Wisdom

My grandson Joaqui is quite perceptive.

While having dinner one day, my sister Dulce tried to explain to him, "What you're eating is pumpkin. It's colored yellow so it is good for your eyes." Two-and-a-half year old Joaqui seemed stunned but recovered his poise and replied, “No, that’s not good for my eyes. That’s good for my mouth!”

My daughter’s family lives in Australia and came home for a visit early last year. Joaqui was already five years old then. My husband Jack asked him one day, "Do you have classmates who are white, black, brown and yellow?" As the conversation progressed, Joaqui almost tearfully argued that skin color could neither be black nor white nor yellow nor brown, but only dark or bright.

“You’re embarrassing me,” he blurted out to his Lolo Jack, as if the latter’s insistence to refer to people in terms of color is a sin. Well, I guess he learned that in his prep school in a country which emphasizes political correctness because of its multi-racial and ethnic mix.

We were all young once and have formed our own world view as we matured. As a youngster, I thought I knew it all. Now that I’m almost 58, I realize more and more that I’m clueless about so many things. I now recognize too that it’s not what we know but whom we know that matters.

Let me explain. Before I accepted Jesus as my Savior, I knew of no other lord but me—my plans, my agenda, my opinions. As I got to KNOW him day after day by reading the bible, He became bigger and bigger as I got smaller and smaller in my eyes. “Apart from Me, you can do nothing,” Jesus said. He is really all the wisdom we need. Now, I depend on Him for everything, including my thoughts and actions for everyday victorious living.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7), sums up God’s offer of success for everyone who FEARS Him. I’m pretty certain a bright future awaits Joaqui. His parents are making sure, applying this wise proverb from Solomon:

“Train a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not turn from it” (Prov. 22:6).