The Ring in Your Nose

"The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the LORD is safe." Proverbs 29:25

The fear of man is a snare, and I want you to sit with what a snare actually is, because we hear the word and think of something small. A snare is not a warning. A snare is a trap, and a trap has one purpose, which is to hold you where you are so that something else can decide what happens next.

But there is a commentary that goes further than that. It says the snare in this verse is not only a trap but a lead. Like a ring through the nose.

That is why you see rings in the noses of bulls. It is not decoration. It is control. An animal that could break a man in half is walked wherever you want it to go, by a ring in the softest part of its face, and it goes, because the alternative hurts more.

Fearing what other people think of you is that ring.

And this is what fools us, because it does not feel like a trap. It feels like a carrot. It feels like something good is out ahead of us and we are almost there, and if we just get a little more approval, a little more of their good opinion, we will finally be able to rest. So we lean forward. We take another step. We keep our head down and we go where we are led.

The carrot is the disguise. The ring is the mechanism.

And you will not feel it. That is the whole point of it. Nobody who is being led by the nose feels the ring. They only feel the pull, and they call it ambition, and they call it service, and sometimes they even call it love.

So here is the only question that gets to the bottom of it.

Who has been walking you around?