January is my time for reevaluation and fresh starts, so I spend a lot of energy throwing old things over the side – things like tired ideas and ineffective habits and out-dated clothes and stale commitments. I can’t learn new things or take on new projects until I open some room in my life, so in January I spend time thinking about what’s important – what I should keep and what I should discard.
One of the best things I’ve been doing is meeting with a great group of guys every Thursday morning – we call it a book study group but it is really a tribal discussion on how we should live our lives as Christian men in the 21st Century. And one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from that group is that we all need to have someone who is speaking wisdom into our lives. We can’t always be the one doing the teaching; we have to have someone else to listen to; we need someone else’s wisdom washing over us. And it needs to be someone who is further down the road than we are … further down the spiritual path.
I don’t know if it has to be a personal contact, like a discipling or mentoring relationship, but I expect those are best. But I also think it might be a particular preacher or teacher who we’ve never met. Regardless, we have to choose to put ourselves under someone else’s wisdom, or at least under the influence of their voice.
The point of intentionality, of choosing, is the conscious understanding that we don’t know everything that we need to know. The notion that “I’m not as smart as I think I might be and I need to listen to someone else” is not a trivial decision for those of us who tend to assume we are the smartest person we know.
I’ve gone through seasons of life when I had several people speaking wisdom into me, and other seasons when I couldn’t identify anyone. Several months ago it became a real concern of mine that I didn’t have a personal contact or a mentor filling this role in my life. I found myself continually asking the question: Who is speaking wisdom to me?
That’s why I started my practice of downloading podcasts to listen to when I am out running or walking. I went looking for wise voices. Nowadays I listen often to Erwin McManus, Reggie McNeal, and Rob Bell. I’ve started collecting Andy Stanley, but haven’t listened to him yet. I also listen to podcasts about running (Phedippidations), about computers (Windows Weekly), and about music (Jazz Corner). I need all their wisdom.
In his book, The Good Life, Charles Colson wrote: “Blaise Pascal, the great French philosopher and mathematician, once said that there are only two kinds of people in the world: seekers and non-seekers. Either we are pilgrims looking for answers in order to make sense of our world, or we are wanderers who have turned off onto the byways of distraction or despair, alienating ourselves from wonder.” There is more to seeking wisdom-speakers than just living smarter; it is fundamental to our search for God. I think we should all be seekers.
Another thing I’ve learned from our Thursday morning discussion is how we all need a place to give ourselves away. I don’t mean simply giving our money away, although I believe in that, too. I mean we have to have a place where we are giving away our personality and our talents and our gifts and our energy and our time and our love to other people. That may be as a musician, or as a teacher, or as a servant, or being part of a large movement.
If we don’t do this, if we don’t give ourselves away, we’ll start to think the world is all about us and our own problems and before long we’ll find ourselves living tiny lives in tiny pictures with tiny hopes and dreams and tiny visions. We’ll think we’re living large, but we’re fooling ourselves.
I have a friend who considers himself a seeker of God, and he spends a lot of time reading philosophy and religion hoping to get a handle on the truth. Unfortunately his search has coincided with the collapse of his marriage and the end of a business partnership. He’s wondering where to find hope, but he won’t find hope and he won’t find the God he’s searching for until he finds a place to give himself away. Giving our lives away is part of the search, not something we wait to do after we’ve arrived.
So here in January I’m looking for speakers of wisdom, and I’m evaluating the places to give myself away. It’s a chance for another fresh start.
