Reflections on Proverbs: Walking in Wisdom

For this week's proverb, we're starting with Proverbs 28:26,

He who trusts in his own mind is a fool;
but he who walks in wisdom will be delivered.

What, exactly, is walking in wisdom? And why would its opposite be trusting in one's own mind?

Another passage in Proverbs might help us here.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not rely on your own insight.
In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths.
Be not wise in your own eyes;
fear the Lord, and turn away from evil. (Proverbs 3:5-7)

Scripture tells us repeatedly to trust in the Lord. God's got it covered. (Remember last week's proverb?) When we trust our own minds, we're not exactly trusting God, are we? Our minds are prone to error; our knowledge is imperfect and limited, yet we draw conclusions and make judgments and act as if we know it all.

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Trusting our own mind means we're arrogant, not fearfully humble before God, and leads to evil. This evil can lead to horrible suffering: think of PTL and the fleecing of the poor, think of Westboro Baptist's actions at military funerals, think of the Boston marathon bombers.

Our arrogance in thinking we are right leads us to act in ways that are very, very wrong.

And when we use God as an excuse for that wrong, our sin multiplies.

We are, however, born into the world and live in the world. We cannot avoid drawing conclusions, making judgments, and acting decisively in big and small matters every single day. We have to trust at least some of our judgments...or we become paralyzed with indecision and fear.

I have a friend who became paralyzed while trying to decide which car to buy. It's a big decision, and she was struck with doubt that she deserved the safe, reliable, used car she could easily afford. She thought it was too nice for her. She prayed but didn't feel that God was giving her a solid answer.

Let's face it. God doesn't speak to us each morning out of our blow dryers (a modern burning bush!), telling us which car to buy or where to eat lunch or whether to buy organic apples.

How, then, do we balance the necessity of living in the world with the call to walk in wisdom with God?

At least part of the answer, I think, lies in humility and love. God created the universe and all matter in it. What a miracle! How small we are, how limited! We see darkly, for a brief time. He sees clearly for all time.

Yet He loves us, each and every one of us, and wants us to love Him and each other and ourselves. He has given us free will, a will to choose our path, a will to choose evil or good.

God trusts us to think about what the right thing might be, to come to Him prayerfully with our problems, to listen to Him, to study His Word for guidance, to live in Christian community with others to help guide us, and to act always in love and humility.

This, for me, is walking in wisdom, and I fall short of it every single day.


This Week's Reflections
How do you walk in wisdom? Did I leave something out of my list? Have you ever felt that you trusted too much in your own understanding and hurt someone as a result? Has your own error ever made your path crooked? If it's still not straight, what could you do to walk in wisdom again and trust Him to straighten that path for you?

Reflections on Proverbs: Love Covers All Offenses

I might as well come clean with you now and tell you what I think the entire Bible really means, what it boils down to for me, what my guiding philosophy is for reading it, for living it.

The Bible boils down to one word, best summed up in Latin: caritas.

Charity. Love. Lovingkindness.

Love God, and love your neighbor. If it's not love, it's not biblical. If it's not love, it's not God. If it's not love, it's not Christian.

The Bible is about relationship love. God's not alone. He created us in His image so He could love us and we could love Him. Perfectly.

We are not, however, perfect, are we? We can't see as clearly as He sees. Our limits make us insecure, uneasy, suspicious, worried, hateful, less like God all the time. Our human nature makes us willful and selfish. We lose faith, lose trust, lose our ability to love perfectly.

This week's proverb is in chapter 10, verse 12:

Hatred stirs up strife,
but love covers all offenses. (Proverbs 10:12)

Hatred creates conflict between people, and between us and God. Hatred separates and hurts. Sometimes we hate ourselves, sometimes we hate difference, sometimes we hate the world, sometimes we hate God. Sometimes we hate them all at once, eaten up with hate.

Love covers all offenses. Love covers them from sight, ignores them, or forgives them. Love is big enough for all offenses...no one is too offensive for God's love, and no one is outside God's forgiveness.

We have a hard time loving like God, though. We want to judge and punish, we want to exact revenge, we want to hold tight to grudges and grumbles and old hurts and new wounds.

On the cross, Jesus asked God to forgive his executioners, for they know not what they do.

You are a beloved child of God, and He will cover you.

Free will, however, means that we can't control what others feel or do. When others stir up strife with hate, making relationship impossible, we are not called to be doormats. Jesus chose his servanthood, and we aren't called to servitude or slavery. We are called to love justice (if laws have been broken, pursue right justice) and to pray for and forgive those who harm us, however hard it is, and however long it takes.

But if we love the God of Love, we know that He has plans for us to prosper. Sometimes, to love we have to remove ourselves from harm, take the opportunities God provides for good in our lives, for love.

Caritas.

Lovingkindness.

God's got it covered.


Where in your life are you holding onto those old hurts or new wounds, where could you cover offenses with love to renew and restore relationship love? Have you ever had a relationship broken beyond repair in a broken world? How can God's love cover your wounds without the broken human relationship being restored?

