Carefully Now

My son, keep my sayings,
and store up my commands within you.
Keep my commands and live,
my teaching like the apple of your eye.
Bind them on your fingers,
write them on the tablet of your heart.
Say to Wisdom, “Your are my sister,”
and call Discernment a friend.
To keep you from a stranger-woman,
from a smooth-talking alien woman.

There’s an irony to be had here. To the stanza promoting attentiveness and attention to detail, we’re likely to content ourselves with a quick scan. Ok, another encouragement to be a good learner – on to the substance…

No, no. Around the corner from me the past couple of weeks a professional clean-out company has been, well, cleaning out a house. All of the materials are going into regular size pick-up trucks, and I’ve noticed how thoughtfully the workers are loading every piece. Evidently they’ve discovered that the time it takes to stack everything neatly is worth the space they’re saving by not just tossing everything in.

Well, that’s my observation of what’s happening with the trash around the corner. Now do the a fortiori and then give thought to how you load up on wisdom. Our proverb implies: attend to wisdom thoughtfully, carefully. Don’t rush through your daily Scripture reading and forget what you have heard. Measure it and then painstakingly fit it into your memory.

Thoughtfully. Carefully.

And protectively, as you tend to your eyeball (the apple of the eye). You have gifts: life itself, talents, supplies, time, intelligence. And hopefully wisdom. Don’t expose these gifts to the waster, to the tawdry, to the sloppy, to the frivolous, to the unfocused Zeitgeist. Live thoughtfully, carefully, vigilantly.

Sure, these words are, in the popular understanding, often next to connotations of “stuffiness,” “stiltedness,” “wooden,” “unimaginative,” “dull,” “rehearsed,” “BORING.”

So what?