“A wise man sees evil and hides himself.”  (Proverb 22:3)

Frustrated that an armed suspect got away, I needed answers. A large manhunt the previous night proved unsuccessful, even though a perimeter should have prevented his escape. But the search ended with no arrest. Everyone figured he was long gone. The following morning, I returned to his last known location. Perhaps he left shoe prints or tire tracks in the dirt field.

I called my partner to let him know what I was up to. I wanted someone to know where I was, just in case. I searched the field for clues but nothing caught my eye. While I stood a few yards from my truck, a strange feeling hit me. A dark foreboding suddenly came over me. It was enough to make me rush back to the truck and leave the area. Rattled, I blamed my imagination and soon forgot about it. 

Later that night my partner called me. He said the suspect stole a car and drove to another jurisdiction. He shot a cop there. “Where did he steal the car?” I asked. It was a short distance from the field I searched earlier that day. He must have been hiding nearby. I wondered if my intuition perceived a legitimate threat, or if it was all coincidence.  

The brain is an amazing machine. The subconscious mind can perceive subtle signs of danger long before my conscious brain does. The resulting uneasy feeling is my intuition. It’s a warning that something is wrong. I’ve learned to listen to it. As Gavin De Becker writes in his book, The Gift of Fear, “Intuition is always right in at least two important ways; It is always in response to something. It always has your best interest at heart.”

God didn’t give man the sharpest teeth or the biggest claws. He did, however, equip us with the biggest brain. That brain has an awesome ability to keep me out of harm’s way if I listen to it. Whether I like it or not, there is evil in the world and the heart of man. There are people who, given the chance, would do me harm. My brain is designed to alert me to trouble, often before I realize trouble is near.

The Lord says “Be shrewd as serpents, innocent as doves.” That’s not an either/or command. It’s both/and. Be shrewd because we live as “sheep among wolves.” God gave me intuition as “wolf defense.” Intuition may not always interpret circumstances accurately, but it is for my protection. De Becker writes, “No animal in the wild suddenly overcome with fear would spend any of its mental energy thinking, ‘It’s probably nothing.’ …We, in contrast to every other creature in nature, choose not to explore—and even to ignore—survival signals.”

Gut feelings warn me when something in my environment seems off to my subconscious brain. It’s the brain silently comparing my situation to past experiences. Hunters know the pattern. The deer in the field lifts his head and looks around when he senses danger. The deer that runs may live. The one that ignores his senses puts his head back down and dies with corn in its mouth. It reminds me to be shrewd. My intuition has a purpose. I pay attention to what it tells me.