“Do you catch the tone of this?” David asked me.
“What’s the tone?” I asked him. I had memorized this piece when I was four years old. I had never forgotten it. I had brought it to mind again and again over the years, sucking some kind of truth sap and meaning from it, some kind of rational safety from it, but I had never, ever once thought about its tone.
“The tone indicates that this is not optional,” he said. “It says, ‘Trust in the Lord with all you heart.‘ Do you see that? ‘And lean not on your own understanding.’ It isn’t an option, to trust or not; we are commanded to trust, and it says ‘in all your ways acknowledge him.‘ This is really serious. It’s about being humble enough to not think just anything we want, but to trust God and his thinking.”
I had never thought about Proverbs 3:5 quite like this before, never seen the demand it put on me in quite this way. To me this proverb has always been a kind of map for how to live, but I haven’t really thought of it as a command for how to live. It is a command — to join the rationality of God!
David and I were doing a study together. I was the mentor; he was the student. But suddenly, with his keep powers of perception and insight, the roles were reversed, as they so often are when we try to teach someone something, and he, a new Christian, was mentoring me, a crusty old professional seer.
Cool!
“And it has a promise in it,” he said. “He’ll make your path straight.”
“I’ve experience that part,” I thought. Then a complication passed through my head. “Does this mean we stop thinking?” I asked, “that our mind is supposed to follow God blindly, and be a blank slate?”
“Not at all,” he insisted immediately. “God still expects us to apply what he has shown us”
A kind of picture passed before me. A person, entering into a whole different mindset than what existed within their own circle of thoughts, a person encountering intense rationality — wise, clear, rational thinking, from God — and beginning to think in his vein, thinking straight-up, thinking super meticulously, thinking with impeccable logic, with super sanity, with a fascinating perspicacity, because they were thinking along with the best mind in the cosmos — God’s.
Here’s the deal, from David, the new guy who knows how to think.
It’s not optional, as a Christian, to not be rational with the very rationality of God. It is not optional to not trust in the kind of thinking that God is thinking.
Think with God! It’s a command. I’m good with that.
Thrive! 