Couched Knowledge

Susie Cassel bragged about her "new" couch tonight. It was quite the steal: $30 for a respectable looking yellow two-seater that has a certain vintage look to it and actually matches their living room decorations remarkably well.

Tonight offered seniors the opportunity to impart some wisdom upon the flock before we skip town. Fully aware I had to say something, I sat on Susie's new couch, squeezed between Hops and Jay, whom I feared would give me a swift elbow to the side in lieu of my normal shark tank treatment should I say anything sketchy.

Trouble is, everything I know comes from me being pretty good at screwing things up. Basically, the pattern of my last four years of life—and I fear the pattern goes back much further—is that in the most important decisions of my life, I have made what turned out to be the best decision, even though it is usually precisely the opposite of what I wanted.

Whenever I share advice I find myself wanting to show to others what great decisions I have made, or how I've done things right. Instead, my advice was more of a confession. Thanks to my friend Steph and her blog, I recently read this quote from Jacques Derrida, whom I cannot claim to have read in any depth:

“One always writes in order to confess, one always writes in order to ask for forgiveness.”

Trying to share tonight at After Hours was only the last of my "confessions" of the last month. Every one of the 70 pages I've written over the last month has expressed the Gospel in some form, if only in a small way. And each confession of the Gospel has pushed me to a confession in the second sense of the word—to admit fault—that I do not live to the standards of which I write.

What a blessed word it is in Proverbs 1:7, "The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge." Not wisdom of myself. Not by my experiences.

This is a fear I need to learn more of.