Lean not...

Lean not on your own understanding...

This verse in the bible seems so simple sometimes. Sure, I can depend on God. I have everything in order and I can see that my life is good. This is just a verse I learned in Sunday School so many years ago.

But, when life falls apart, when the storm hits, we try to understand. We look around to see what is happening. We try to figure it out. What did I do? What could I have done? Why would God allow this to happen in my life? Now, the verse is not just a verse any longer - it is life.

It says, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart". Trust is a word that brings on different meanings and feelings depending on where you stand. If you stand on a high dive with a pool of water below and God asks you to jump - trust is possibly fearful, but fairly easy. It is when you are standing on the high dive looking into an empty pool - when you don't see anything in front of you to break your fall - and God asks you to jump. Now, the word trust, has new meaning. It means you are placing it all into His hands and trusting that He will catch you. This trust is everything.

It is interesting that God didn't just say, "trust in the Lord and lean not on your own understanding". That would have been enough, right? We need to trust. When the storm is breaking and flooding into our lives, we must trust him to get us through - but this is not all he asks of us. He says to "trust in the Lord with all your heart...." This is not a simple trust. This requires all. All your heart. At times, when our hearts are breaking, this trust feels like God is asking too much of us. How can we give him all of our heart when we don't even feel as though we have a whole heart to give him? Do we give him a broken heart? Does that even count as "all my heart"? How do we trust God when we don't trust ourselves? This verse is asking for all of it. All your heart. No looking back, no time to fill up the pool - just jumping into his arms and trusting that he is there. Trusting that he will catch you.

The verse asks even more of us when we continue to read - Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. It asks us to give up how we see things...our own thoughts, feelings, pain and hurt - and hand it to God. To trust him...with all of it. It is not easy to trust a God we cannot see or understand. God does not want us to trust our own understandings because we are not able to truly see. We only see what we, as humans, can see. We can not see past our own understanding of life. God knows that we effect more people and things around us than we see. This is why we need to trust - with all our heart. He sees what we cannot. He knows that eternity is so much more than we can see - than we can understand. That this life is so much more than we can see or understand.

Trust in the Lord. Don't lean on your understandings or what you see, lean on him...he is trustworthy. He is faithful. He will catch you. He will hold you. He will lift you up, so one day, you will be able to see.