You Already Know… So…

There’s an art dealer who can tell a fake from the real thing in an instant.

There’s a tennis coach who can tell if a player is going to double-fault before the ball hits the racket.

There’s a psychologist who can tell if a couple will get a divorce after observing them together for only a few minutes.

Snap judgments, intuition, instincts, and hunches have all played important roles in our lives. And they’re probably right more times than they’re wrong. Doctors call this our adaptive unconscious, and it’s capable of some pretty amazing perceptions.

There are a bunch of reasons why we don’t trust our intuition more – one of the more important ones is because we often don’t want to. When our instinct tells us we said something we shouldn’t have to that sales clerk we are more inclined to shrug it off and try to forget about it than choose the harder option of apologizing.

On this upcoming Good Shepherd Sunday we are reminded that an aspect of our relationship with Jesus is that we instinctively know his voice – and, like sheep, do well to obey it: if we talk to God with our words, God talks to us with intuition.

And we know that we do well to follow that intuition not just because it can lead us down the right path, but also by doing so we hone the skill of hearing from God and thus make it easier to do the next time and the time after that.

As we go through our day, what is our intuition saying to us? How are we being guided? What’s the shepherd saying to the sheep?