Reflections on Proverbs: The Beginning of Wisdom

The Book of Proverbs is part of the wisdom literature in the Bible. Back in Biblical times, no one confused Wisdom with its ugly step-child Standardized Book Learning. (Can you tell my children have gone through their third round of standardized testing this school year? Can you tell I'm not happy about that? Good. I'm not hiding that light under a bushel.)

Back to wisdom. In the olden times, before standardized tests and institutional text books and curriculum poorly designed by committees of politicians, wisdom came from experience, study of scripture, and word of mouth passed down from previous generations. Proverbs has lots of advice for children to listen to their elders.

According to Proverbs, wisdom begins with fear of God.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,
   and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. (Proverbs 9:10)

If you grew up in a "sinners in the hands of an angry God" church (you know who you are), then the word "fear" in this proverb may not strike you as odd. But for many of us modern-day, mainstream protestants, fear of the Lord is a hard concept.

We grew up with sweet Lord Jesus being our buddy, pal, and friend, a sort of avuncular chum, our model for behavior. Jesus loves us and is kind. He only gets angry at the money lenders in the temple. Sure, He gets impatient with the disciples and their stupidity from time to time, but He's not really a figure to incite fear in people.

God speaking out of a burning bush?  Traveling ahead of the Israelites in a thunder cloud? It's easier to fear the God of the Old Testament, isn't it?

But what, exactly, is the fear of the Lord that the proverb expresses? That's our contemplation for this week. When do you fear the Lord? What is the nature of that fear? Is it like your phobia of snakes or spiders or heights or being forced to watch Jersey Shore? How might fear make you wise? How might fear of things other than the Lord be good or bad for wisdom?

For me, fear of the Lord means being humble and awed in the face of His awesomeness. It means accepting His hugeness, His mystery, His infinite goodness and knowing in my bones that I'm just a tiny little bit of His vast and glorious creation. The beginning of wisdom is accepting that our human wisdom will never be His wisdom, accepting that we see only a piece of creation through a glass darkly, accepting that we are limited in every single way...physically, mentally, historically, spiritually, mortally.

When fear paralyzes us, I don't believe it's not fear of the Lord. God loves us and wants us to love Him and each other, and love is a verb. "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself." That love is active and compassionate.

A modern definition of intelligence is the facility of the mind's movement from big idea to little detail and back again. A smart person can move between the big perspective and the small details, the macro to the micro, and back again, allowing the details to influence the larger perspective and using the larger perspective to see the importance of the details. In other words, intellect is dynamic, a movement of thought, not static.

I believe God has perfection of that dynamic wisdom. He sees all, knows all, creates all...yet the fall of a sparrow matters to Him. We can never see all, and our contemplation of details is ever so limited. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to achieve wisdom as our abilities allow. We were, after all, created in His image.

But the more I know, the more I know that I know nothing. We should always be humble in our pursuit of wisdom. When wisdom begins in us, it begins with the awareness that the knowledge we seek so ardently and enthusiastically will never, ever be full and complete because we will never be God. And if our knowledge can't be complete, it will always be flawed, in a state of error, in a state of sin.

Wisdom begins with humility in the face of God's greatness. None of us is adequate in the face of God. All of us sin. Yet God is infinitely merciful, infinitely loving, infinitely forgiving.

Wisdom begins with healthy fear, not the paralyzing fear of phobia but the healthy fear of our own sin and God's own perfection.

That healthy fear grows our wisdom with a watering of mercy, love, and compassion for others and ourselves. That fear sets our feet on the path to His Kingdom.

What are your thoughts on fear of the Lord and wisdom? Do you let fear of things other than the Lord get in the way of wisdom? When do you, like Adam and Eve, want to claim the Knowledge of Good and Evil--God's own knowledge--for yourself? How are you inevitably humbled?

Please feel free to share your reflections in the comments.

Reflections on Proverbs: A Slack Hand

Many of the Proverbs deal with wealth, money, work, and poverty. Let's start with a very straightforward one:

A slack hand causes poverty,
   but the hand of the diligent makes rich. Proverbs 10:4

On the literal level, this proverb seems fairly accurate to life, don't you think? If you're lazy, unwilling to work, you will certainly have a hard time paying your bills, and if you willingly work hard, you are much more likely to have what you need and probably a lot of what you want.

We can, of course, think of exceptions to this rule...especially in today's economy. Think about the children of the very rich. Their hands may be as slack as dead fish, but they will never want for wealth. Think about the hard worker who suffers a disabling accident. She may be as diligent as she can be, but her disability will likely drag down her economic situation.

Still, as a general rule, Proverbs 10:4 works pretty well.

What happens, however, if we stretch beyond the literal with this verse? Doesn't its advice not to be lazy apply to all sorts of endeavors in life? Think of the divorce rate. How many divorces come from "slack hands" in a marriage? Certainly not all divorces--plenty result from truly bad behavior or legitimate differences. But I've watched several marriages fall apart over far, far less than infidelity or differences of opinion about having children.

