Hubby and I were out walking again, and I was a few steps ahead of him with my stick to wave down any spider webs. I stopped to pick up a fallen branch and no sooner had hubby
walked past me that he walked right into a big cobweb. He didn’t pause when I did, and wait until I resumed my duties.
Re-read Part One HERE if you need to, but this metaphor is about cultivating a belief that God is going before us to clear away obstacles from our day, and our lives. (Given my own background of religious trauma, also shared in part one, I'm sensitive to those who still suffer from religious hurt. If you don’t believe in God,
or it's a sore place, please substitute whatever you attribute universal favor to, and if you don’t believe in that, I urge you to try again as an experiment. Message me if you want help, or re-read Part One HERE to see where I used to be on this.)
Had hubby been willing to be patient and wait for “God,” aka me with the spider stick, to resume path-clearing, he could have avoided the spider web. We are so impatient! It only took me a few seconds to stop and pick up the
stick I was after, before I continued waving down any possible cob webs.
We get in our rhythms and don’t want to stop for anyone or anything. Self-sufficiency takes over and we say, Oh we'll be fine. Or
worse, we think God probably wasn't doing all that much anyway. So we ignore the internal prompt to take a pause, and then boom, we walk right into the obstacle God had slowed us down to avoid.
Many of us were raised to
be strong and independent. Some may even have been taught that leaning on others was weakness. Others of us may have learned that depending on anyone or anything didn't yield what we hoped it would, so we had to become strong and self-sufficient, never fully relying on anyone. And that served us for a while, until it didn't.
It takes a lot of strength to surrender our will and our lives to God (or as I said in Part One, to anything else besides my own self-will). It takes courage to be still and wait. It takes self-restraint to allow, or even acknowledge, outside help.
We don't have to understand why we're being guided to slow down and wait until further instruction. If that's what we're sensing we should do, we do it anyway and see what happens. When we honor our inner nudges, three things increase: our faith, the muscle of intuition, and our sense of discernment.
We learn to trust the rhythm of our internal guidance when it says go, slow down, speed up, or stop. Or when it says yes, no, or not now.
I saw an interesting reel on social media where a nature researcher was filming bobcats when he noticed they went into stealth mode and started creeping ever so quietly toward an area. When he moved his lens over to see what they were after, he saw two hikers. The cats crept closer and closer until they
were within five feet of the people, but they remained undetected.
Those people never knew they were being watched or pursued (and maybe, protected). They never knew of any possible danger. The bobcats apparently
lost interest and retreated. The humans never had to be confronted with bobcats or even be nervous or fearful—the situation was taken care of for them. They went about enjoying their hike that day, experiencing favor and protection they never even knew about.
When we learn to trust our inner compass, even when we don't understand it, we see more and more that things tend to work out for us. Later on, the reason for a nudge may become clear, or it may never become clear. We don't need to know what it was about or what we may have been spared from for it to still be true, and something that helped us—although when we do find out, it is faith-building, offering encouragement to keep walking the way of trust.
Ironically, as I was walking our trails and dictating this inspirational thought to share with you into my phone, as soon as I said, “Keep walking the way of trust,” I heard dogs or coyotes off in the not-too-distant distance.
I immediately looked around for a bigger stick, ha ha, but decided to follow my own advice and keep walking the way of trust. They were pretty far away, anyway, and I was almost home. Most of the time, we’re safe. Most of the time, we don’t need to carry a big stick.
What can it hurt to experiment believing in this idea?
I hope you enjoy your amazing day today too, trusting the way is being cleared for you. Believing that
favor is going before you. And watching for gifts in unexpected places. The more we seek, the more we find!
