Sorry bout that. The mp3 of the morning service should be online soon. Check back Monday by noon, that’s the weekly goal anyway.

I have been out on the roads and everything seems fine—no slick spots that I noticed at all. So we are on as planned! Obviously if your area is in bad shape use your own wisdom as you feel best. But we hope to see you all soon.

Your road condition assessor in a 94 Protege,
Jim Pace

As I send this, we are experiencing some freezing rain. If there’s a need for a change of plans, we’ll make the call early tomorrow morning and post the news here by 8am. Also, a reminder that we are discussing Prov 21-26 tomorrow, primarily 25 and 26. If you bring your Bible with you, it could be a help—but if you don’t have it, that will be fine as well. As you may remember, there’s no 7:07 tomorrow.

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow, especially the campus as I haven’t had the chance to speak there in a while. This will be fun! Have a great night and I hope you haven’t stopped being thankful just because Thanksgiving is past.

Be His,
Jim Pace

Chapters 5 and 6 bring the focus back on the “other” woman. More enticing than Lady Wisdom, Lady Marmelade, we’ll call her, offers an alternative path—straight to the grave. It might be easy to dismiss her as a legitimate temptation since Blacksburg has no red light district, the nearest strip club is in WV, and it’s rare to find desperate housewives roaming Pritchard, but the virtual door of her house is closer and more accessible than ever before. Keep your browser cache pure, do not lust in your heart after her, for “she preys on your very life”. If you’re falling into this temptation and would like to talk with someone who can relate, please contact me.

Proverbs 4: Hilarious case in point! As I was passing my eyes across verse 20 in a robotic superficial effort to check off today’s reading from my to-do list and move on to something else, I found myself snapping out of a daydream. So I re-read it. “My son, pay attention to what I say; listen closely to my words.” Very funny. As I look over the entire chapter again, my close attention finds the second half of verse 26: “take only ways that are firm”. I think of the final pit on the mud run, not the firmest way.

Proverbs 3: Wow, verse 5 – 6 is really hard! This was one of the first passages I memorized as a kid, my dad’s favorite. It describes the essence of faith, the entire Gospel in a sentence: we have a way, God has a way, His way is right. How can I lean not on my own understanding today? Verses 13 – 18 are the verses that prompted me to ask a girl named Kati Wise to marry me. If you know her, you know that she is the “she” in this passage. How blessed I am to lay hold of her!

Proverbs 2: “Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men.” I hope so. I keep thinking that by this point in my life I would be wise, but I’m reminded here that I need to always be on guard against people “whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.” It sounds funny to even say there’s such a thing—especially in my Blacksburgian utopia! In today’s culture it’s quite out of style to label people as wicked. If we’re honest, the black/white, wicked/righteous dichotomy that proverbs clearly sets up can be hard to accept when we see ourselves not clearly fitting into the one category and not the other.

Today’s reading from Proverbs 1: Already in 1:18, I see the principle Jim illustrated with the block of salt. Pursuing selfish gain does more harm than good: “it takes the lives of those who get it.” I can hear the echo of Jesus’ paradox that “he who seeks to gain his life will lose it, but he who loses it for My sake will gain it.” Lady Wisdom enters the scene. Just like the statuesque symbols of Lady Liberty and Lady Blind Justice, this abstract concept is personified as a feminine form that the young male listener would and should find attractive.