Wisdom from the poor man…
// March 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // OUT LOUD THOUGHTS
I wonder if anything is more despised or looked down upon than the wisdom of a poor man.
If you sat on a sidewalk for hours a day with a poor man, do you think you’d be wiser?
If you knew someone who sat on a sidewalk for hours a day listening to a poor man, do you think they’d be wiser? Or do you think they’d wasted their time?
Is a poor man’s words less wise than a rich man?
Does a person with worldly success possess wisdom? Maybe not you’d assume, because you think of yourself as less shallow than that. But, then again, when was the last time you listened or sought the wisdom of a poor man.
Our minimum standards are probably upper middle class mean at least I think – credible enough because they have some standard of success yet authentic enough that they have struggles and a measure of brokenness.
We should be more appalled at ourselves than this. After all, Jesus did some pretty great talks explaining the distinction between the foolish and the wise and the rich and the poor.
But we still think the poor man speaks of only madness and failure. We think the poor man earned his place because of his own choices and sin.
Sounds kinda familiar to me, because they thought the same thing about Jesus:
Isaiah 53:2-4
He grew up before him like a tender shoot, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. ..yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.
