Pay attention, my children!
    Follow my advice,
    and you will be happy.
Listen carefully
to my instructions,
    and you will be wise.

Come to my home each day
and listen to me.
    You will find happiness.
By finding me, you find life,
    and the Lord will be pleased
    with you.
But if you don’t find me,
    you hurt only yourself,
    and if you hate me,
    you are in love with death.

Wisdom has built her house
    with its seven columns.
She has prepared the meat
and set out the wine.
    Her feast is ready.

She has sent her servant women
    to announce her invitation
    from the highest hills:
“Everyone who is ignorant
    or foolish is invited!
    All of you are welcome
    to my meat and wine.
If you want to live,
    give up your foolishness
    and let understanding
    guide your steps.” (Contemporary English Version)

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

Socrates

Know-it-all’s don’t pursue wisdom. They ignorantly believe they already know what’s best about just about everything. Yet their prideful stance betrays only foolishness.

The truth is that wisdom is a skill to be developed. It takes time, patience, humility, grace, trial-and-error, action, reflection, and, most of all, a teachable spirit.

“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.”

Albert Einstein

To be blessed is to carefully graft wisdom into one’s daily life. To go about life with meaning, humility, and confidence are the unmistakable evidence of wisdom’s work within a person. It would be difficult to overstate the great importance of wisdom. Indeed, there is no such thing as too much of it.

The wisdom literature of the Old Testament Proverbs contrasts two approaches to life, personified in the book as Lady Folly and Lady Wisdom. Lady Folly relies on clandestine encounters, secrets, and seduction in promising satisfaction and a happy life. Yet, in the end, imbibing her drink poisons the soul and kills the spirit.

Conversely, Lady Wisdom operates openly and in the daylight. She gives a clarion invitation to a genuinely good life and persuades others, without manipulation, to feast at her banquet. Eating from Lady Wisdom’s table is open to all, both the simple and the sage. She offers a perspective which brings insight and clarity to confusing situations and bewildering circumstances. Lady Wisdom sets up a person for a blessed life.

“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.”

D. Elton Trueblood

Perhaps an illustration may assist. The COVID-19 vaccination is available. It has proven to work. The clarion call has gone out. Listen carefully, get vaccinated, practice basic human kindness through masking and proper social distancing – and there will be life. Lady Wisdom is open about the process and the procedure for health.

However, another calls goes out, as well. The vaccine is not safe. It is an attempt to control. We are mere pawns in a politician’s game. The statistics on those infected are skewed. Come, drink deeply of freedom and exercise your right to refuse medical treatment. After all, if it was so safe, why is there so much talk about its safety, to convince people of its efficacy? Lady Folly has set her trap.

Foolishness relies on manipulating emotions, making false comparisons, and promising happiness without a pathway to get there. It sets up the logical fallacy of the Strawman, misrepresenting wisdom’s argument to make it easier to attack. Lady Folly is a simpleton who makes judgments without reasoning.

Lady Wisdom invites people to consult, collaborate, converse, and cooperate with well-worn bodies of teaching passed down through the ages – to drink deeply and eat heartily of truth so as to apply cogent applications to life’s most vexing issues.

“Discipline is wisdom and vice versa.”

M. Scott Peck

You see, it is eating and drinking at wisdom’s table which brings enduring patience, proper perspective, needed perseverance, and satisfying provision for life. Impatience, narrow-mindedness, lack of action because of petty squabbling, and ignorance, are the sad results of folly’s empty promises. They only lead to death.

Wisdom can only be acquired through making daily routine decisions of faith and patience, of putting one foot in front of the other in a slow process over time. In contrast, foolishness is just so because it circumvents time and process and speaks of deliverance and happiness now, right now, without all the fuss and hardship.

So, then, in our current social and economic climate; in our world dominated with the effects of pandemic; in our own personal lives; just what is Lady Folly barking at us about? And Lady Wisdom inviting us to?…

Your answer and your response just might be the difference between life and death.

Thank you, Wise God, for being present, available, and inviting me to approach you in my times of need. Thank you for bending your gracious ear to listen and to care. There are times I feel weak, helpless, even afraid. Yet, I cling to the knowledge that God is with me. I know that you are Lord, and I am not. I know that you hold all situations in your good strong hands. Therefore, I trust you and I trust the process you have me undergoing to become wise and just. I ask for strength and wisdom so that I might endure and handle everything in a way that will bless both you and the world; through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit I pray. Amen.