When Making Decisions, Cultivating Wisdom Is Better Than Following Billboards
In a small patch of summer shade, my husband, Ryan, and I sipped iced coffee while our three sons and their cousins played basketball. We were discussing a major life decision—a disruption, of pandemic proportions. We considered alternatives, weighed options, wondered aloud about God’s leading.
Like most decisions, the alternatives circled around questions of time: of ultimate things, of final things. What mattered? What mattered now? What couldn’t be put off? What made sense of God’s revealed will in the Scripture? The decision begged the prayer of Moses in Psalm 90: “Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
That’s when we saw the billboard.
Off the Kennedy expressway, a block beyond the park, a billboard practically shouted an answer to the questions we sat asking each other. Had we been considering a move to Brazil, the billboard would have read, “Learn Portuguese fast!” Had we been wondering whether to sell the house and travel the country in an RV, the billboard would have boasted a map and a rebate code.
I elbowed Ryan. “Look at that!”
God might very well write his will on billboards—and I could be made to believe in the possibility on a summer day in 2021, when an emphatic answer to our questions glares back at us in towering letters of black and white. God can certainly use billboards, should they be required.
But maybe my belief in billboards has less to do with my confidence in God. Maybe it has less to do with trust in his shepherding love. Maybe my interest in neon signs has more to with my stubborn commitment to spiritual “optimization.” To think how much more efficient it would be if God would micromanage our paths, calling out directions in the recognizable voice of Siri.
If only God had as much preoccupation for the “wasting” of time as we did.
This isn’t God’s way, of course: this huffing husband at the wheel of the car, honking at his wife. In the Bible, God is never caught tapping his foot or glancing at his watch, wondering what takes his people so long to move. Sure, there is that moment in the Book of Jonah when he hurls howling winds and a hungry whale to steer the prophet back on course, but God generally has a reputation for patience.
God knows wisdom, this moral capacity for deciding, will not be hurried. He could very well lead forcibly: by the hand, as a parent threads a small child through a thicket of people at an amusement park. Or he could train our feet to travel his paths.
Wisdom is not the business of hacking life. It is not the product of searching Google and scrolling social media. It is not a matter of applying tips and tricks to the thorny problems of being human. No, wisdom has nothing to do with technique and its proposed efficiencies. It’s why it rarely factors into time management advice. Instead, wisdom is fruit borne from the fear of the Lord. Wisdom is formed incrementally by a long and slow obedience to God. In fact, wisdom, as a product of character, cannot be had all at once. “It takes time,” writes Ellen Davis, “for the tree of human experience to bear the fruit of wisdom.”
To read billboards, you don’t need wisdom. At my age, you simply need glasses.
If time were God’s only interest, if all he cared for were our punctual arrival at the place of his choosing, he could electrify our path like an airport runway. But efficiency doesn’t seem to be God’s project. No, God longs to see the wisdom formed in his people: “Be not like a horse or a mule, without understanding, which must be curbed with bit and bridle, or it will not stay near you.” He longs to see us submit to his instruction, his teaching, his counsel: these levers of wisdom. He longs to form in human beings greater and greater capacity for trust.
A donkey can follow the lights of a blinking billboard. But wisdom, as Derek Kidner writes, “is for disciples only.” It’s about a human’s “management of affairs, his sensitivity to people, his character and his morals; above all . . . his relation to God.” Wisdom, then, cannot be measured by the stopwatch, as productivity can be measured. A stopwatch can count the seconds, but it cannot measure virtue.
Kidner points out that wisdom literature in the Bible requires us to step into a participatory role. It assumes the exercise of human agency and asks us to decide. It does not speak in the mode of the law: thou shall. Neither does it speak in the mode of the prophets: thus sayeth the Lord. Rather, wisdom literature engages the reader, “draws [them] into answering and asking, into working things out painfully.” Wisdom is the capacity we were left to exercise that day in the summer shade, Ryan and I sipping iced coffee. We needed wisdom when none of the alternatives blinked glaring lights of call or caution, when responsibility for choosing could not be avoided. ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning,’ or first principle, ‘of wisdom,’” writes Kidner. “In one form or another, this truth meets us in all the wisdom books.”
We live by the stories we tell, even the stories we tell about time. Whether we realize it or not, we are myth-making beings, always narrating the reality of the world and our place in it. Maybe the world is friendly or indifferent or hostile. Maybe we are good or depraved or improvable. Maybe we are alone here, and time is just another resource to economize, to exploit, to expend for our good pleasure. Or maybe the world is lovingly superintended by a Creator and Sustainer, a wise and good Giver of all things, including time itself.
Maybe we stand to learn the hours don’t belong to us. And maybe a billboard, blinking the lesson in neon, won’t be necessary after all.
Adapted from In Good Time: 8 Habits for Reimagining Productivity, Resisting Hurry, and Practicing Peace by Jen Pollock Michel (© 2022). Published by Baker Books, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Used by permission.
Jen Pollock Michel is the award-winning author of Teach Us to Want, Keeping Place, Surprised by Paradox, and A Habit Called Faith. She holds a BA in French from Wheaton College and an MA in Literature from Northwestern University, and she is also a student in Seattle Pacific’s MFA program. Jen is a wife and mother of five and hosts the Englewood Review of Books podcast.