Tiny Devotional for Monday, 08-02-2021

A great good morning to all my friends and neighbors in Internet Land! And to family members who have dropped by, pizza.

Discretion will watch over you,
Understanding will guard you,
Proverbs 2:11, NASB


This is a part of the latter portion of an “If-Then” statement. In other words, it’s conditional. So don’t expect discretion and understanding to drop out of the sky in random fashion.

I first learned about If-Then statements when I started playing around with programming in BASIC in 1982. I was, LITERALLY, playing around; I took an existing program, and modified it, and that’s how I learned how to shoot a duck with a keyboard-launched arrow. Later, I found more productive outlets for programming, some rather sophisticated.

Long before that, though, I was living in an If-Then world, and I still am. For the first few decades, I didn’t understand it, and I liked it even less. That’s because I lived with people who loved me, and desired to protect and train me, and one of the ways they did that was to mediate the interactions I had with the world. I was given food, shelter, and clothing, with minimal demands made on me. Over time, my responsibilities went from zero to self-sufficiency, and I didn’t die along the way. We call that “raising kids.”

That’s how God raises us to be His kids, too. The “If” part of the statement is found in verses 1-4; if we listen, attend, seek, and cry out for wisdom, it will be ours.

Think about that: how many times in your life have any bad consequences come your way that you REALLY were ignorant of? Isn’t it usually the case that we know, but think we can get away with it?

Peace be on your household.

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