[This sermon was delivered at Downtown Church, Columbia, SC, and posted on their website here. It can also be played using the embedded player below.]
Trust in the Lord with all your heart
Proverbs 3:5-6
and do not rely on your own insight;
in all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
There is a whole industry of workers out there whose job is to understand stuff. Some of them also work to help others also understand stuff. I’m thinking of journalists, writers, podcasters, news anchors, teachers. I happen to be a member of this group. I am a Ph.D. student, and so I am, more or less, a professional understander.
And so, frankly, I find this proverb a little hard to swallow. Because I love relying on my own insight, my own understanding! It’s what I do! In fact, it’s what I’ve done for a long time. This fall I am going into—I kid you not—the 28th grade. Understanding things is kind of my thing. Here’s an example: this sermon is largely going to be about understanding, because while the translation we read this morning uses the word “insight” in verse five, the Hebrew word it interprets is probably better translated as “understanding.” See? Understanding. It’s what I do.
But I also know that there’s a shadow side to all of that research. Sometimes I suspect that one of the reasons I like to learn about things is because I have this sense that by understanding a thing, I can get some sort of control.
I don’t think you have to be an academic to feel that way. I recently shared with my home group my insatiable desire to research, well, everything, and I had a few fellow members reveal similar inclinations. That desire to know everything about a thing, and thereby acquire control. There’s a ton of different ways that this impulse appears. Maybe it happens when you’re shopping. Look, I’m a mom, and so I get that it’s important to know if that pacifier is actually going to work, or those diapers are just going to leak. (Or it could be anything! Someone in that home group conversation shared that they recently spent hours trying to figure out what kind of birdseed would attract birds and not just squirrels.) Or perhaps you find yourself researching when planning for a trip: you want to make sure the place you’ll stay has a hot tub and that the rental car agency won’t send you out with a lemon. Some of you might be a history junkie: you find yourselves addicted to podcasts like Throughline and More Perfect or voraciously reading through all the non-fiction you can get your hands on.
For me, the time that I have most compulsively researched was when I was pregnant with our first child. I think I spent nine hours straight one day researching strollers. I wanted to be positive that what we got would be absolutely perfect for our son (and for us). And then I read about a dozen books about all sorts of things kid-related: how to eat well while pregnant, how to nurse, how to sleep train, how to appropriately discipline toddlers, etc etc etc. I think I thought that if I learned everything that I could learn about what it is to be a parent ahead of time, it would somehow make my experience as a parent easier or better. Again, understanding became a means of control. Understand it, then you’ll be able to control it.
Let’s just say that’s not how things worked out. Of course, you may have guessed that books just can’t prepare you for the experience of parenting. But we learned this lesson even more intensely than we ever could have imagined. That’s because, after our son was born in the summer of 2018, he repeatedly failed to reach important developmental milestones. I was beside myself, because I just couldn’t understand what was happening. When he was first born was never able to nurse, and none of the lactation consultants we hired could help us figure out what was going on. But then he didn’t learn how to sit, either. Or eat solid foods. It was helpful when, at around age one, doctors diagnosed him with a condition called hypotonia—which means that his brain and his muscles don’t communicate with one another very well. Given that I am a professional understander, you can imagine the unending research I did to learn about hypotonia.
While all of my reading up on hypotonia made it possible for me to help Max to grow and learn as best he could, it never gave me control over his condition. Max didn’t walk until he was two and a half—where most kids take their first steps around age one. He’s nearly four now, and has only really started to talk in the last few months. And that’s complicated his ability to engage with others and to make friends. And no matter what I learn about his condition, I can’t make it go away.
Instead, I’ve had to face the difference between two different kinds of understanding: the kind that understands what’s going on, and the kind that understands why it’s happening. I’ve had to face the fact that even as I understand how hypotonia works, I have no clue why. I will never understand why my sweet son would have to struggle with this condition. There is no book, no expert, no podcast, that will ever be able to spell out why.
Let me add here that, at least in my life, there are a lot of things just like this. Even as I understand what is going on with this heat wave in our country, I just don’t understand why. I understand what is going on with polarization in our country, I can’t possibly understand why. And, because of my academic training, I understand all too well what is going on with racial violence in our country, but I just will never understand why.
If you’re like me, failing to know the answer to these why questions can sometimes weaken your confidence in God and God’s grace.
But God is telling us here in the book of Proverbs that it’s okay not to understand these things. In fact, it might be better for us to stop pretending like we can comprehend it all, that we’ve got it all figured out, that we can build our faith lives upon all that stuff we think we understand. Especially when our desire to understand is just another symptom of our desire to be in control, it would be a very good thing to get more comfortable with not understanding.
Now, I should be clear: it’s not as if this proverb is telling us that there’s no need for us to try to understand who God is, and what God is up to. My husband, Justin, is a seminary professor, and it’s basically his job to work to understand who God is, and help others to do the same. I’m grateful for the work that people like him do. It is a blessed thing indeed to spend time in Bible study and prayer learning about God, and I encourage all of us to prioritize time spent reaching out to God in those ways.
But the fact remains that, while God does sometimes grace us with understanding, that’s not the only form that grace takes. In fact, I think God’s grace often shows up precisely when we don’t understand, when we don’t have the answers to the questions.
I don’t—and probably never will—understand why my son has had to struggle with hypotonia. But I can tell you that it has been right there, at that most troubling spot, that we have experienced God’s grace. It’s come in the form of daycare and Sunday School teachers, who love Max exactly as he is, and shape him and teach him about how much God loves him exactly as he is. It’s come in the form of new, dear friends here at Downtown Church, who welcome Max into their lives with open arms, not troubled by his mostly indistinguishable words but instead excited to share their gifts with him. And God’s grace has come to me—and perhaps to some of you, too—through Max, this resilient, brilliant, lovable little kid who treats the world as if it’s a wondrous miracle.
What a shame it would be if I in my desire to understand—and control—missed out on the grace that comes in the form of such love and joy! What a loss for all of us if by relying on our own understanding of the world, we miss out on the miracles, the mysteries, the grace that exceeds our frail minds. Hear this good news, friends: we may not understand it all, and we certainly can’t control it all, but thank God for that! Because the good news is that even when we don’t understand, we can trust in God, and the good things God has in store for us. In fact, it’s often right there in those moments when we don’t understand what’s going on or why, that God shows up, inviting us to trust, to “acknowledge him,” as this Proverb says, to be still and know God is God. May we open our hearts to receive that grace—and may we dare to be the means by which others experience God’s grace, too. Amen.