Blind Trust

How do you deal with people who try to deceive you?

Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness; and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people.  - Hebrews 5:1-3

When I scroll through the growing number of emails in my Junk folder, I do so with confidence that the computer has got it right and filtered out all the bad stuff for me.

The problem with that approach is that I tend to trust the Inbox too much that way.  I assume everything in that folder is good.

It isn't.

For some reason I am barraged by ads that all look the same, as though one email marketer has been hired by thousands of swindlers posing as legitimate businesses.  I never heard of some of these companies before.

But the most devious of all is the security alert, the email posing as a warning from one of the cloud accounts I use to store my files.  Someone has used your account and it needs to be reverified.  These are the ones I could almost take seriously.

What if it is real and I ignore it?

In today's reading from Hebrews, we are reminded of our weaknesses as humans, and our need to reach out to those appointed by God for help.

But even those designated as high priests, he tells us, are subject to weakness, just as we are, so we need to do more than just trust blindly.

I believe we need to discern the truth for ourselves, relying on all the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit to guide us.

Just as we are barraged by so many emails, we are also barraged by too many voices telling us what we should believe and how we should act.  We can go crazy.

What we need, I think, is a little quiet time with God, a respite from the day to take a moment and pray for His guidance, before we rush to conclusions about what is right and what is wrong.

Perhaps if we all did that today, tomorrow would be a little less insane.

More to come...