There is something extraordinary about this instruction. “Lean not on your own understanding.”
We spend so much of our lives trying to understand. We want things to make sense before we move. We want to know how something will work, where it will lead and, preferably, how it will all turn out.
Our understanding is built from what we know. What we have experienced. What we can see. What we have learned.
It is enormously useful. But it is also limited.
Because there are things we cannot see yet. People we haven’t met. Conversations we haven’t had. Opportunities we don’t know exist. Possibilities that have never occurred to us.
And yet sometimes, somehow, we know. Your inner leading doesn’t always explain itself. Sometimes you know before you understand why you know.
Something says go. Or stay.
Call. Wait. Say yes. Not this.
And sometimes your own understanding immediately arrives with a very reasonable argument for why that makes absolutely no sense.
Perhaps that is where trust begins. Not when everything makes sense.
But when it doesn’t — and you accept that what you currently understand may not be everything there is to know.
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart…”
That comes first. Then:
“…and lean not on your own understanding.”
It doesn’t say that understanding has no value. It simply asks us not to lean on it as though it is the only thing holding us up.
Because perhaps being led sometimes means accepting that you will not always be given the explanation before the instruction. Sometimes the understanding comes later.
You make the call and discover something you couldn’t possibly have known.
You wait when everything in you wants to move.
You walk away from something that looks perfectly right on paper.
You say yes without seeing the whole road ahead.
And then life unfolds.
Something connects.
And suddenly you find yourself looking backwards and thinking:
Oh.
That’s why.
Maybe that’s one of the great adventures of being led.
Sometimes all you have is the nudge.
And the choice to trust it.
Perhaps we were never meant to understand everything before we moved.
Perhaps we were simply meant to trust — and let understanding catch up🦋
