3:5-6

Recently our minister, Joe Keyes, reminded our congregation about some important lessons he had recently picked up from Andy Stanley, who wrote a book entitled, The Principle of the Path.  Now, I know Joe well enough to know that he did not just now learn these lessons but has likelier just recently been reminded of them via a new viewpoint, another’s lenses.  (And that in itself is a lesson worth writing about: it behooves us to keep studying the Word through other’s vantage points—even parts of the Word, like this one, that a practical, fleshly part of ourselves wants to talk us into thinking we know inside out, backwards and forwards, so what’s the use in sowing into tired soil whose nutrients are long depleted? Another time.  Not today.)

He says, “Direction, not intention, determines our destination.”  Yes, exactly!  I remember as an English teacher who made her kids write in journals every Monday posting this quote on the board for twenty minutes’ worth of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old contemplation:  “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?”  

The key to reaching a particular destination is to stick closely to the map.  A lack of commitment to the map, a laissez faire attitude toward one’s map is the best way to waste a lot of expensive gasoline.  A successful road trip to someplace we have never been requires that we trust our map or GPS and then back up that faith with strict adherence to its recommendations.  Anything less is foolhardy.

The key to showing up where we want to arrive in the Kingdom, both here and in the life to come, is utter, total submission to the One Authority.  Once we have identified the True Authority, we can no longer dilly-dally around with inferior would-be substitutes; we have to ignore all competition with the Authority.  Sometimes, at least with me, that is easier said than done.   Sometimes I am not successful at just passively ignoring the other  voices by angling my head a little so that my earballs are out of the direct line of fire; I have to actively do battle with the competition.  I have to speak the Truth out loud or stamp its imprint solidly and concretely upon paper.  Sometimes God has even arranged it so that someone else appears before me who needs to hear the very Truth I need to remember right then.  I am obliged then to open my mouth and speak it for the sake of us both.  Now you may think this is hypocrisy, but I heartily disagree because when I hear myself say it, or when I see myself write it, I am suddenly convicted of this Truth and realize that I have been in a fuzzy state about it until just now.  Oftentimes with me it is just as E.M. Forster said:  “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”  

I wonder if because I have such a sixty years worth of tendency to speak impulsively and to say way too many words, God just arranged a way to teach me as all that is happening.  He might have thought, “Huh— if she is going to persist in being this way, I’ll find a way to meet her where she is.  I’ll just hijack her words on the way out of her mouth and on the way out of her fingers so that by the time they hit the air or the paper, she gets what I have been trying to get her to see all this time! She will think, ‘I think that? I never had a clue!’”

“Trust”— Lean only on Him for true understanding.  Don’t let the world interpret your Truth.

“All— Not just in some, but in all of your ways—Sunday ways through Saturday night ways; alone times and social times— acknowledge His authority.

…and He will make the best path known to us.  Solomon started well, but somewhere along the way, his “trust” became wobbly and his “all” became “some.”  A few hundred foreign wives in order to kowtow to political correctness, and bam!  He was somewhere he never intended to be.  He had leaned upon something other than God. Read Ecclesiastes to hear and feel his regret. Read 1 Kings 11 to see the far-reaching disaster to Israel’s moral fiber because of her once wise, but finally misguided, king.

I once heard somebody say that it is true that experience probably really is the best teacher, but it’s just plain stupid, with all the roadkill along the highways, to insist upon walking in front of an eighteen-wheeler.  Let us try to learn from Solomon’s experience.