Really Seeking Wisdom

January 14, 2009

Today's Reading: Genesis 27-28 and Proverbs 4

There is an old story about a man on a boat with a wise teacher. The man asks: “Good teacher, what can I do to obtain wisdom?”

The mentor then takes the other man and sticks his head in the water. The man thinks that his mentor is trying to teach him a lesson, so he allows himself to stay submerged. Sadly, the mentor does not lift his student’s head out of the water, and the man drowns.

The mentor then dumps the body and heads back to shore, saying: “Now I will always be the wisest of them all!”

Okay, I changed the ending for that story. The way I heard it, the mentor guy eventually lets up his student from drowning and says: “When you desire wisdom like the air that you breathe, then you shall have it.”

The only reason why I changed it is because I’ve heard this story several times in sermons, and I’m kind of sick of it. Still, just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean that it isn’t true.

Proverbs 4 tells us that we must seek wisdom, but the truth is that most of us to not. Truth be told, we are usually trying to fill out heads with nothing but distracting trash whenever we have free time. I know in my case, you usually don’t find me reading the classics like Lord Jim, but vegging out in front of the television or whatever cool videos that I can find on the Internet these days.

In all honesty, I don’t think that I have the right to complain about my problems when I can clearly see that I could easily obtain the wisdom necessary to take them all out. If I truly sought wisdom like air, then I would be the one who strides for righteousness out of heart that is desperate to do good. Not some guy who wants wisdom whenever it is convenient.

So, the clichéd story has some merit. Some of you might like my version better, so I thought of another Christian story for a unique “irreverently reverent” twist.

This man was walking down a beach, and he sees a man picking up throwing starfishes back into the ocean. He walks up to this man and says: “I see that you’re trying to throw starfishes back into the ocean to save them from dying, but there are thousands of starfishes here, you will never save them all.”

The man then picks up a starfish, and throws it at the other man, lodging it in his eye like a shuriken. He then says: “Shut up”.

Like that one? Know the original ending of that story? Let me know what other dried-up Christian cliché metaphors that you want me to mess with.