On the Way to Wonder

Oswald Chambers advises, “It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, but another thing to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight, no one paying the remotest attention to us.” That sure sounds like one of the challenges of “sheltering in place” during this pandemic, crisis! Proverbs 8 meanwhile focuses on wisdom, ending the chapter, “Blessed is the man who listens to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway. For whoever finds me finds life and receives favor from the Lord. But whoever fails to find me harms himself, all who hate me love death.” That’s pretty intense! So I looked up, on the internet of course, how Jewish thought formed about wisdom. Kaufmann Kohler wrote about wisdom that it is “practical intelligence, the mental grasp which observes and penetrates into the nature of things, and also the ability skillfully to perform difficult tasks. The former faculty is intuitive, the latter creative.” Wisdom connects deep understanding with artistic skill and is a more universal concept than Torah or knowledge. Hence, Daniel whom we are studying was one of the wise men while captive in Babylon. How does this apply? As we shelter in this crisis and feel perhaps isolated with partial contact with friends to share the journey, and as we long to gather together to hear God’s word shared and explored, may we have grateful hearts to have time to ponder the wisdom written in his Word, shared through the media, and inscribed in nature outside our window. May we be wise and embrace life as it comes to us today! Blessings!

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2020 at 7:25 am and is filed under Spiritual Vitamins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.