Judgement and Directions

Tonight, in our family scripture study, we read some advice to use both "judgment and the directions of the Spirit" (D&C 62:8). I believe that it's important to be able to follow either. There are times when God trusts us to follow our own judgement, and there are times when we need to trust God and follow His. We need to learn how to hear, recognize, and follow the voice of the Spirit, but we also need to learn how to make our own decisions in the absence of God's guidance. Both skills are essential for good decision-making. We can't always trust our own judgement, and we can't always count on God to tell us everything that we should do. When either our own judgement or the directions of the Spirit are lacking, we need to be able to lean more heavily on the other. Each for their own reasons, neither of them are always completely reliable. To make it safely through life, we need to be able to confidently follow either of them, so we need to learn how to trust them both.