A short conversation from last night when someone saw that I have my arm in a sling;
They: "what happened?",
Me; "I had shoulder surgery last week",
They; "No wonder you're haven't been blogging"
Me; "That's my excuse for not blogging, what is yours for not posting a comment:)".
All in fun, but a good reminder that I truly think most people get more from the comments others make regarding my posts than they do from the original post. Please comment.
Lately, and just a few moments ago while lying in my bed not sleeping, I have been thinking about how little I know about any of the areas I am supposed to know things about.
As a small business owner there are so many things that I am supposed to know lots about that are directly related to our business and then things that others would not necessarily expect me to know things about but if I don't we are at an extreme disadvantage. For example; I am supposed to know a lot about counter top fabrication and installation, about kitchen design and back-splash/counter top coordination. I do have a very good understanding of those things, but there are things that I know a little about but to be really successful I need to know a lot about them.
We had a new website built. I contracted a guy to built it who is a "web site expert". Well when it was all said and done it took him a year and he built it using an old platform "inside" of the site. The site looks great but there are changes that needed to be made but we couldn't easily make the changes because of the older platform. We hire a SEO- search engine optimization- person to increase the amount of traffic we get to our site and he can't do all that he needs to do because of this problem. We have a "request for quote" section in the site and it doesn't work as well as it should because our hosting site was not communicating perfectly with it. The list goes on and on, and that is just web things.
How can we know all these things? Einstein said, "you don't have to know all the answers but you need to know where to find them". I don't even know all the questions to ask to begin to look for the answers, and this is just in a small section of our business. What about husbandry, fathering children, leading a small group or being a friend?
This makes me respect Solomon so much more when I consider that people came just to test his knowledge and he was more wise than they even thought he was; the "urban legend" exceeded the hype. That is certainly NOT me.
James 1:5 "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him." Through out my life I didn't ever think I was smarter than my dad but I often thought I had a pretty good understanding of what I was doing. The longer I am alive the less I think I know. Shouldn't it go the others way? Shouldn't I gain understanding in more areas? I think I am gaining understanding of some things but at the same time I am seeing how much more I don't know about even the area that I am learning about.
This is sort of like sin; the closer we get to Christ-likeness the more holy we become but we then see our sin that remains and it feels like they are multiplying rather than dividing.
Both of these places I believe are good places to be- seeing our dependency on God-leaning not on our own understanding- and seeing our sin for what it really is. They are hard places to be because they require humility to be there and stay there and our flesh wants to push us to the front and say "You're not so bad" or "You're pretty smart" and that is just sin crouching at our door. Living in total dependence on Christ is where we always need to live. We will not "arrive" until we actually do arrive in Heaven and until then we are dependent, sinful people who have much to learn about a lot of things.
"Spirit of God, descend upon my heart;
wean it from earth; through all its pulses move;
stoop to my weakness, mighty as thou art,
and make me love thee as I ought to love."
George Croly
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