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“Wisdom is better than strength.”  – Ecclesiastes 9:16 

As a teenager growing up in a small farming community, my buddies and I would sometimes hire ourselves out during the summer months to local farmers to help them haul their freshly baled hay from the field and stack it in the barn.  What always puzzled me back then was how those farmers who were forty or fifty years our seniors, could labor alongside us all day long, matching us bale for bale, and hardly break a sweat, while we strapping young high school athletes would be exhausted by the end of the day.

It was not until years later after I was well seasoned in my own career that I discovered the answer.  While we were out there flexing our muscles, tossing those seventy-pound bales around with brute strength, those farmers had figured out how to get as much done using sort of a rhythmic finesse I cannot exactly describe, but that required far less effort.  It was a great demonstration of what wisdom truly is.

Society, as it always has, admires physical strength, just as it does wealth, fame, and power, beauty, athletic ability, artistic talent, intellect, and academic achievements, to name a few.  What is often overlooked, unrecognized by the masses, is wisdom.  Even though it is more effective – like the farmers demonstrated – wisdom is not always heard, and wise people often go unheeded.  Why is that I wonder?

Too often, I think, we use the words knowledge and wisdom interchangeably, and while the two characteristics are not mutually exclusive, neither are they synonymous; for not all highly knowledgeable people are necessarily wise, nor wise people those with the most knowledge.  Knowledge is something we learn by being taught, either by other learned people or our own endeavors to study and learn.  Wisdom, however, is something that must be discovered by experiencing life.

That was the great wisdom demonstrated by the farmers; for I suspect when they had been young men like we were at the time, they too were out there flexing their muscles, tossing haybales around with brute strength.  But after years of experiencing life, they eventually discovered more effective ways of getting the job done with far less effort, realizing that “wisdom is better than strength.”

“He is not here; he has risen!”  – Luke 24:6 

Great lessons can sometimes come from total strangers.  We had one of those experiences one evening while dining at a neighborhood restaurant.  Seated at a nearby table was a young couple, along with their daughter, who seemed to be having a perfectly delightful time visiting, laughing and enjoying their meal together.  Nothing was particularly unusual except for the fact that their little girl was severely disabled and confined to a specially designed wheelchair.  It wasn’t the child’s disability that captured our attention, though, rather it was the obvious pleasure this family had simply being together.  The couple, while showing affection toward their disabled child and assisting her occasionally, otherwise treated her as a normal person, engaging her in their conversations.  Neither did they dote over her in any way.  What was most obvious about them, though, was a total absence of self-pity in spite of their circumstance.

Marianne Williamson, author of the best-selling book A Return to Love once said, “Our only job is to be an example of a life that is working.”  That’s exactly what we witnessed from that young family, “an example of a life that is working”.

Happiness, you see, has little to do with circumstance and everything to do with choice.  No one has a perfect life – no one!  Every life is plagued with some sort of hurt, grief, disappointment, disability, illness, financial strain, and any number of other hardships.  The difference between those who embrace happiness and those who embrace self-pity is in the way they choose to deal with life’s imperfections.

In his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, author, poet Wendell Berry offers these sage words, “So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.  Love the Lord.  Love the world.  Work for nothing.  Take all that you have and be poor.  Love someone who does not deserve it.” . . . . “Practice resurrection,” the poem concludes.

Sounds like Jesus, doesn’t it, the perfect example of a life that is working – a life that concludes not in self-pity, but with resurrection.  For as the angel proclaimed, “He is not here; he is risen!”  Alleluia, He is risen indeed!!

“The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”  – Mark 2:27 

The joke we have all heard – or maybe it’s not a joke – is that no one ever made a death-bed confession wishing he or she had spent more time at the office.  Yet, we live in a culture that glorifies busyness whereby we obtain bragging rights for the hours we spend and the sweat we pour into hard work.  Indeed, we have come to believe that work is the great virtue above all virtues, thus the more time we spend at work and the harder we go at it the more virtuous we are.

At the same time there’s an old folk proverb that claims idleness to be the devil’s workshop.  By not keeping ourselves busy, in other words, we put ourselves at risk of doing something we shouldn’t, things that are mischievous or harmful, and get us into trouble.

I have to admit being guilty of both at various times in my life.  The times I have done things I shouldn’t and gotten into trouble, those actions have inevitably hatched in an incubator of idleness.  At the other extreme there have been times when I have immersed myself in work to the extent of losing track of time and awareness of the world around me, earning bragging rights about how long and hard I worked.  But then I have been brought back to my senses – thanks mostly to wife’s stern reminders – that there are other things of greater importance than spending more time at the office.

“Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.  Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath . . . On it you shall not do any work . . .” (Exodus 20:8-10).  Mistakenly viewed as arbitrary, impractical and even irrelevant in today’s high-work-ethic Western society, this fourth of the Ten Commandments instead is meant to be practical, given to us for our own well-being.  Its intention is that we take time to rest from our labors, to pause and enjoy our relationships with others and with God, and reflect on Him and all He has provided; for “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath,” Jesus reminds us, so that our lives will be filled with abundance – rather than regret for spending too much time at the office.

“Let the blame be on me alone.”  1 Samuel 25:24 

Following the death of Samuel David and his servants were traveling through the Desert of Maon when they encountered a wealthy landowner named Nabal.  David was apparently acquainted with who Nabal was because he had previously entertained his shepherds and been kind to them when they had been in David’s own backyard.  Presuming Nabal would be kind enough to return the favor David asked if he might spare some food for his own men, but Nabal, notorious for being “surly and mean in his dealings” refused.  Fortunately, Nabal was married to a kind, intelligent, and beautiful woman named Abigail, who upon learning of – and perhaps embarrassed by – her husband’s lack of hospitality, gathered up a generous supply of food and wine, loaded it on several donkeys and had it sent out to David’s men, without her husband’s knowledge.

What I find curious in the story though is this.  When Abigail came out to meet David face-to-face, she fell down before him begging forgiveness.  “My lord, let the blame be on me alone.”  Now, if she felt shame or embarrassment by her husband’s behavior and offered the men some food to make up for it, that’s understandable.  But to bear the blame – all of it?  Which begs the question, are we to be held responsible when someone else misbehaves?

One judge thought so.  It occurred on a cold winter night in 1935 when New York City’s colorful Depression era mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, took over the bench in a night court in one of the city’s poorest wards.  A tattered old woman was brought before him, charged with steeling a loaf of bread.  She told LaGuardia that her daughter’s husband had deserted her, her daughter was sick, and her two grandchildren were starving.  Yet the shopkeeper refused to drop the charges.  LaGuardia sighed, then turned to the woman and said, “I’ve got to punish you, the law makes no exceptions – ten dollars or ten days in jail.”  Simultaneously he reached into his own pocket producing the ten dollars to cover the fine.  “Here is the ten-dollar fine which I now remit.  And furthermore, I am going to fine everyone in this courtroom fifty cents for living in a town where a person has to steal bread so that her grandchildren can eat!”. . .  And what about me, I wonder?  Have I contributed to a culture in which people have to steal bread to eat, or feel they must lie, cheat and steal to get ahead in the world.  If that is so, then let the blame be on me.

“Teach us to number our days aright.”  – Psalm 90:12 

Art Linkletter, the late comedian, for many years hosted a TV game show called People Are Funny.  It was so long ago I don’t remember much about the show’s content except that the show’s title pretty well described the main theme of Art Linkletter’s humor, that people are funny.  He had a unique gift for observing the funny things that people do and say, and a style of presenting those observations in hilarious ways that were neither belittling nor embarrassing, yet made us laugh not only at other people but at ourselves.  He put smiles on our faces because he loved people and found humor in the crazy things we say and do, which for him is what made life fun and exciting, and positive, and in turn inspired his audiences to feel that way too.

I had not thought of Art Linkletter in years until recently when my cousin and dear friend Jimmy passed away, and as I had the opportunity to be around family and close friends at his memorial service it occurred to me as we all shared stories about him that the central theme of his life was similar in that he too loved people and found humor in the crazy things we say and do.  Every conversation I ever had with Jimmy, which were fairly frequent, was laced with laughter, mostly swapping funny stories about our experiences with some of the characters we knew from the respective small towns where we grew up.  And like Art Linkletter, Jimmy never belittled people in talking about their shenanigans, just that the stories were amusing – and generally speaking, that people are funny.

“The length of our days is seventy years – or eighty, if we have the strength,” Moses wrote in his Psalm.  So, I suppose we can’t argue that Jimmy did not have a long, full life.  Yet, for those of us who knew and loved him it still seems too short.  Jimmy, though, was not naïve about the length of life, realizing that it is short and that we must use our time wisely and for good purposes.  That is what inspired him to live the way he did, loving God and people, with a big heart and sense of humor, laughing at life in a healthy way, yet with great compassion and generosity toward others.

As Moses also wrote in his Psalm: “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”  Thank you Cousin Jimmy for reminding us of the importance of numbering our days, and for being an example of how to live an abundant life.