Trust in the Lord with all your heart,
and do not lean on your own understanding.
6 In all your ways acknowledge him,
and he will make straight your paths. – Proverbs 3:5-6
Wisdom is the strongest theme in Proverbs, and is a virtue that is scant in the world today. And that is ironic, of course, because information is more accessible now than it has ever been. But there is a great difference between wisdom and info. Perhaps what Proverbs hammers home more than anything is that wisdom is by knowing God and acknowledging one’s own limitations in terms of real understanding. The result of this pursuit is humility, a virtue often extolled in both the Old and New Testaments.
Marci and I watched a new documentary on those terrible murders in Idaho in 2022. True crime documentaries are all the rage and I don’t know if they’re good or not to consume, but we were interested, and so we turned it on. There was one major takeaway for us that was unavoidable: the Internet can be an awful place! Families and friends talked about how hurtful it was for everybody and their grandma to be posting conspiracy theories and blaming innocent people, even blaming the victims! This has been a major problem for those affected at Sandy Hook and even after 9/11. And what I’m afraid of is that the Internet gives this massive, Wild-West style forum for the very thing that the writer of the Proverbs worried about: we lean on our own understanding far too much. We love being experts on anything, because it fuels our pride, but perhaps even more wickedly, it makes us feel this “at least I’m not as bad as this person over here.” In human history, we’ve always done this of course – to exert power to feel superior, but without technology, we’ve had to do this in large systems that move slowly over time. Now we can do this with a click of a button, and it is very dangerous. You can become an expert on anything in no time! Read an article, listen to a podcast, or consume a blog and you have instant wisdom! But this is not the way of wisdom according to the Proverbs.
What if we were people committed to knowing what we can know, and then being experts on nothing else. Here are categories of things you can truly know, according to the Proverbs, and according to the Bible as a whole: You can know the Lord! You can know your family very, very well. You know become an expert in your particular vocation with time, effort, and practice, and that is a great gift from God. You can know your neighbor relatively well, and you should! And then with everything else in the world, we can exercise what it means to not know certainly – we can have a humility about it and a teachable spirit that works collaboratively and patiently. We should have humble opinions on things – and that is certainly good to do – but our certainty should be short, except on those things we are expected to know about: God, family, and our particularly call to dominion (our jobs – whether you’re a mother, a fireman, or plumber). And that short list actually helps our contentment and limits our anxiety. Be happy about what you do know and then be an eager learner in every other way. Wisdom will follow.