The Beginning of Wisdom (Proverbs 1)

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 towards 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.

-Eugene Peterson's Introduction to Proverbs in The Message

"Start with God" says Peterson's translation of Proverbs 1:7. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, but fools scorn wisdom and discipline" (NEB).

To be honest, for quite a while I've been reading only very rarely from Proverbs, thinking--mistakenly--that, with only a few exceptions, Proverbs was "merely" a book of moralistic sayings and not really the guts of the gospel. Genesis, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Jeremiah, some of the minor prophets, the Gospels & Acts & the rest of the New Testament, and above all the Psalms have comprised my primary canon. 

But old dogs can sometimes learn new tricks and the prophet Joel says even old men shall dream dreams. And, yes, per above, only fools scorn wisdom and discipline. So I will, with God's help, discipline myself in the reading of Proverbs, a chapter a day, during October with gratitude to my old friend Dale Davis, a wise and self-disciplined man if I've ever known one, for coming up with the idea. 

Edward J. Lubbers (1910-2005)

By the way, I'm reading Proverbs, the classic wisdom book, using a hardcover copy of The New English Bible which belonged to another very wise man, my grandfather, Edward John Lubbers. I remember Grandpa reading from it after meals at the table on the farm when I was a teen. The NEB was brand new back then (published in 1970) but my grandfather was never categorically opposed to anything just because it was "new," not even in the church. Not that he was a proponent for everything that was new--but we'll save some of those stories for another time. Anyway, to read, to hear, to absorb, to eat these words of wisdom from his Bible just feels right, particularly when I read:

Attend, my son, to your father's instruction
and do not reject the teaching of your mother;
for they are a garland of grace on your head
and a chain of honour round your neck.

Glad to be on the journey with you,
Randy

Come, Holy Spirit!

Open my ears to Lady Wisdom who "cries aloud in the open air" & "raises her voice in public places" & "calls out at the top of the busy street" & proclaims her messages and warnings at the main entrance to the city centre. Open my heart to sound advice and dire warnings--keep me from immediately thinking of all the other people it might apply to other than me. Open my weary soul to reassuring promises, and grant me the grace and courage to make them my own. Help me to listen, so that I may "live without a care, undisturbed by fear of misfortune." 

Amen.