What If God ...?
04-19-2021
By Brenda Pogue
The longer I live, the more I realize how cyclical life is. As I begin to think about winding down after graduation, though I can truly only think about finishing this race to graduation, I think about a door closing, a chapter completed, a goal achieved. But I also think about how wide-eyed, trepidatious, and excited I must have appeared when I began this journey. As this leg of my journey ends next month, it is a new journey for those incoming students who I now see as being just as wide-eyed, just as trepidatious, and just as excited as I was. They will soon be where I am now.
If I can share what I’ve learned, I would tell them to grab and embrace every morsel of wisdom. It will not only come from the books read, which in and of themselves are eye-opening, soul-stirring jewels of knowledge, as they should be; it will not only come from the professors, who are angels of scholarship that dispense erudition with care; it will not only come from the cohorts who journey with them, though they will have much to share and offer from their particular experiences and personal perspectives.
As they continue from semester to semester, and from course to course, they will find that wisdom will begin to enter in from all places unexpected as they remain open to the emprise. Dots formed from yesterdays past will gradually connect to dots newly formed. In my own journey, what I discovered were answers that made my venture comprehensible and purposeful. The trek is transformative, and suddenly, wisdom flows to fill in those once-thought unfulfillable gaps, like a stream flows to fill all unclaimed crevices along its path.
What if God was speaking directly to us through the writers of Proverbs 1:2-6 as God described the reason for and outcome of our journey:
“For learning about wisdom and instruction,
for understanding words of insight,
for gaining instruction in wise dealing,
righteousness, justice, and equity;
to teach shrewdness to the simple,
knowledge and prudence to the young—
let the wise also hear and gain in learning,
and the discerning acquire skill,
to understand a proverb and a figure,
the words of the wise and their riddles.” (NRSV)
As life continues to cycle, as knowledge continues to be gained, share and exchange in an effort to earn more knowledge, and become indispensable to the world.
