submitting ourselves humbly to a process

Wisdom. It’s right there, attainable, for anyone. Yet it seems so elusive. It helps to realize that it requires a process, and can never be attained apart from constant shared-time-and-space with God. Isaac gave us a list on Sunday, a helpful framework for how to be wise in this world where foolishness and wisdom are sometimes so indistinguishable from one another. In the Proverbs about seeking wisdom, all the verbs are ones that take effort: listen, treasure, tune your ears, cry out, search. Here is Isaac’s list on how to carry out these verbs.

1. Wrestle with God ... and don’t let go.

Jacob wrestled all night with God, because he wanted God’s blessing. You know how if you kind of want something, it’s really easy to give up at the first pushback? If you just kind of want a good cup of coffee in another town, but you’re driving around and get tired of looking for a place with good coffee, pretty soon you’ll just settle and stop at a Starbucks. (Or a QuikTrip, whatever you consider bad coffee.) But I remember this one time in college when my friend Robin and I wanted, I mean really wanted, a good lunch. So we drove three hours into the mountains of North Carolina to eat at the sherpa restaurant on the bridge over the Nantahala River. It’s a difference of will. We must really want God’s wisdom, and when we do, we won’t let go—just like Jacob didn’t let go.

2. Eat this book.

Eugene Peterson says that about “reading the bible.” Often we just read a verse here and there. Or read through a book of the canon without digesting the words. Or, worse yet, we read books about the bible instead of reading the bible. But we need to immerse ourselves in it, love it, eat it, meditate on it, let its words get imprinted on our hearts. When we know God in this way, we hear his voice. Perhaps not audibly, but the way we can anticipate a good friend’s reaction to something because we know him or her so well.

3. Obey what you know to be right.

God says that when we’re faithful in little things, he will give us bigger things because he knows our faith to be strong. There are a thousand things that we do daily that are disobedient, and not because we don’t know that we’re being disobedient, but because we think it doesn’t matter. We break the law by driving over the speed limit. We remain quiet when someone needs words of encouragement. We judge celebrities when we see gossip on the TV or the internet. We put fountain soda in a water glass. If we are going to receive wisdom from God, we need to have strong integrity, a wholeness of holiness.

4. Honor family.

Whether they seem sideways or backwards or completely normal, God has given us our families for a reason. God has designed us and our families specifically, and we have been entrusted to our families by God. So whether they steward us well or not, we must honor them as we are called to.

5. Lean into leaders.

When we are in the body of Christ, we are swimming in a sea of valuable wisdom. Leaders who are older and have seen life have the benefit of experience. Often they have seen situations so similar that they can impart wisdom that we never would have imagined. They also have the ability to see our situations from a more seasoned and mature perspective ... often what we see as the end of the world, they see as a general rite of passage, and likely they have been through it before.

6. Trust community.

Your friends know you. When my friends are all giving me the same advice, and I happen to disagree with it, it’s more likely that I am wrong instead of them. Listen carefully to loving advice and weigh it. Discuss honestly with friends whom you trust. When we share perspectives, we can really start to uncover what wisdom says for situations. Decisions in isolation are dangerous, especially when we feel we’re “on our own” because no one really is comfortable with those decisions. God never leaves any detail unturned, and he’s surrounded us with the community that he has for specific reasons.

7. If you’ve done 1-6, simply follow your heart.

Psalm 37:4 says, “Make Yahweh your joy, and he will give you the desires of your heart.” So if we see steps 1-6 as part of our making God our joy, then the desires that he has put in our hearts will be the way of wisdom. When we’re making God our JOY, our hearts change, they are becoming holy. And when our motives in this life are holy, we can trust that what we really want to do will be wise.

In the search for wisdom, the idea is to—like Jacob—walk away limping, but walk away blessed.

Being Captivated By The Right Story.

We are each so captivated by our own story. I mean, rightly so. We each exist in our own little world ... or shall I say, we exist in the same world, but we have our own unique and personal perspective of it, populated by thoughts and dreams and circumstances that are absolutely different from anyone else's. It may as well be our own world, for this is the one we live in, the one that we wake in and eat in and mull about in. It's the one we let other people into or keep them out of. It's the one that we remember and the one for which we have a dream. It's the one that claims our time and our finances and our energy.

It seems rather odd, in a way, that we all live on the same planet and breathe the same air, yet we each perceive this life so differently from anyone else. Marilynne Robinson says it so well: "In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence."

No wonder we are so captivated by our own stories. We are all secrets. We are all so separate.

But in this society of individualism, could it be that we are secrets, separate, for the reason of being all part of the same story? Could it be that we are unique in design and perspective not to live out our own story but to bring life and character and purpose to THE story?

God says yes.

God tells us that he is writing a story that is far beyond our scope of understanding, and for us to be involved in THAT story is to engage in life. If we are only concerned with our own story we disengage from life, curling into a smaller and smaller existence that is not noticeably affected and has no noticeable effect. To be involved in God's story is engaging in life. To give our lives away to The Story is the only way to really live.

In the prologue of Henri Nouwen's Life of the Beloved, he talks about why he wrote the book. He speaks of his friend Fred, a secular Jew, who goaded him to write something about spiritual life that was relevant to him and his friends, something that they "could hear." As Nouwen heard these words, something stirred in him and he realized that he had heard this charge before. He lists the many people from whom he'd felt this proposition before, and then continues ...

"I heard it, too, from young men and women beginning to feel the many demands of a society that claimed their attention, but fearing at the same time that it was not going to offer them much in the way of real life."

Real life.

God's call is for us to engage in real life. It's for this that we were created. To say, "I want to be part of this story, this story that begun before the creation of mankind, this story that is an epic rescue, this story that defines me by my involvement and awakens my soul to a purpose far greater than the daily things that claim my attention."

To be captivated by the right story is a choice. A movement from letting things happen to you and for you and instead leveraging your life for God's story.

What no eye has seen and no ear has heard, what the mind of man cannot visualise; all that God has prepared for those who love him. [1 Corinthians 2:9]

A story that no eye has seen and no ear has heard, a story that can't even be visualized ... a story far greater than our own small story. That is the story worthy of leaving a legacy in.