Owned or Loaned?

Every once in a while you stumble across a jewel that takes you by surprise by its brilliance and intensity.  It causes you to pause and to take in its wonder and beauty. 

Ideas, the good ones, are like that and they have the capacity to transport you to another place---a place where you are able to get your bearings again---where things start to make sense.

I have come across a 'jewel' in the form of a book titled "The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: an English professor's journey into christian faith," written by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield.

This is her account of living as a lesbian, the pressures of academic life, the call of a God who loved her and who challenged her ideas that were deeply entrenched, and the wisdom that came to her from a place not from within herself that led her to rethink what was real and true in life.

This is a jewel. . . . .

One of the statements that she includes in her book comes from an address she made to the 1999 Graduate Student Orientation at Syracuse University.  This is what she wrote. . . .

"King Solomon, one of the many sons of David, ruled over Israel from 962-922 B.C.  Before Solomon stepped into his kingship, he asked God to give him an 'understanding heart. . .to discern between good and evil' (1 Kings 3:9).  God gave him a gift of discernment unmatched by any other figure then or now on the condition that Solomon never forgot the first commandment (the commandment to honor God, not the idols that bolster the autonomy of our own egos.).  As Solomon became rich and successful, he started to believe that knowledge was something that he 'owned,' something that he harbored inside of himself, rather than what it was: something loaned to him,  something fundamentally located in the radical Otherness of a Holy God.  Once he lost his anchor, he lost his wisdom, and it all came tumbling down.  The biblical story does not stop here, because the nature of a Holy God is redemptive, not abandoning, but that is a lecture for another day.  Suffice it to say for today that Solomon failed by thinking that all truth-claims exist in a contingent relationship to the self. Solomon's legacy offers a warning to all. . . .we all need to be anchored in something bigger than we are. . .Real learning, no matter how polished the moves or rehearsed the rhetoric, is empty learning unless we who profess are anchored in something bigger than we are.  Choose with discernment, and don't let the proclivities of the here-and-now choose for you."

Is this what God is trying to tell you today?  Is he trying to get you to believe that the answers you are so desperately looking for are hidden from you because it is you trying to figure it all out?  Is he trying to tell you that what you need is found in Him and Him alone, and that to get there is to stop your self-reliance, to rest in Him and to trust that He will provide exactly what you need?

I do not fear for you, if this is where you find yourself today, because I know that God is able to continue, for as long as it takes, for you to find what you long for. 

He is waiting. . . . .

BT