Some couples just get lazy, take each other for granted, let love slip into mere tolerance or even open contempt, and then toss in the towel.

A slack hand causes poverty of love and partnership.

Those of us who've been married a while know how much hard work it is to overcome irritation at petty things, to compromise and to pay attention, to forgive and to encourage, to work through troubles and to keep moving forward. Two diligent hands--or hearts--working at maintaining love cause marriage to be richer and more stable.

Other areas of life follow this same advice quite neatly, especially our spiritual life. Get slack with prayer and your prayer life suffers. Work diligently at serving others, and you will certainly be rewarded.

Over the next week, think about the many areas in our lives that suffer poverty when we get lazy about them. Think about those areas that stay rich when we give them due diligence. Where do you need to be more diligent in your life?

An Invitation to Share: If you feel moved to do so, please share your reflections in the comments. You never know when your thoughts will spark someone else to deeper understanding or discovery!

Computer Crash

Just finished reading Ecclesiastes, and find that I'm living the Teacher's belief that all is vanity. Well, perhaps not all, but counting on your computer not to die certainly is silly.

I hope to be up and running again soon. My functioning mini-laptop is sssslllloooowwww and awkward for longer typing sessions. But I WILL BE BACK ASAP!

Reflections on Proverbs, Introduction

How It Began

I am currently taking a Disciple 4 Bible study with our pastor, and last week we read the second half of Proverbs. When the discussion started, I said, "I think Proverbs would best be read one proverb per day to give you time to digest each one. Reading a lot at once is overwhelming. It would be a good iPhone app to have."

Pastor replied, "Well, you do have a blog."

Doh.

So here I am, starting a series of posts on the book of Proverbs. The wisdom books, I think, particularly benefit from contemplation and balanced reasoning. Is that not, after all, part of their intent?

What We'll Do

I've always appreciated pithy aphorisms, and as I read Proverbs, I found myself nodding or shaking my head, seeing holes in the reasoning and seeing how some were more universally true than others. Some are specific to the times in which they were written; others are as true today as then. Some are useful and wise in certain situations, but it is easy to see other situations in which they wouldn't apply well at all.

Let's explore them together!

The plan is to move around the book as the spirit moves me, focusing on a single proverb or a cluster of related proverbs in each post. I will quote a proverb from the Revised Standard Version translation, and then reflect on what it might mean to us today.

An Invitation to Share

I strongly encourage you to share your own feelings on each proverb in the comments of this blog.* Being heavily steeped in the Methodist tradition, I'm a big believer in the importance of using one's Christian community to gain deeper understanding of Scripture. I hope you learn from what I have to say, but I'm no expert or Bible scholar. We can learn so much from each other, no matter what denomination we belong to or how long or short a time we've been Christians.  Everyone brings a valuable--and different--perspective to the conversation! 

Even if you are a complete newcomer to Bible study, you have much of value to share. You never know when your basic question or observation might spark someone with years of study to deepen in insight. And by reading the comments of those who have studied in depth, you will learn as well.

I hope you will join us on a proverbial adventure.

May God richly bless those who study His Word!



*A word of peace: I will delete any comments that do not follow a spirit of mutual respect and lovingkindness. Hateful speech, insults, partisan politics, or rudeness will not be tolerated. Differences of opinion, when respectfully expressed, are very much appreciated, as are expressions of denominational differences.

Hangar Time

Rest. Recuperation. Rejuvenation.

Sabbath rest was meant to be a blessing to God's people (although the sentence of death for its violation always struck me as a tad harsh). Modern medicine shows how important rest is, reinforcing that which God knew from the beginning. If children don't get enough rest, they don't grow well, their brains don't develop properly, they don't do well in school.

In today's stressful, busy world, we don't get enough rest, and our brains are forced to put too much on auto-pilot. As we fly through life, we miss so much happening right under us, even in our own brains. Habits develop without our conscious brain knowing...until something blows up in our face and then we realize how careless we've become. Our flight becomes uneven, bumpy, hazardous.

We crash and need repair.

Gratitude steps in with a hydraulic lift and blow-torch to fix our self-inflicted mess.

Cultivating gratitude means we protect and respect our blessings so they can be shared with others. To love your neighbor as yourself you have to love yourself. Punishment, recrimination, self-loathing...these are not usually helpful.

Hangar time is critical when you have crashed. It allows you to love yourself, nurture and recuperate, regain your strength to take flight again.

But to keep from crashing in the first place, schedule your hangar time regularly.

When you take regular hangar time for routine maintenance and self-care, you'll be much less likely to crash in the first place.

Contemplating, savoring blessings so you can move forward with sharing them...that's what hangar time is all about.

Do you need hangar time? Perhaps you just need five minutes of it, sipping coffee or tea on your back porch while birds sing in the trees. Perhaps most of your life is flying smooth and level, but one area of it is falling apart on auto-pilot. You might only need hangar time for work, or home, or a single relationship that's become more about resentment and irritation than loving kindness.

Take the hangar time you need regularly. You'll fly better for it.