We seemed like grasshoppers

Twelve men go up to scout the promised land, and ten come back with a report soaked in fear. The land is good, they admit, but the people are giants and the cities are walled to the sky, and then comes the line that gives them away: we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. Read the order carefully, because the order is the whole lesson. They shrank in their own eyes first. The smallness began inside, and only then did they project it outward, assuming the giants must see them as they had already decided to see themselves. Disorientation distorts perception. Fear in the wilderness works like a warped lens: it magnifies the obstacles into giants and shrinks God's people into insects, and most quietly of all, it edits God out of the calculation altogether. Two men saw the identical land and read it differently. Caleb and Joshua looked at the same giants and the same walls and added the one fact the other ten had left out: the LORD is with us; do not fear them. Same facts. Different report. The difference was who they remembered was standing with them.

In the wilderness, fear will distort what you see, and the distortion is the danger more than the giants are. Fear magnifies the obstacles until they fill the sky. It shrinks you to a grasshopper, and the shrinking starts on the inside, in your own sight, before it ever reaches anyone else's. And most dangerous of all, it quietly edits God out of the picture, leaving you to do the math with the one factor missing that changes every sum. The disorientation, in part, is a crisis of perception, not only of circumstance. So the question is not whether the obstacles are real. They may well be; the giants were not imaginary. The question is whose report you will believe: the fear that leaves God out, or the faith that factors Him in. The same land yields two readings, and you live inside whichever one you accept. Refuse the grasshopper report. The giants may be real. So, more really still, is the LORD who is with you.