Showers of Wisdom
Showers of Wisdom
Judges 13:8-9a
Then Manoah prayed to the LORD and said, “O Lord, please let the man of God whom you sent come again to us and teach us what we are to do with the child who will be born.” And God listened to the voice of Manoah.
To my shame, if you’d asked me a month ago to rattle off five fun facts about Samson from memory, I could’ve given them without blinking an eye, but if you’d asked me to give you five facts about his father, Manoah, I would’ve looked at you like a deer in headlights. Yet, that’s part of the joy of reading slowly through these biblical narratives, friend. Doing so enables us to place ourselves in the moment of the action, without looking too far ahead, and face each new scene the way an impressionist like Monet faced a sunset or a pond full of lilies, engaging with the immediate landscape as thoroughly as we can before it inevitably changes. For my own soul at least, when I treat biblical chronicles not as surveys of a few key events but as glimpses into the way God meets us in the middle of our human travail and provides the cleansing and wisdom and nourishment we need for the present, then even the seemingly peripheral and marginal moments become monumental ones.
“Oh LORD, come back to teach us!”, cries Manoah in his desperation to get God’s will right. I wonder, friend: how many Christian influencers in our generation start off their day by praying that prayer? How many elders and professors and pastors look in the mirror before their respective occupations, recognize the deficiency of their talents and insights and spiritual giftings, and cry out, “Oh LORD—give me Your wisdom as I minister! Teach me what I’ve been missing—show me what I’ve been getting wrong so I can make it right!” We’ve all, in some form or another, sought to gain knowledge or acquire degrees or enlarge our network for the purpose of getting a better job or amassing credentials or landing an advisory role among our peers, rather than to first and foremost discern the will of God.
Just think of all the wonders we miss in our lives of faith when we drink from the broken cistern of our own understanding instead of resting on our knees under the rains of God’s wisdom.