Metaphors are strange animals.
Some times they leave me with more questions than answers. Some times I get the point right away. Some times they lead me nowhere and dribble off into a strange "nothingness." Some times the metaphors I think are excellent one day make no sense at all the next (which some times leaves my wife laughing with love at how I can mix things up). :)
Some times a good metaphor can cause me to pause and ponder long and deep the current moment. This is what began to happen a couple of Mondays ago when my more-than-amazing wife and I were at the Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Reading from the Old Testament writings we call "Proverbs" while recently away from home here in Colorado, I was both refreshed, perplexed and soul-smitten with these recorded wise sayings of Solomon and a few others. Again, in The Message, Eugene Peterson has given new life through current language to what has been read, absorbed and lived through the centuries from this valued part of our Bible.
In the four small, but potent, paragraphs of Peterson's introduction to this biblical collection of life-thoughts, one wants to read again what one may have read before...having the hope that this time one may read with new eyes of the soul:
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Many people think that what's written in the Bible has mostly to do with getting people into heaven--getting right with God, saving their eternal souls. It does have to do with that, of course, but not 'mostly.' It is equally concerned with living on this earth--living well, living in robust sanity. In our Scriptures, heaven is not the primary concern, to which earth is a tag-along afterthought. "On earth as it is in heaven" is Jesus' prayer.
"Wisdom" is the biblical term for this on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven everyday living. Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves. It has virtually nothing to do with information as such, with knowledge as such. A college degree is no certification of wisdom--nor is it primarily concerned with keeping us out of moral mud puddles, although it does have a profound moral effect upon us.
Wisdom has to do with becoming skillful in honoring our parents and raising our children,handling our money and conducting our sexual lives, going to work and exercising leadership, using words well and treating friends kindly, eating and drinking healthily, cultivating emotions within ourselves and attitudes toward others that make for peace. Threaded through all these items is the insistence that the way we think of and respond to God is the most practical thing we do. In matters of everyday practicality, nothing, absolutely nothing, takes precedence over God.
(...sorry, can't refuse a crisp, warm "amen" to that last sentence...even though I utterly fail miserably some hours of many days in allowing "my stuff" or "other's stuff" to take precedence over my relationship with God...)
Proverbs concentrates on these concerns more than any other book in the Bible. Attention to the here and now is everywhere present in the stories and legislation, the prayers and the sermons, that are spread over the thousands of pages of the Bible. Proverbs distills it all into riveting images and aphorisms that keeps us connected in holy obedience to the ordinary.
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Whoa! Stop a moment...........
"...in holy obedience to the ordinary."
...that line stopped me dead in my tracks down there in Arizona. What does holy obedience to the ordinary look like in my life? Your life?
If you truly want to know...then I encourage that you read Proverbs from The Message and trust the Spirit for a fresh breeze within your soul to move you to new places in all your relationships. This happened to me beginning on June 5.
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It's OK...I sincerely hope...to NOT be a man of my word in this one instance. How? Why?
It is important to go to a third thought (and maybe even a fourth, or ???) before getting the promised "ho, boy!!" I will get there. However, focusing on and remembering the journey of last week, these important pieces that fueled some new happenings within my soul seem as necessary to ponder, pick up, look at, taste, hear and feel again, as getting to the particular series of events that have left me a bit speechless and at the same time exploded new joy and hope within my soul.
This part of the hinge (read previous post) into the third third of my life is opening up new vistas of the soul for which time needs to be received as a gift to remember, reflect and refocus for that which is to come. Thank you for being willing to travel with me a bit more slowly than first anticipated.
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