Wisdom

My child, listen to me and treasure my instructions. Tune your ears to wisdom, and concentrate on understanding. Cry out for insight and understanding. Search for them as you would for lost money or hidden treasure. Then you will understand what it means to fear the Lord, and you will gain knowledge of God. For the Lord grants wisdom! From His mouth come knowledge and understanding.(Proverbs 2:1-6)

It's very easy to tune our ears to things that seem wise, but are not. How many times to people say that you need to look out for yourself; that you need to put your happiness first before you can make anybody else happy, that we should be our first priority? I'm finding out more each day that the world's wisdom is not God's wisdom. You don't have to look very hard for the world's wisdom, but I realize that God's wisdom requires a little bit of work on our part.
First we are to "tune our ears to wisdom". This means not just listening to God's voice, but making sure that it is God's voice that is speaking and not just our own desire or Satan disguising himself as God. That type of discernment can come only by spending time with God, in prayer and in His word. We also need to obey that wisdom. James wrote, "If you just listen and don't obey, it is like looking at your face in a mirror but doing nothing to improve your appearance. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like." (James 1:23-24) I'm still working on the obedience part, as I think we all are.
Secondly, we need to actually search out insight and understanding. Pouring over the Scripture, pondering it, asking God for wisdom, discussing it with other Christians--that's partly why we have the Church. The Church body can help us understand these things that are puzzling to us. Some things, of course, we'll never understand in this life.
I would like to understand exactly what it means to fear God, and to know Him better. That is the reason for this blog. The search for joy and the search for God are one and the same.
Part of my search for insight and understanding have led me to purchase a course on the composer Shostakovitch from the Teaching Company. I had heard somewhere (I don't remember who told me) that my family was distantly related to him, so I'm finding out more about him, and it is exciting. Finding out that he had his first symphony performed when he was only 20 years old and was immediately acclaimed as a major symphonic composer is really cool. However, finding out that he had several friends killed under Stalin's rule, not so much. Being forced to tow the Communist party line in order to survive, not so cool. Finding out that he had the joy almost literally beaten out from him and that he died a bitter man makes me pretty sad. I am at some point going to go on ancestry.com to find out if we are indeed related. If so, this would explain a lot. The man looked an awful lot like my family on my dad's side, and I'm extremely curious.