Of the wisdom that is hard-won

The very best of wisdom, they say, is hard-earned.  This is such a great encouragement for all those who have often wondered whether what they suffered was all just a big waste.

With hard-won wisdom, we ponder something that often takes years (not weeks) to procure.  And that’s because this kind of wisdom humbles us in failure time and time again.  It can feel humiliating to miss the mark so repetitively, but the very point of hard-won wisdom is we NEEDED to make all those mistakes to draw out of the scenario all there was to learn.

In the exercise of humility enough to bear the pain of being out of sorts for such a length of time, THERE, right in that most horrible of spaces, is the very conditioning that expunges pride—that detestable quality that sticks to those who exalt power and fall for Hubris Syndrome.

Humility is exemplified in wisdom, 
as folly finds itself in full array in pride.

In the winning of the wisdom that makes us and keeps us humble, there is growth and life—yes, out of the torment of getting life wrong for so long.  There are moments in this whole process, and very many of them I’m here to tell you, where you feel as if there are people laughing at you and treating you with disdain.

Well, once you have hard-won wisdom, nobody laughs at us then.

This is why I always encourage those I counsel to hold on and be patient and gentle with themselves when they’re assailed by the impossible.  God, we know, works especially in the realm of the impossible.  This is why faith seems so ridiculous.  And yet it’s why faith is an integral part of gleaning this hard-won wisdom.

I’d venture to say there are few exceptions to the general rule that hard-won wisdom is the only true wisdom.  There are people, however, who are wise simply for whom they are—they didn’t need to learn it the hard way.  But these are rarities.

You know what this reminds me of?  What Paul says about human wisdom in First Corinthians.  Human wisdom—let’s call it success, or the projection of success for image-sake—is folly.  And in this social media age we’re all tempted to fake it to make it.

The only wisdom that works for humanity is that which is hard-won, that has made us humble, that has kept us grounded, that has made us not only wise, but that has made us a truly kind and personable human beings—deeply capable of empathy, won to compassion—people who are just lovely to know.  That’s a wise person who has enrolled in, stayed, and graduated from, the School of Brokenness.