Morning Thanks--Worldly Wisdom I

As childhoods go, mine was right up there with the idyllic best, methinks. No abuse to speak of. Two older sisters who largely left me alone. Parents who loved each other and us sumptuously. Small town--bicycles, sandlot baseball, just an occasional Fourth-of-July Black Cat firecracker.

And Sunday School, which was hardly abusive. But sometimes I think it's taken me a lifetime to unlearn some things Sunday School simplicity left imprinted somewhere within me. Once upon a time my mother-in-law visited her father who was in a Sioux City hospital for a couple of weeks. She was eighth grader. Once visiting hours had ended, she said she'd take off running to the hotel where they were staying because, well, it was the city, and who knows, exactly, what kind of evil might be lurking in those furtive shadows. To a Sunday School farm girl, Sioux City, Iowa, was "the world."

That's in me too. "The world," was a place to run from, a Vanity Fair peddling licentious liberties. "The world" had ogres whose horrid, twisted values arose from the darkness, a snake pit of heathen follies into which too many righteous had already fallen. "The world" was peopled with evil men and women.

Oddly enough, "the world" was also what God so loved that he gave his only begotten son. . .

Go figure.

All of that as intro. Perhaps Sunday School is the villain here, but the phrase "worldly wisdom" is not something I can utter without feeling somehow comprimised, even a little dirty. But on we go because here's a bit of worldly wisdom from Zanzibar:

"When two elephants tussle, it's the grass that suffers."

Proverbs delight us, at least in part, by their visual immediacy. This bit of worldly wisdom has to be worth a t-shirt at least, because you can see its succient truth in a moment. Think of a thousand applications, when you see that beat up grass: think of divorce; think of the U. S. Congress; think of the American Civil War.

"When two elephants tussle, it's the grass that suffers." Amen, brother.

That's worldly wisdom that could just as easily found a place in the Bible's own scrapbook, the book of Proverbs.

Worldly wisdom ain't all bad, and this morning I'm thankful for its delightful moral leading.

"When two elephants tussle, it's the grass that suffers."

Take that one home with you. God loves Zanzibar. And Sioux City.