Trust in the Lord with all your Heart

The summer camp where my wife and I met and where our boys attended and later worked on staff is named Camp IAWAH, an acronym for “In All Ways Acknowledge Him.” So it’s no surprise that Proverbs 3:5-6 is a verse we all know by heart. My son Aaron wrote this on his blog last week; it’s short, but I wanted to share it here…

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Proverbs 3:5,6

In the Bible, this passage reads “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and rely not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will make your path straight.”

I used to work at a summer camp that had a beautiful forest on its property. It has kilometers of trails with stunning vistas overlooking lakes and groves of tall trees that stretch into a cathedral-like canopy. I wandered around in this forest during my time off to unwind. Eventually, I had the beaten paths memorized. I got bored. I started to deviate from the paths and I learned how the trails ran relative to each other.

I found cool ancient dead trees with branches that stretched up like flames. I found skulls, rivers, new vistas, and other things that had always been a couple meters or a half-kilometer off the path. So long as I remembered where the sun was, I always made it back to camp in one piece and on time.

If we rely on our own understanding of the world, we only re-walk a path that we’ve been on a thousand times before and we miss out on the whole. We understand only a fraction of what there is to understand in the world. We need to reach out and challenge ourselves from time to time. I like doing abstract thought exercises because they help me to explore. Sometimes I find something worth coming back to and other times not. I try to understand things that it seems a lot of people reject on principle. I play devil’s advocate and wonder ‘what if’?

Some would call it dangerous. To them I say, life is. There are no guarantees in life except for that those that walk the beaten path will remain eternally blissfully ignorant. Sometimes we get lost. Sometimes we ask ‘who am I, what am I doing, and where am I going?’ As long as we stay focused on the source of our direction, we won’t stay lost. When I feel depressed or worried, sometimes I simply pray ‘God, you’re here.’ Christians often say that God doesn’t promise life will be easy, but he promises that he’ll stay with us through the hard times.

This is my first rule. Don’t trust your limited perspective. Get the larger picture. Follow the light that guides you and you’ll always find your way home.

~Aaron Wilkinson