Tell Me What to Do, Lord
Tell Me What to Do, Lord
Proverbs 3:5-6 learning to hear God when you don't know what to do.
Tell Me What To Do, Lord
Proverbs 3:5–6 — and learning to hear God when you don't know what to do.
Summer has a way of loosening us. The days stretch long, the routines break, maybe there's a vacation that pulls us out of our normal patterns — and in that different space, we start to reflect. Old questions resurface. A lingering decision comes back into view. This past Sunday we welcomed guest preacher Scott Palmbush, who named the moment many of us know well: the one where you finally pray, I really need to hear your voice on this one, Lord. I don't know what to do. Tell me what to do.
Scott was honest about when that prayer tends to show up. Not when everything's going great — but when the big questions land. Should I take this job? Marry this person? Move? Quit? Which treatment should I follow? How much should I help my grandkids? In those moments we come to God hoping for a thumbs up or a thumbs down — a divine stamp of approval so we can get on with it. If that's where you are right now, Scott said, you are not alone.
To ground the conversation, he turned to a proverb many of us have half-memorized: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight" (Proverbs 3:5–6). Then he did something unexpected — he read it backward, from the bottom up.
"He will make your paths straight." Does your path feel straight today? Scott's didn't, and he guessed ours might not either — ups, downs, seasons that felt like going backward. He walked us to the Israelites, freshly rescued from Egypt and promptly wandering. The trip to Canaan was about 200 miles, a ten-day walk. It took them forty years. And the detour was on purpose: God led them the long way, Exodus tells us, because the short road ran through a war they weren't ready for (Exodus 13:17). God knew His people. A straight path, it turns out, doesn't mean easy or short or even straight. It means the way God intends.
"God wants to be more than an answering machine we use to reduce our anxiety. He wants a relationship with you."
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart." Here Scott got personal. Do we trust the actual God, or the God of our imagination — a kind of cosmic Magic 8-Ball we shake for answers to calm our nerves? (His wife, as a girl, used to close her eyes and picture a giant stoplight in the clouds, waiting for red, yellow, or green.) But God wants to be more than an answering machine. He wants a relationship, and guidance grows out of that relationship. Scott told us about leaving tiny Cutbank, Montana at eighteen for Stanford, where his simple faith got hammered in the classroom and on the football field — until he went home that summer, sat in his pastor's office, and admitted he wasn't sure any of it was true. His pastor didn't flinch. He told Scott that God wasn't afraid of his doubt. So Scott spent the summer walking and praying, and one day heard God as clearly as he ever has: I am the God you have known your entire life. You can trust in me. Trust, he reminded us, is built one moment at a time — and the older we get, the more data we have of God coming through.
"Lean not on your own understanding." Why the caution? Because what we want, and our skill at justifying it, is powerful. Two people can watch the same play and both be dead certain of opposite calls (Scott, still a little salty about the Dutch losing on penalties, could testify). Our perception gets colored by things we can't even see; sin seeps in, and the heart, Jeremiah says, is deceitful. So hearing God isn't mainly about God handing us instructions — it's a life of daily dependence. And we fight it like toddlers swatting away a helping hand, or like his son the day he got his license, itching to drive off alone. If we want guidance from God, Scott pressed, we have to actually want God's guidance — not just a rubber stamp on what we've already decided.
"In all your ways submit to him." This is surrender — holding everything loosely and offering it up. Jesus modeled it in Gethsemane: "Not as I will, but as you will." Scott borrowed a hard, freeing word from Ignatius of Loyola: hold health and sickness, riches and poverty, honor and dishonor with an open hand, wanting only what furthers God's purpose. Deep breath on that one.
So how do we actually listen? Scott left us with a handful of practices. Ask for help, and don't expect an instant answer. Create space — silence and solitude, or a walk, or yard work that quiets the mind. Soak in Scripture, the reliable address where God's voice is found. Ask friends to pray with you; community amplifies God's voice the way the Stanford dish magnifies a faint signal. Don't panic if you hear nothing — maybe God trusts you with the decision, because, as Dallas Willard put it, the main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish, it's the person you become. And remember He is a good parent, the kind who hands his child bread, not a stone. This week, name the decision in front of you, bring it to God honestly, and start listening — trusting that even a winding path, in His hands, is straight.
