By Donna Lee Schillinger
If a person can grasp a motivating vision of how life can be better, and through encouragement hold on to that belief, she will begin to see how that folly is holding her back; it’s time to choose: go forward into a better life or keep wearing diapers.
Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding his like grain with a pestle, you will not remove his folly from him. Proverbs 27:22
Are some people completely beyond reform as this verse suggests? God does not wish any person to eternal doom, even though God created some specifically for the “day of destruction.” And though we are instructed to shake the dust from our feet of those who reject the gospel, I refuse to believe that God gives up on anyone. I believe God gives us all one last chance before we check out. God calls one last time. Some are so deafened by sin they can’t recognize God’s voice. Others are so stubborn and willful, that even though they have an inkling that God is calling, they continue headstrong to their doom. Perhaps the fool of this verse is like that.
Though you grind a fool in a mortar, grinding his like grain with a pestle, you will not remove his folly from him. Proverbs 27:22
Are some people completely beyond reform as this verse suggests? God does not wish any person to eternal doom, even though God created some specifically for the “day of destruction.” And though we are instructed to shake the dust from our feet of those who reject the gospel, I refuse to believe that God gives up on anyone. I believe God gives us all one last chance before we check out. God calls one last time. Some are so deafened by sin they can’t recognize God’s voice. Others are so stubborn and willful, that even though they have an inkling that God is calling, they continue headstrong to their doom. Perhaps the fool of this verse is like that.
There have been many people who have lived foolishly to later reform to a life of service to God.
Or, perhaps in this verse God is letting us in on a little secret about how to successfully separate a fool from his folly. It can be done, you know. There have been many people who have lived foolishly to later reform to a life of service to God. And I’m one of them! Maybe in this verse, God is trying to tell us that brow-beating a fool is not the way to separate him from his folly. Something about that aggression makes him bond more tightly to his folly. Maybe to get him to give up his folly, we have to use other means of persuasion.
Like a toddler who doesn’t want to give up a bottle or a blankie, an attempt at a forceful removal of folly from a fool is not well received.
I breast-fed my daughter for 18 months. I had given some thought as to how to wean her and was planning to do it soon, but on one particularly frustrating day, I impulsively decided today was the day. I had had enough. What followed was traumatic for both of us. We stayed up half the night yelling at each other. She couldn’t understand and I couldn’t make her understand why all the sudden she was cut off from her major source of comfort. The days to follow were not as bad, but the whole experience left me with bad memories and wondering if I had done some indelible damage to her psyche.
Having failed so miserably at weaning, I was really dreading potty training. I believed it would take a measure of patience I didn’t have, with all the other pressures of being a working, single mom. With no real plan of how or when to begin, I gave her a training potty for her second birthday.
It stayed in the box for about a week then one day she asked, “What’s that?”
I took it out of the box and explained what it was and why she needed it. She was going to learn to wear big girl panties. That was all I had to say. My daughter was incredibly motivated by bigger kids. She wanted to be like them, and there was no greater honor for her than to be called a “big girl.”
She told me, “I want to use it now. Go out.”
Sure, why not. We took her diaper off and I went out of the room. She sat down on the pot and we waited. I was just around the corner and a couple of times, I peeked in on her. Each time she said authoritatively, “Go back!”
After a few minutes more, she called me in and she had successfully christened the pot with numbers one and two. We made a big deal of it and later that day went to buy her some big-girl panties.
When nighttime came, however, I put her in a diaper again. She didn’t like that. It was regression to her. I told her that she would need to wear a diaper at night until she woke up in the morning three times in a row with a dry diaper, something she rarely did. I thought it might take her some weeks to learn to hold her bladder while she slept. Wrong. The next morning she had a dry diaper. And the next. And the next. That girl was determined to be rid of her diapers and wear panties like a big girl. And that was that. She was day and nighttime potty trained, with almost no effort on my part, all because she had a meaningful motivation (unlike M&Ms). All my worries about potty training being another traumatic experience had been for nothing.
God gave this message on the eve of its destruction – in an era marked with folly.
The contrast in these two experiences holds an important lesson for all of us about how to implement change and how to get people to change. If we try to take something away from a person, or beat it out of them, they will only cling to that thing more tightly. The aggression from without causes the fool and her folly to bond from within – it’s just them against the world. However, if a person can grasp a motivating vision of how life can be better, and through encouragement hold on to that belief, she will begin to see how that folly is holding her back; it’s time to choose: go forward into a better life or keep wearing diapers.
This very simple of idea of intrinsic motivation for change is the basis of the vast majority of successful reform programs and is used in countless ways in education, business and also in God’s word. Probably my favorite passages in the Bible are Isaiah 54 and 55. They are much more meaningful to me in a modern language; here are some select verses from these two chapters in The Message. “Clear lots of ground for your tents! Make your tents large. Spread out! Think big! … Don’t hold back – you’re not going to come up short. You’ll forget all about the humiliations of your youth… I’m about to rebuild you with stones of turquoise, lay your foundations with sapphires, construct your towers with rubies… You’ll be built solid, grounded in righteousness… You’ll go out in joy, you’ll be led into a whole and complete life … giant sequoias…Monuments to me, to God, living and lasting evidence to God.”
The amazing thing about these vision-giving, motivational words is that God didn’t speak them to Israel when the nation was at its pinnacle of obedience. It wasn’t praise. God gave this message on the eve of its destruction – in an era marked with folly.
God wants us to catch a glimpse of what we can be when we live according to God’s word, and then turn from our folly – voluntarily. God holds out hope for our best, even when we’re at our worst.
This very simple of idea of intrinsic motivation for change is the basis of the vast majority of successful reform programs and is used in countless ways in education, business and also in God’s word. Probably my favorite passages in the Bible are Isaiah 54 and 55. They are much more meaningful to me in a modern language; here are some select verses from these two chapters in The Message. “Clear lots of ground for your tents! Make your tents large. Spread out! Think big! … Don’t hold back – you’re not going to come up short. You’ll forget all about the humiliations of your youth… I’m about to rebuild you with stones of turquoise, lay your foundations with sapphires, construct your towers with rubies… You’ll be built solid, grounded in righteousness… You’ll go out in joy, you’ll be led into a whole and complete life … giant sequoias…Monuments to me, to God, living and lasting evidence to God.”
The amazing thing about these vision-giving, motivational words is that God didn’t speak them to Israel when the nation was at its pinnacle of obedience. It wasn’t praise. God gave this message on the eve of its destruction – in an era marked with folly.
God wants us to catch a glimpse of what we can be when we live according to God’s word, and then turn from our folly – voluntarily. God holds out hope for our best, even when we’re at our worst.
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