August 10, 2023
Our Weekly Meditation
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and be not wise in your own sight.” — Proverbs 3:5-6
Sometimes I take things too far.
Hearing this verse from Proverbs in worship, I thought, “Well, how do I do that?” And I concluded that, right then and there, I would trust in God in everything I did, ignoring the loud voice of my will.
And by everything, I meant everything: Crossing the street. Writing my book. Preparing coffee. You name it, I was going to trust God. Period. End of story.
You can imagine how long that experiment lasted — perhaps, oh, two minutes. “You’ve failed!” I sighed.
Then I was visited by an image of Jesus in the workshop.
We don’t often reflect on Jesus the Carpenter, but this time it helped me enormously. There he was — measuring, sawing, sanding, shaping, sweating. Did Jesus trust in God to execute all these hardscrabble, real-time chores?
No. He first said his prayers, then focused all his God-given energy, talent and skill on the task at hand.
A Buddhist master was once asked the secret of life. “Pay attention to what’s in front of you,” he said. When asked the second rule, the master replied, “Repeat the first rule ten thousand times.”
We can’t – and shouldn’t – abandon all we do to God in expectation that God do all things for us — write the book, prepare the coffee, saw the wood. But we can – and should — start the day in prayer, “trusting in the Lord with all our hearts,” and recognizing that all that we have – our memory, our mind, our will – has come from Him.
And then we can get on with it.
Pete Taft