Wisdom

As you may know, I work for a Skilled Nursing Facility. One of the other staff members is our chaplain, Dave Passey. Dave shared yesterday from James 3:17, and particularly 7 qualities of wisdom, which I have reproduced below:

1. · Pure: Untainted by selfish motives.
2. · Peaceable: Diffuses conflict and brings the peace of Christ.
3. · Gentle: Seeks to understand before judging.
4. · Willing to yield: Not insistent on its own viewpoint.
5. · Full of mercy and good fruit: Showing patience and willing to give others space.
6. · Impartial: Shows no favoritism.
7. · Without hypocrisy: Lives a life of integrity, i.e. walks the talk.

I chose to put this on here today because I feel it's important to meditate on, because there is a veritable difference between Intelligence and Wisdom.

One of the gifts I have is intelligence. There is no real way to say this and sound humble, but the truth I very rarely do not feel more intelligent than anyone else in the room. It actually throws me off my edge when I'm in the company of someone who is smarter than me.

But I definitely don't have much wisdom some times. I make lots of mistakes that should be easy to see coming. And I think that comes from a realm of dealing with people (wisdom) versus a realm of the physical world (intelligence). I think you can see that most of those points above refer to relationships with people, rather than relationships with things.

Here's what I mean: Intelligence can tell me that someone needs encouragement. Wisdom can tell me how and when to encourage them. In some ways, Wisdom makes intelligence superfluous. If you can successfully understand the people around you, you can go far.

Most successful leaders are people of wisdom. Most successful managers are people of intelligence. I think I would be pretty successful as a manager but not that successful as a leader.

So that's one of my goals; to go from doing well with the world around me to doing well with the people around me.