Each day during the month of March we will be sharing a devotional from a booklet written by Steve Love. Steve is a member of Canton First and a Traumatic Brain Injury survivor. If you would like a complete PDF of this devotional, it can be downloaded here.

Day 15

Proverbs 3:5 (New International Version)

Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.

    “Trust in the LORD with all your heart.” This is great wisdom. Trust has become a vital part of our lives. Many have never trusted anyone let alone God. Reliance, care, position of obligation, and a hope for the future are the elements of trust. Reliance is our confidence in and dependence on others fairness, truth, honor, or ability. When we trust others to help us with our care, we give them the responsibility to take good care of us. When we give someone a position of obligation, we expect them to behave responsibly or honorably. Hope for the future means we will have a hopeful reliance on what will happen in the future because of the trust we give to others.

    We have given our trust to our Doctors, Nurses, and Therapists. We know they are more knowledgeable than we are in their area of expertise. They have our trust. Having spent time in the hospital on floors where the staff doses do not know anything about a person with a brain injury was a to my recovery hindrance. These medical people did not understand my needs and how to respond to them. I quickly lost my confidence and trust in them.

    We have learned we can trust in God. God keeps all the promise He makes. I spent 18 years working in retail. One of the biggest sellers was an item with a lifetime warrantee. The problem was the company which backed the warrantee went bankrupt and the lifetime warrantee was no good. God is everlasting and His promises have an everlasting lifetime warrantee. How are we to trust God? We are to use all our heart/mind. 

    People make a distinction between head knowledge and heart knowledge. Having the facts is not the same as living the life which makes sense and meaning out of the facts. Head knowledge is having the facts. This process of making sense and meaning of our lives is heart knowledge. We know the facts of who God is and how God works. It is only when we make those facts a vital part of the way we live life that accept we then can put our trust in God. Our heart/mind allows us to trust God and aspects His judgment when in comes to our lives. At this point in our spiritual life with trust in God we no longer “lean not on your own understanding.” 

    Many people lean on their own understanding and can not put their trust in anyone let alone God. Their life becomes one where their stress level increases and their ability to cope decreases. The more their coping ability decreases the more stress is added to their lives. It’s only when we trust in the LORD with all our heart and lean not on our own understanding, that we will have the ability to successfully live life with a brain injury.

Pray and thank God for being the One whom we can trust.

Pray and thank God for how He provides for us by meeting our needs.

Pray and ask God to help us trust Him with our whole heart/mind and to give us the ability to cope even in our stressful times.