Walk in God's Ways

September 5th 2025

When I was in high school my dad traveled a lot from our home in Taiwan to China – I’d say he was gone about one third of the year. Before he left, he’d often sit me and my brother down to remind us that while he was away, we needed to be extra responsible by supporting Mom and stepping up when needed. I can’t confirm whether or not that’s what we actually did, but we did try.

And when we did inevitably encounter some scenario in which we needed to ‘step up’ – take the motorcycle to the repair shop or help Mom lift something heavy – we always considered the inevitable question: What would Dad do in this situation? How would HE do it?

One evening at about 9:00 PM my brother came downstairs from his room on the roof of our row house.

“Joey, there’s a bat in my room.”

We could both see the physical manifestations of bat-fuelled adrenaline in my mom’s face. She immediately started rummaging through a drawer.

“Mom, what are you looking for?”

She emerged with a bandana, which she furiously tied around her head “to keep the bat out of her hair,” which was a beautiful 1990s perm.

What would Dad do in this situation?

Call the exterminator? Open the doors and hope it left? Just leave it and sleep downstairs? Definitely not. He’d just solve the problem. He always just tries to solve the problem.

After a few rounds of trying to swat the bat with tennis rackets (which was hilarious), we finally got a big bed sheet and slowly made our way from one end of the room to the other.

Voila.

Bat captured. Released humanely. Perm saved.

This semester, our school theme is to Walk in God’s Ways.

But what does that mean?

Proverbs 3:5-6, our theme verse for the semester, beautifully articulates it:
Trust the Lord with all your heart
And do not lean on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge him
And he will make straight your paths.

Walking in God’s ways takes trust. It takes us not depending on our ways, but humbly submitting to his. But very interestingly, according to verse 6, it also takes “acknowledgement.”

Yet what does it mean to “acknowledge him” in all our ways?

The Hebrew word here is a really interesting one: yada. Yada him in all your ways.

Typically, yada is translated not as “acknowledge” but more simply as “know.”

From Psalm 139:
O LORD, you have searched me and know [yada] me! You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar. You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.

Incredibly, it’s even the same word used in Genesis 4:1 (!):

And Adam knew [yada] Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.

What God is saying in Proverbs 3:6 is that following him requires not just trust but also a deep and intimate knowledge of how He does things.

My brother and I, in the absence of our dad, had a deep and intimate yada of his ways. We knew how he would approach nearly every situation because of this yada – an experienced, life-together bond that transcended facts and feelings.

God calls us to the same. And the incredible thing is, we can deeply know him through his lived life on earth in the person of Jesus Christ.

My challenge to you parents is the same as the one I’ve given to our students in chapel at the beginning of the year.

Do you deeply and truly yada Jesus? Do you spend time with him in the gospels and in prayer, meditating on his ways? Are your days spent with him, seeking to walk in the way he might walk?

See I John 2:4-6. See Matthew 7:21-23.

My encouragement to you is to spend time this semester as a family, alongside us, exploring what it means to “walk in God’s ways” – and I encourage you to keep the person of Jesus as your focal point. This semester, let’s seek to more truly yada Jesus together.

—J.T.