Then I was beside Him, as a master
workman; and I was daily His delight, Rejoicing always before Him,
Rejoicing in the world, His earth, and having my delight in the sons
of men. Proverbs 8:31
As I write, thousands of people are
gathered in Paducah, Kentucky, for one of the premiere quilt shows in
the country. This show is so important to the quilt world that the
national quilt museum is located in the city. In it are the winning
quilts of that all-important show. The winner is paid $10,000 for
their quilt, and the masterpiece is then displayed forever to the
world. This year's winner will have the satisfaction of knowing that
her masterpiece will be admired for generations to come. Quilting
fads may come and go, but these quilts will show the standard of
excellence in design and workmanship that come with crafting and
award-winning showstopper.
And thus is Wisdom. The verse in
Proverbs speaks of God's wisdom in His creative process of making the
earth and all that is in it, the people and all that was pleasing to
the eye and the soul.
When I think of just the human body, it
is a marvel. I am married to a nurse. After 25 years in Medical
Intensive Care and 7 in Interventional Radiology, he can regale you
with stories of diseases and body parts gone amiss, most of which you
never thought about. Who knows about enzymes, germs with names as
long as your arms, and syndromes where the chain-effects of cell
breakdown can cause illness or death. Whoever designed 2 germ cells
to produce millions of different body parts from one fertilized cell
had to know what He was doing or the whole thing dies.
And that person can live in the rest of
world! He can use plants that are especially designed to nourish the
body. Most of them are a delight to the palette if they are good for
us, and rejected due to their nastiness if they are poisonous. That
is wisdom. The air we breathe, the miracle of water, the covering of
skin, the design of reproduction...it all has to be just perfect for
life to exist. And it is perfect, thought out perfectly in detail.
The need for light and darkness, sleep and rest, exercise and
song...it is all a miracle. The beauty of mountains, the pleasure of
beaches, the colors of a sunset sky...why do we respond to these
things? We are not machines, but feeling, emotional, self-conscious
humans.
How can a person like me stand in front
of a quilt of utter beauty and design and weep? What does that? (Yes,
I did...I cried, the display of this woman's work was so amazingly
perfect). Wisdom.
Wisdom delights in beauty. It
appreciates the world in its amazingness. It stands next to the
creator and designer and praises His work. It stands in awe of the
shared creativity that He chose to instill in man. Even if I don't
like something like a song the first time I hear it, I can learn to
appreciate it most of the time unless it is evil. I can see bits of
wisdom in non-perfect things.
The chapter goes on in Proverbs stating
that the wise love life, and the wicked, death. Wisdom sees the
things of the earth in these two realities. We are builders or
tearers-down. We care for our bodies or we abuse them with
destructive things like drugs. We plant flowers and mow grass, or we
throw bricks through windows. We share food and contribute to
fund-raisers, or we take to the streets and kill our neighbors. You
can tell if a city or a country is wise by what you find there. You
can tell a Dutch town in Iowa – it is neat as a pin. It is expected
to stay that way. There is a pride in beauty and order and respect
for one's environment. Then there are the places we see on tv where
people burn their own neighborhoods to the ground without though of
whose lives and livelihoods they are destroying. Wisdom seeks the
good of the neighbor, the good of the community, the betterment of
the people and development of security and pleasure in the giving to
the world around it.
Love wisdom. Stand alongside God and
tell Him daily what I good job He did. He gave me medicine for my
infection yesterday. I praised Him for that. The cloud formation from
a passing storm – amazing in its color of steel blue – I
worshiped. The celebration of the people around me – birthdays,
weddings, graduations, and other events that spark in us a joy that
comes from completion of a task, the following of God's design for
structure and order and peace. It is good to praise Him. There is so
much the sons of men have been destroying that it can take us down to
the pit. But today we can use wisdom to praise Him even for that, as
He has planned even the end of this world and designed an even more
glorious place for His own. How wise of Him was that?
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