I glanced out the window. I was sitting in my recliner in the den and looking through the kitchen blinds and could only see the top half of the trees. When I looked up, I either saw the top of a piece of farm equipment pass by the fence line on my property or I saw the wind blow across the tree limbs turning the soft colored undersides of the leaves over into floating shadows. I did’t know which thing I saw until I thought about it. There was no reason for a harvesting combine to be on my property in the fall, much less in early summer, and wind was indeed blowing the limbs.
What caught my attention causing me to look out the window in the first place was what I thought was a miss-located piece of farm equipment headed my way. But what was actually there on my property were trees being blown by the wind. What often seems obvious is not obvious at all. What makes it seem obvious are the assumptions we bring to our interpretations. Assumptions are beliefs. Assumptions are like the wind blowing limbs in a certain way as to look like the top of a machine moving by. The assumptions do not have a basis in fact substantial enough to conclude every matter; but we are not able to process all the information, circumstances, and stimuli that we encounter so we must make assumptions that we feel we can trust in order to narrow down the number of things we have to give our attention to in a given day.
Many of the assumptions we make will be faulty. Sometimes we will draw conclusions we later regret. Sometimes we will believe we saw things that were not actually true. Therefore, on occasion, we must question those assumptions — or else we find ourselves chasing after illusionary phenomenon, or worse yet, fail to get out of the way of something that could run us over.
Time usually will tell but we do not always have the time before we step into a trap. When we do find ourselves in that trap, the wonderful thing to default to in out thinking when it comes to drawing conclusions, is that if we are striving to follow Jesus and fall into a trap, then the promise made by the capable Savior, is that there will be a way out of the way of lasting danger.
Trusting the Savior in my experience is the main thing that time has testified to me to be trustworthy indeed.
Stephen Williams 6/22/24