If we want a hard, sticky job, we may want to collect a huge vat of maple sap and boil the watery fluid down all the way past syrup to sugar. It’s not a complicated process, but it does take a lot of work. Cleaning up is hard.
The process is similar to what we do with dozens of things in our minds, every day. We “boil things down” in an attempt to take a huge vat of seemingly unrelated things and make sense of them. Just as few of us will ever take a fifty five gallon drum of otherwise useless sap and boil it down into a couple of pounds of sugar that’s so good people will pay premium prices for it, most of us will not make money by reducing the volumes of information we’ve absorbed into small and salable units.
It may be postulated that the smartest people are those able to reduce the biggest amount of information into the smallest concentration. Some such concentrations of information are called “adages”, wise sayings that let us understand a great deal in one, pithy sentence. It has been suggested, for instance, that textbooks full of economic issues may be reduced to: “There is no free lunch.”
Holy Scripture uses the word “proverbs” to describe such distillations of knowledge. There is, in fact, an entire section of The Bible that’s entitled The Book of Proverbs. We would help ourselves learn to think more clearly if we would read a page or so of the distilled wisdom in The Book of Proverbs every day or so.
Reading a page or so of Proverbs every day will help us more than doing the other things on which we will end up spending that amount of time. We know, at some level, that we will not be doing that reading. We also know that even though we know that, we will still fail to do what we know is good for us because wanting to be better is not enough to make us actually do something to become better.
But, we do know this: Even though we have considered the helpfulness of reading a bit of The Book of Proverbs every day, and have concluded that doing so would absolutely be helpful to us, and realizing simultaneously that we will not be putting forth the effort to do so, we are, nevertheless, very likely to enthusiastically recommend to others that they read a page or two of Proverbs on a daily basis. “It can really be a big help!”, we will say, with all the enthusiasm we think we’d have if we’d actually been doing so, which is precisely the impression we’re trying to leave.
That’s the way we are. The profound miracle that this should cause us to consider is that it’s absolutely amazing that God knows this about us, sees with complete clarity what utter phonies we tend to be, and still, He loves us.
