Get Yourself Some Wisdom

 Proverbs 4:5-8

"Get wisdom, get understanding: forget it not; neither decline from the words of my mouth. Forsake her not, and she shall preserve thee: love her, and she shall keep thee. Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom: and with all thy getting get understanding. Exalt her, and she shall promote thee: she shall bring thee to honour, when thou dost embrace her."(KJV)

Looking back at our past we have gone through some very lean times. While I had the added complication of my chronic illness being unmanaged there are things I could have done better had I known how serious the future was going to get. Some choices were physically impossible at the time like gardening, canning and any outdoor manual labor. By the time we realized we were in a personal crisis event there was not much we could do about it. 

While we cannot change the past we can learn from it. Wisdom is found in our family history, national history and the Bible. But history is boring! If you really only know history from a school textbook it does seem that way. But the kind of history I am talking about are things like mothers and families in historical stories and fiction. What did they do when their crisis hit? How did they adapt to the new normal? Some of those accounts tell of a normal standard of living far below anything any of us have experienced. You can  learn a lot from material designed to entertain because history is about the people who lived it not dry facts unconnected to real life. 

I've found practical wisdom for hard times in the Little House books, short stories of Michigan pioneers and other similar fiction from various times in American history. My current favorite is the Foxfire series which is a compilation of interviews, tales and demonstrations of Appalachian life as told by the elderly in the 1960's. 

Since neither my husband or I had much access to our family history once we were old enough to appreciate it we seek it out from other sources. Most of our grandparents passed while we were young or just adult enough to realize we should start asking them about their past. So if you have access to elders who like to talk and tell stories, sit down and ask them about their childhood, what they did as newlyweds, how they got through.