[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 13/March/2022]
Do not rely on your own insight or – in most translations – Trust in the Lord, and “lean not on your own understanding”. (Proverbs 3:5)
My barber and I have the most frustrating and, sometimes, challenging conversations! (How can she give such perfect haircuts while apparently never looking at what she’s doing?!)
She’ll show me video clips on her phone, arguing that nothing we see is what it appears to be. She speaks several Eastern European languages, and devours news from online sources that I (and, I bet, most of you, my readers) have never heard of! According to her, nothing we watch on, say, BBC news is reliable. That includes coverage of what is happening in Ukraine.
Until this morning I’ve been dismissing her views as wild and uninformed. Now I’ve begun to ask myself, how have I come to trust what I see on my TV? What I see with my own eyes?!
Does the verse in Proverbs mean that I am NOT to trust what my eyes are seeing? Or to ‘rely on my own understanding’? I’m going to experiment with something: I’m going to deliberately ask the Lord to show me what is true. That is, to ask Him to help me see things as HE sees them!
When you read my next YOURS page, I’ll let you know if I’ve learned anything!
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Contributed by Dennis Ginter; © the Author
