It was rather easy for me to decide what the theme for the first day of the year ought to be – the value of wisdom (natural/spiritual) as a primary objective of a person’s life to maturity. The earlier it is included in the nurture of a life, the better it is for that person, and those with whom he/she has to do. Newspapers, magazines, or other serious news outlets should have a department for the communication of news about wisdom. The general approach ought to be a current daily story of the meaning and application of wisdom for the good and truth of a person, a family, a community, a nation – the world. Instead the public is informed of the crime, the greed, the warfare, the poverty, the celebrities and fallen leaders. We do receive the negatives of business markets, businesses, and the oddities of life like busy streets, the crash of an airplane, and a fire downtown. These last may be, perhaps ought to be, reported in passing, but not to the expense of the news of life contexts that improve lives. Wisdom not only absorbs the realities of problems, but must say something about solutions. Report, perhaps: To this particular problem we are yet to address the issues of confusion, suffering, neglect for a situation related to the safety of human beings. If nothing more, perhaps leaders will address truly human issues. Answers are somewhere in serious human beings.
Our primary concerns as Christians, as to wisdom, relate to value application even to spiritual issues, so to address values. Values are shunned by much of modern education because there is so great difference in human values and sources. Skittish about religious sources, often considered of inferior origin to nature and nature’s proofs the academic community leaves the matter to other venues, perhaps the church or some idealistic philosophy or law conjured by mankind. The very awareness of the difficulty of the theme ought to give it a more careful attention than it receives. Values do not violate nature. They fit. This values issue is meaningful to the degree that Christian higher education is needed if for no other reason than to address and incorporate values in the context of education. (We students even dealt with the issue in a class in a state university. The professor used the eminent attorney, Clarence Darrow, as his example of an educated man who shrank in public life with reduced values.) With all the arresting quality of discovery in natural science, life is first determined by the quality of life that can be found in the world, the world as we find it in life mystery. Wisdom grapples with life, and relates to values under God – or, if one is unconvinced, acts as though there is a god. Part of wisdom relates to assumptions that may be doubted, but may be assumed so to serve for the life of the community in our own generation. Persons reading Pages a century or so from now will surely make some amendments to statements. They appeared true to me, in my time. They met a contextual wisdom when they were iterated. Circumstances, discoveries, new ways, and approved advancement will, perforce, change some considered and applicable current conclusions.
The application here may be more practical than we find in formal education. The current status of parenting is greatly reduced by the failure of parents to make wisdom a focal motivation for the nurture of their children. Part of the problem relates to the flimsiness of the value system held by many parents, and the misuse of their time/space for family. When one presumes the wisdom of parents like Hannah, who bore Samuel, or Jesse, father of David, the next generation gets a Samuel, first among the judges, and a King in David, whose epitaph is magnificent. (Psalm 78:72) (Neither David or Samuel followed up as effective parents.) When we read the failure of parenting in David, who did not pick up parenting from his father, and perhaps failure in his wife, Haggith, we get Absalom and Adonijah (I Kings 1:5 ff.) What a gift it is to have parents who through devotion of time, of objective questions, of clarity of thought, values and problem solving, with true parental love and assigned responsibility, carry the context of a life of wisdom to their children. Generations rise and fall in nurture. Nurture works in children, but it takes parental time and persistence for cultivation. It doesn’t seem too much to expect, in the few years of child life that there is time, wisdom and energy to value the assignment in order to completion. Education, both formal and informal, is vital to form the person, and to fit (train) that person for life. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020