Ask the Community?

I have run into people in this world who are quite smart, but not very 'smart', if you know what I mean. They have all the IQ they could ever put to use, but sometimes they lack the common sense to go along with that very well-developed IQ. Our 'intelligence quotient' doesn't always make us wise. Wisdom comes more by making the right connections rather than adding more 'smarts' to our list of already too long 'smarts'. The right connections begin with our relationship with Christ - to know him is to gain understanding (wisdom). There is more to knowing God than just calling ourselves a Christian, going to church, and under-scoring a few favorite passages in a leather-bound Bible. There is more to wisdom than just getting 'smarter'.

If you want to become wise, you must begin by respecting the Lord. To know the Holy One is to gain understanding. (Proverbs 9:10)

It should come as no surprise to us that we need to 'become' wise - implying none of us is born with 'wisdom' as our mode of operation in life. We may have been born with an ability to learn, but if learning is only directed toward the things that this world teaches us, we will be 'wisdom poor' in the end. What we lack in wisdom isn't found in the 'books'. It is found in the relationship (connection) we make with the Creator of all things - God himself. We begin by 'respecting' the Lord - in other words, we acknowledge him as our Lord and Savior, then we begin to defer to his authority in our lives. More often than not the place where we struggle is in this 'deference' part. 

Wisdom comes to us when we are rightly connected - because wisdom isn't a 'thing', it is a person - Christ. Have you ever considered something for so long, becoming more and more frustrated with it, then walked away from it for a while? When you finally walk away, what happened? It is quite possible that you realized there was a different solution to the issue at hand. Why did it take 'walking away' to give you that answer? There is something about being so close to something that you cannot see anything any other way than what you have been considering over and over again. I think this is why God asks us for us to 'leave' in order for us to 'cleave'. We leave behind our old ways of thinking in order to learn how it is we can think differently.

Wisdom isn't 'brand new thinking' as much as it is 'thinking rightly' about life's actions. When we make this connection with Jesus we are saying we want to forsake the prior way of considering life's choices. We want to defer to a new way of pursuing life's actions, so we need to learn from the one who not only gives all wisdom, but who is wisdom itself. This past week, I posted a blog entitled "I am not thinking straight" and do you know what happened? Facebook gave one of those suggestions that only I could see that invited me to 'ask my community for help'! I laughed a while as I considered the 'algorithm' that post went through within the social media site that popped out that suggestion that I needed 'help' on the matter of 'not thinking straight'! 

The help we all need in 'thinking straight' - the type of thinking some will actually refer to as being 'wise' - is not in asking the 'social community' for the wisdom, but in asking God to become more evident in our thinking processes. In other words, we can actually 'experience' his sorting out of our thoughts, placing them in more than just 'right order', but actually helping us to discard the ones that only get us into trouble or serve no purpose in our life. We can begin to sense the presence of Christ within us helping us see things as he sees them - that different perspective we have when we 'sort out' what isn't helping us. Wisdom is indeed all about 'connection', but not so much within the 'community' as much as it is with the one who IS wisdom - Christ Jesus. Just sayin!

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