On what "discernment" really means

At college, we heard a lot about "discernment." Generally, many of my peers used it to justify seeing raunchy movies or listening to profanity-filled music. "Ah, but we're discerning!" they would say. "So we know that behavior/language is wrong." Which always seemed to be bad logic.

Recently, I've been thinking about living in the present, and what that means. How not to hold past sins for which you have repented against yourself, how not to imagine future events and plan your life to meet or avoid them. That sort of thing.

Part of my attempt to live in the present has been trying not to assign motives for anyone ("Oh, so-and-so did this because..."), but just to deal with their direct actions and words. And then at the same time, not to accept anyone else's justification or condemnation of the words and actions of others, because that could be just them reading motives, too. Knowing when to write someone off as well-intentioned but wrong. Knowing that just because someone questions your judgment/motive/actions doesn't mean you're wrong. Being willing to accept correction, but distinguishing that from unfounded/misguided criticism. This is where true discernment comes into play.

In one of my favorite books, Winnie-the-Pooh (or, more properly, The House at Pooh Corner), there is a chapter in which Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet and Rabbit are lost in the forest, and they've been going around and around in circles, and finally Pooh brings this up and Rabbit goes off on his own to prove he could find his way right back to where they are, and of course he gets lost. But then a little later Pooh says to Piglet, "Let's go home," and when Piglet asks how he can know the way, Pooh says his stomach can hear his honeypots calling to it. The line I'm especially thinking of as applicable is: "I couldn't hear them properly before, because Rabbit would talk, but if nobody says anything except those twelve pots, I think, Piglet, I shall know where they're calling from."

If God speaks in a still, small voice, hearing it will not always be easy. We hear the words of others, or the words from our minds, and we are so quick to assume that God is in them. But sometimes discernment lies in stopping our ears to all of the outer and inner voices, for regarding them as the fallible human sounds they are, and for sitting in silence to wait. To wait and to listen, until the day He appears.

Maranatha.

"My soul waits in silence for God only;
From Him is my salvation."
~~~
Psalm 62:1