Proverbs 16:16-17
How much better it is to acquire wisdom than gold;
to acquire understanding is more desirable than silver.
The highway of the upright is to turn away from evil;
the one who guards his way safeguards his life.
I love where we live. Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have my complaints. I only have two of them, not enough snow and not enough thunderstorms. But aside from those two things, we live in one of the most amazing parts of the world. Literally. There aren’t many places where you can drive an hour one way and go skiing and drive an hour the other way and be at the beach. This is one of the greenest parts of the world with more trees than people. We have mountain ranges and deserts.
We also have canyons and this thing called the “Columbia River Gorge.” You may or may not have heard of it. It’s an amazing thing. It’s a gorge, kind of like a canyon, that I believe was carved out when the flood waters receded from the great flood of Noah. You may think that’s crazy, go ahead. Crazy doesn’t mean wrong. But, you can drive down this gorge and look up at mountains that tower over you by thousands of feet. There are majestic waterfalls (Multnomah Falls for instance) and amazing views.
One of these amazing views is when you’re heading east down Highway 14 on the Washington side of the gorge. It’s Called Cape Horn Lookout. It’s amazing. The whole drive is beautiful, but there is one particular part that is astounding. You can look out over the Columbia River, the gorge, trees and farm land below. And it’s also terrifying. There’s very little that separates you from the safety of the road and the 800′ drop down the side of the rock.
The only separator is this little, old, guard rail. I don’t think it’s enough, but, I don’t ever plan on hitting it. But, if something were to go wrong and you got hit during that time, you’d be very thankful for that little guardrail there, keeping you from falling to your explosive death.
This is wisdom. We know that it’s wise to have guardrails on roads and cliffs and bridges and in between lanes of traffic going the opposite direction a highway speeds. But when we think about guardrails for our life outside of driving we get defensive and throw fits about how they are taking away our freedom. Until we go over a cliff. And then we realize, we should have had more safeguards in our life to keep us from falling like we did.
Wisdom is turning away from evil. And turning away from evil keeps us on the right path. When we do this regularly, we can learn to travel through life with incredible efficiency. How do we guard our life and our ways? Wisdom. The more we try to live the Proverbious life and all its ways, the more we safeguard our lives and travel on the Highway of the upright.
