PEBBLES IN THE POND
“The prudent see danger and take refuge but the simple keep going and suffer for it.” Proverbs 27:12
I heard definitions of the wise and foolish person recently or, as above, the prudent and simple, which made sense to me.
A wise person is one who understands that all of life is connected. Whatever our choices, there are always results or consequences. Our present is connected to our past, and our future is connected to our present. But we are also connected to the people around us, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and their choices also impact us in various ways. To be wise is to acknowledge our connectedness, and to live in a way that impacts positively, not negatively, on ourselves and others.
By contrast, the fool lives for himself, makes foolish decisions and doesn’t care how his choices impact on others. When things go wrong, he cops out, blames God or other people, and takes no responsibility for the mess he is in. Perhaps the greatest tragedy for the fool is that he does not learn from his mistakes. He simply goes on making the same mistakes over and over and messing up his own and other people’s lives in the process.
Take, for example, the married man or woman who keeps having affairs, knowing what it does to spouse and family and yet doing it anyway and never learning from the consequences. He or she keeps making the same choices but believes that the outcome will be different.
It’s a bit like dropping a pebble in a pond, making waves that move outward in ever-widening circles. The impact doesn’t stop with the first wave but eventually makes waves that cover the entire surface of the pond. So are our choices to do both good and evil.
This makes me think of the life of Moses. Despite the Pharaoh’s decree to throw all the Hebrew baby boys into the Nile, his mother chose to weave a little waterproof basket and put him in the Nile, not to drown but to be rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter.
That decision had a ripple effect – Moses grew up in the royal palace and had inside experience about being a son of Pharaoh. As an adult he made a bad choice – to kill an Egyptian – and had to flee the wrath of Pharaoh as a murderer. But his bad choice also had a good outcome – he learned to survive in the desert, which knowledge he made good use of as leader of God’s people later. Moses’ life unfolded, ripple by ripple, as he learned God’s ways, obeyed His commands, and eventually became the greatest of all Israel’s leaders, taking the people of God from slavery to freedom, from Egypt to Canaan and being the mediator of God’s covenant with His people.
His mother’s decision to save him was the pebble in the pond, and here we are today, being a part of the ripples that still go outward on this pond of life.