Jacob, Elena, and myself are working together to build a curriculum for the Oasis Center in the afternoons. The curriculum consists of teaching through the aphorisms of proverbs. I have been surprised to discover things that I should have already known. For example: Things won through difficulty will be held as a greater prize (ha! I am thinking in aphorisms now). The hearts of the youth are rebelling because they find most of what is taught or preach to them plain boring. Drugs give a high, gangs give a bond, sex gives passion. Children desperately want to feel and the church has too often given them rules instead of experiences. The book of proverbs offers a timeless teaching tool because it asks us to look back and forth between wisdom and experience and to decide which is true. Here is a little of what I have learned (borrowing some ideas from Leland Ryken's "How to Read the Bible as Literature"):
Ultimately a proverb is to cultivate a moment of epiphany. The modern story writer James Joyce once described a moment of epiphany as the point in a story where a spiritual or intellectual eye adjusts its vision to an exact focus. A proverb is just such a moment of intellectual focus. A proverb captures the clearest and most affecting moment, the point of greatest light. In the end, as foretold in the beginning, all wisdom revolves around one unifier: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. All life, rightly understood, displays this to the wise person. Each proverb provides a verbal snapshot that contains particular insight that can be visualized mentally, painted on a canvas, lived; however, only fitted together can the puzzle of experiences show its greater identity.
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