Month of Sundays: Worth

This is what the LORD says: Don’t let wise people brag about their wisdom. Don’t let strong people brag about their strength. Don’t let rich people brag about their riches. If they want to brag, they should brag that they understand and know me. They should brag that I, the LORD, act out of love, righteousness, and justice on the earth. This kind of bragging pleases me, declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 9:23-24)

College preparatory schools rise and fall on the strength of where their graduates attend university. That’s especially important for those just starting, or with no endowment to carry them through. In the case of the school I went to, both were the case. So they were very pleased when a good number in my class were admitted to Ivy League schools such as Harvard, Brown, and Cornell.

Somehow I didn’t get the memo on this. For a variety of reasons, I went elsewhere. When this got out, I found myself in trouble with faculty and classmate alike. That trouble went right up to the day we graduated.

Many years later, I went to a class reunion, and shared this with our class valedictorian, a very intelligent mental heath practitioner who is also Jewish. She was appalled at this; she expressed the sentiment that it’s not what school you went to, it’s the kind of person you are.

Today we have a governing establishment that is loaded to the gunwales with graduates from the “right” schools. But they were unable to prevent the crash of 2008. Our country and our world are well endowed with people of “proper” credentials, who have lots of power and money. But the moral level of our society should tell us that what we’re short of is people of integrity. That’s where real worth lies, and that’s where the real poverty is.

True knowledge of God will lead to real integrity and personal worth. Those who know God will want to imitate him in acting “out of love, righteousness, and justice.” If your walk with God isn’t leading you there, you may be going in the wrong direction. But he is ready and willing to set you on the right path.