Did you know that there are more than five senses? We have a sixth sense (no, not the one where we see dead people!) and a seventh sense, called the vestibular sense (which enables us to move and balance our bodies), and our proprioception sense (which has to do with body awareness). [1]
The way I understand it, these two senses allow us to safely move in and interact with the world around us.
When was the last time you swung yourself or someone else around in circles? Pretty difficult to walk in a straight line afterwards, right? Interestingly, our joints help us to discern how we are grounded in relation to our surroundings.
During the last few posts, we’ve spent some time exploring the fact that we were created to move, we were meant to immerse our bodies into the world, explore, feel, experience, and create meaningful connections.
How fascinating, though, that we are hard-wired with the capacity to protect ourselves. When you get a fright, your body has a way of trying to protect you. Thankfully we don’t fall over every time something throws our balance off a bit. Intuitively, we don’t bump our heads or limbs against everything within our vicinity. We have built-in defence mechanisms.
The same goes for our emotional and spiritual well-being. Intuitively, we often know when we are potentially in danger, or when we should tread with caution.
The Holy Spirit, God-within-us, the Spirit of Christ has, apart from many other functions, the function to alert us when we may be in danger of getting hurt or hurting others. Yes, power is often ascribed to the Spirit. Another important attribute is protection.
With the guidance of the Spirit, we have the agency to protect ourselves; and one of the reasons for that is that the Spirit will always gently remind us of the truth. If we allow the Spirit to work within us, influence us, and infiltrate our headspace, we have access to truth in any situation. I’ll give an example: I might have conflict with someone over something. From my (selfish) perspective, I am right and the other person is wrong. In a situation like this, if I allow the Spirit to protect me and also the other person, I will probably be persuaded that my argument (even though I may be factually right) is not going to protect the relationship. The truth is that there is a better way to reconcile. If I allow the Spirit to show me the better way, I will not only protect myself emotionally, but the relationship might even be better afterwards than it was before.
Speaking of truth, the truth is: in many (maybe even most) situations where we have been hurt before (relationally or sometimes because of our sin), we knew the truth beforehand but chose not to heed the truth, and so we lost track, we bumped our heads, we got hurt.
It is never God’s prerogative to keep us comfortable. It is, however, part of His will to help us not to hurt ourselves and others. The catch is: all of us also received our own free will. If we choose, instead of responding to the nudge of the Spirit, to let our own free will determine who we are, what we do, and who we become, it’s not fair to blame God for it.
[1] https://chicagooccupationaltherapy.com/articles/what-is-sensory-processing/
Anru Liebenberg 
Leave a comment