“Trust in the Lord with all your heart.
Lean not on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him
and he will make your paths straight. “
These proverbs sound simple enough but I believe the implications are profound and puzzling. They seem to be offering two differing recommendations that somehow wed to give a complex representation of what it means to live life in response to God. The first two lines suggest that my own understanding is both an inadequate and unreliable foundation upon which to build my life. In other words, leaning on my own understanding would fail me, whereas leaning on the Lord would provide stability and security. How do I lean on him rather than myself? I think this is answered in the first line: trust him from the bottom of my heart.
But trust is difficult for me on many levels. First, a technical problem. Since my experience of God is necessarily mediated through myself, trusting God becomes also, in a sense, trusting my own experience of him. For example, if God speaks to me, I am not only trusting his word, but I am also trusting my apprehension of his voice, along with my interpretation of his words. If I entered a dark room and had to feel my way around to discover my surroundings, I must not only trust that the objects in the room are real and tangible, I must also trust my sense of touch as well as my brains interpretation of that sensory experience. Second, when it comes to doubt, the recommendation to “trust” is about as ineffective as the all too familiar adages meant to bandage a broken heart. “There are plenty of fish in the sea,” “Time heals all.” For someone struggling with doubting God, prescribing “trust” is simply a restatement of the problem. I cannot trust God right now because, well, I cannot trust him at the moment. In this way the proverb seems circular. But I have found that a lot of good religious writing is almost maddening in that sense. Trusting God is so difficult, and so profound, because it is so simple. Third, trusting God means obedience. It is not simply an emotional or intellectual exercise. Trusting God is so hard because it takes work. Finally, trusting God becomes personally difficult because my decisions to “follow God’s leading” have caused painful rifts in relationships.
So the first two lines argue for a wholehearted trust in God as opposed to a confidence in my own understanding. But the second two lines seem to imply a different perspective on the way life may be led.
In all my “ways,” I am to acknowledge God. I think this means that though the roads I take may be diverse, they may all be pleasing to God as long as I remember him as sovereign. This troubles me, however, because the freedom implied here seems to disrupt my understanding of how God leads me. Does he not prescribe my paths? Does he not dictate to me direction for my life? The freedom to choose my own ways frightens me, but this freedom is also suggested in the final line of the excerpt. He will make my paths straight. He will remove obstructions and pitfalls from the path I walk and will ultimately cause my path to lead to something beautiful. I think the path is metaphorical in this sense. It is not necessarily straight and narrow in the same way the path to the Gospel is, but it is straight in the sense that it is good and accommodating. But it strikes me that the proverb does not say “follow the paths the Lord provides.” Instead it claims that God will improve and ameliorate the direction I have chosen.
How do we reconcile these verses, especially considering their proximity. Clearly trusting God and leaning not on my own understanding must coincide with choosing my own paths. I just don’t know how. Could it be that I must trust the freedom that he has allowed to live my life? Could it be more trusting to make my own decisions while acknowledging him than to live a mediocre life waiting for God’s voice? Is his voice entwined within my will like a grapevine?
