Today’s Devotional
A project manager sits at her kitchen table at 6 a.m., laptop open, three browser tabs full of spreadsheets she built alone. She has been awake since four. The budget is wrong, the timeline is collapsing, and she knows, in the quiet before anyone else wakes up, that she missed something two weeks ago and has been patching it ever since. She will not ask for help. Asking feels like proof that she should never have been trusted with the project in the first place.
Proverbs 11:14 does not say what we expect it to say. We read “many advisers” and hear a suggestion, a nice-to-have, a footnote about teamwork. But the proverb sets “many advisers” opposite a nation falling. The stakes are that high. The writer of Proverbs looked at how kingdoms actually survive and concluded that the decisive factor was the number of honest voices the ruler was willing to hear. Victory, the verse says, is built by a room where more than one person is allowed to speak.
The woman at the kitchen table is not running a kingdom. But the instinct is the same: I will hold this alone because asking feels like failing. The verse reframes that instinct entirely. Seeking counsel is the architecture of winning, the load-bearing structure beneath every good outcome. The people who ask are the ones who understand what competence actually requires.
Time to reflect
These questions are worth sitting with before the day fills your hands with tasks.
- When was the last time you asked someone for advice on a decision you had already made internally, and what kept you from asking sooner?
- Is there a specific area of your life right now where you are carrying something alone because you believe no one else can carry it as well as you can?
- Think of a person whose counsel you trust. What stops you from reaching out to them this week?
- Have you confused being capable with being sufficient? Where is the line between those two things in your own life?
Prayer Of The Day
Lord, I confess that I have treated self-sufficiency as a virtue and asking for help as a concession. I have carried decisions alone and called it strength when it was closer to pride. Teach me what the proverb already knows: that victory belongs to rooms full of voices, not to a single mind working late and afraid to admit what it cannot see. Give me the courage to open a conversation I have been avoiding because it would require me to say, “I do not know.” Let me trust that you built wisdom to live in community, not in isolation. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen.
Strengthening Faith
Asking is a practice, and practices begin with small, deliberate steps.
- Identify one decision you are currently making alone. Before the day ends, name it out loud to someone you trust, even if you only say, “I have been thinking about this and I would value your perspective.”
- Read Exodus 18:13-26, where Jethro watches Moses exhaust himself judging every dispute alone and tells him to delegate. Notice how Moses responds: he listens.
- At lunch, put your phone face down and ask a coworker or friend a genuine question about their life. Stay in the answer for five minutes without redirecting the conversation to yourself.
- Write down three decisions you made in the last year entirely on your own. Circle the one that would have been stronger if you had asked someone before choosing.
- Skip one task on your to-do list today, deliberately. Leave it undone. Notice what happens when you allow a gap instead of filling every space with your own effort.
- Before you go to bed, thank God for one specific person whose honesty has shaped a decision you made. Then tell that person tomorrow.
Today Wisdom
Victory, the proverb says. The word lands with the weight of something engineered, not stumbled into. Advisers are the beams and joints of every sound structure. The strongest buildings are the ones designed to hold weight in more than one place.
