Don't trust your instincts

The things we don’t talk about with others are often the same things we don’t examine about ourselves in private.

Instincts. Motives. The impulses we’ve enfolded into our understanding of ourselves — the wallpaper in our everyday — such that we don’t bring them into our conversation with God, and we surely don’t examine them for a remodel.

Yet as these days in the world get darker, more narrow, could it be that the unexamined ten or twenty percent of our hearts and lives will internally drive us more than the eighty percent in our viewfinder?

And further … could it be that these instincts and predispositions drive us more than we realize — and yet are not to be trusted?

You see, we’ve had a living laboratory in our Hagerty home, with four of our seven having lived some portion of their lives as orphans. The instincts you learn as a parentless child teach you to self-preserve, trust almost no one, and shame yourself into the kind of behavior that might ensure you won’t ever be parentless again.

And, friends, those instincts die hard.

But they aren’t exclusive to former orphans. My kids teach me about myself. (And about you.)

Just last week, I had a brush with my instincts. It looked like this …

I woke to a 27 degrees morning, with ice outside coating our back-porch furniture and our trees. Half-awake, I dug through my overflowing sock bin to find my wools again and remembered that my fingers move slower in winter. Winter re-emerged ruthlessly after weeks of what we had claimed as our early spring.

By 9:30 am, my mind was like those trees — coated, heavy. A child had struggled through the weekend, and even those (too short) wee morning hours of quiet didn’t gift me the aha! moment I needed to solve that struggle. I still didn’t have a clue about our way through.

I watched myself do what my muscle memory tells me every time I feel the silence of God about a particular subject: analyze, consider all the angles, mentally review mentor’s notes from the past, even dig books out of the basement book closet. Meanwhile, I’m still changing diapers, handling family logistics, and responding to texts, all while my brain is passively problem-solving … always problem-solving.

I have dragons to slay in my mind, but barely enough energy to hunt for matching gloves and hats for the little people. I went through the motions of our everyday rhythm of walking the path through the woods at 9:30. We dragged out the snow boots we’d prematurely tucked away on the garage shelf for next November and filled our lungs with winter’s elixir.

Throughout our morning walk, my mind wanted to super-compute strategies and solutions for my struggling child. This is my instinct. I wanted to pull from the archives in my mind of the books I’d read and conversations I’d had with mentors — yet here I was ducking ice-laden evergreen branches and being pulled by mittened hands towards the big footprints in the muddy snow (because under-five-ers love footprints) and answering eight-year-old’s questions about the new buds that accidentally sprouted last week. Would the trees die from seasonal confusion?

And as I did all of this … “I am doing a new thing” popped into my head from Isaiah 43:19.

Next, this verse came to my mind: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9).

This small-day, small problem illustrated a much bigger reality. My instincts told me to continuously problem solve — to learn, implement, and adjust so that life in our home could “return to normal.”

But what if my instincts aren’t to be trusted?

In this little moment of my day (I couldn’t even call it a little moment in my life, it was that small), I saw that bigger war at work: my instincts to “solve it all” versus God’s thoughts.

Dozens of times a day, one of these two will win out and take space and shape in my mind … thus claiming more length and shape within my life.

A cause and effect is operating in the way we see the world that, unless examined, will forever have a pull on us.

The former orphan grows instincts around distrust — at any moment, just as in their childhood, the ones they need most might betray them. If it operates only in the backdrop of their seemingly-healthy young adult (or adult) life, this distrust goes unexamined and crystallizes to a fundamental instinct. But that instinct then creates new pathways of seeing the world and people and God. That instinct becomes more than a minor influence.

Romans 12:2 says, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”

If unfettered, my instincts tell me that when I mess up, second chances are limited —so I white-knuckle my way through every potential failure. They tell me that my friends might leave me if I miss an essential moment or opportunity to care for them — so I respond accordingly. They tell me that the love I desperately long for will come and stay when I’m most lovable. My instincts tell me to make myself needed, so I’m … needed and not forsaken by those I love most.

This is only to name a few.

And in a 24-hour stretch, more than a few of these instincts lobbies for my attention.

The mind that informed my decision-making and friend-forming and world-viewing in my teens and twenties requires a consistent renewal in order for me to discern the ways of God.

Friends, in these darkened days, could it be that the places where we are reacting and responding and leading and reaching — all from what we’ve known from our youth — aren’t actually serving us, but instead are leaving us anxious and tight-wound and angry. All because they are what we’ve known.

It may be time to begin examining the twenty percent, the cobwebbed corners of our thinking that we’ve supposed to have little effect on our relationship with God, with our friends, with our spouse, with our community — but which are perhaps taking up more space than we realize.

He loves to do a new thing, even in old, long-forged ways of thinking. Try Him.

Our maturing, well-forged prayers in this next season could be ones like:

… help me not to trust my way, but Yours God

… teach me about me and my orphaned ways of responding that aren’t allowing for Your new perspective, Your fresh ways of seeing

… show me where my instincts have been history-formed rather than God formed

… tell me about me. Instruct my heart, according to how You see me

… renew my mind, my way of doing things, my way of seeing things

{This month, we’re talking about story and the subtle power our personal history carries in how we see God and relate to Him and see others and relate to them over in my more-private writing space, SOAR.}

Until next month,

Sara