Proverbs 4
H,
There is something truly
substantial about following the narrow path. I mean, there has to be. It cannot
simply be a moral victory. It has to be an actual one. We are giving up
something fake and fleeting for something much more. There are all these things
that lose their taste because we have stumbled into a great light, and that
must point to something more edible to the human soul. It is not like we have a
set of instructions that are about having a different set of instructions. Nothing
tells us this is just smoke and mirrors with a balding magician behind the
curtain pushing buttons to make himself appear dreadful and wise. There is
something far more superior on offer. A chance for something really complete,
for once.
When you think about it, we
are called with a promise of reward. It is inherent right that leads to actual
righteousness. I always get the sense in my head that all of this up and down I
experience is a lack of something real to get my teeth into. I think, like the
great actor once said, “boredom is just a lack of imagination”. There are
wonders ahead that none of us have the imagination for. There are glories that
the heart can only guess at. There is a kingdom rising that will make all our
haggling, all our devious negotiating, all our dreams of grandeur seem like a
poor script to a terrible snuff film. We are not promised less in God but much
more. We are not promised a smaller piece but the key to everything. It is too
bad that we read into this that glory is a car and revelation is the name of a
villa. This is not what it means. It is too bad we think we will somehow give
God glory if we had a position or if our bank account proved the point that a
Christian can “make it”. It is not about proving points. It never has been. And
if we had to that make that argument, it would not be material reality that
showed spiritual truth. Nothing in our basic text tells us that. Nothing in the
life of Christ tells us that. We have simply made that up.
The road of wisdom starts
with a dispelling of many myths. We live in myth. We are told things that have
no eternal value and we believe them all the time. We sample four or five
friends and decide, even in the most basic of ways, what is real and what is
not. A small sampling of the experiences of others, a few heartaches here and
there or one or two other disappointments and we are able to believe that one
gender or the other is always after something off, that money will solve
everything and that one tribe or skill is superior to the other. We do not know
a thousand stories but we use what little we know to access seven billion
people and “what the world is really like.”  None of this is really true and if some of it
approaches any sort of honesty it is not of the eternal stuff that wisdom is
trying to tell us all about. All things fade, wisdom says. All things will fall
down, wisdom cries. Except this. Embrace this.