Logic and arguments can sometimes skim over the surface of my mind and skip over the deep parts of my heart. Story, though, even the kind I read to my four year old, pierces me with deep knowledge, the kind that changes you. And if I mull on it, the Gospel is always at the heart of this kind of change.
The story this time was a fable from Africa I had never read before. Entitled “The Tortoise and the Wisdom of the World,” it is a tale of a tortoise who, because he is wise, decides to make sure that he truly is the wisest creature in the universe. He does this by roaming the whole earth, storing up the wisdom in a gourd that he carried with him. Once he has collected enough wisdom, he thinks, he will certainly be the wisest.
At last, he rounds out his collection of wisdom; and, not wanting to lose something so precious, he wisely decides to hide it in a tree. I’ll excerpt to get the details right:
He decided to hide the gourd at the top of a very tall palm tree. To get to the top, he hung the gourd on his neck and tied a rope around himself and the tree to haul himself up. But the gourd was between him and the tree trunk making it difficult to climb. He would make a little progress and slide right back down. Meanwhile, a snail who was passing by had stopped to watch the tortoise. After watching the tortoise slide down the tree yet again, the snail suggested, “Why don’t you throw the gourd behind you instead of hanging it in front?”
The tortoise tried this and easily climbed to the top of the tree. Then he realized how futile his effort was. He had collected all the wisdom in the world, yet the snail had proven wiser than him. He threw the gourd onto the ground where it broke into several pieces allowing all the wisdom in it to escape back into the world.
This is when the story hit my heart. How often have I, like the tortoise, been growing in knowledge of God and in His wisdom, but been derailed by comparison? When I find myself on social media or even talking to a mom who is making a different parenting choice than me, I find myself questioning my own choices and trying to add on their way of living, even if it isn’t something God has truly worked on my heart, or if it doesn’t fit with our family culture. I treat my freedom in Christ as if it does not exist, and I take on weight of the law of other’s lifestyle. Like the turtle, this makes me tempted to scrap everything, and throw myself down in a petty heap on the floor.
Through the truth of the Gospel, God meets us in this moment of vulnerability and comparison and shame. Christ took upon himself the pride we take in our flimsy knowing, and died to break its power!! HE ROSE AGAIN that we might be free to walk in a new kind of wisdom, one so free from fear and competition that through it we can laugh joyously at the discovery of another’s greater wisdom, and humbly at its own foolish moments.
And even if we, like the turtle, compare ourselves to others and give up on our wisdom and the freedom we live out in Christ again and again, God will restore us to freedom and humility. Let us turn to him in repentance and remember again the Jesus who walked among people and never rejected their foolishness (but only the wisdom they held tight in pride).