“On Tending to My Knittin’”
My fifth-grade teacher, Mrs. Manley, often exhorted her students to “tend to your knittin’!” I didn’t understand the metaphor, but I knew what she meant. I needed to stop talking to the pretty girl across from me, and concentrate on my writing assignment!
Distraction is at epidemic proportions these days. Much of what I call “work” is actually just scrolling through the internet looking for cute puppy videos or political news. I imagine some of you occasionally struggle with similar distractions.
Proverb 17:24 has an interestingly worded warning for people like me.
“The discerning sets his face toward wisdom,
but the eyes of a fool are on the ends of the earth.”
(English Standard Version)
Fools look too far away. I sometimes do precisely that.
But aren’t we supposed to be concerned with what is going on the world? I would answer that with a definite maybe.
Here is the problem, as I see it. I tend to be more interested in knowing what’s going on in the world, than I am in actually doing something to make the world a better place right where I am. This sort of “knowing” doesn’t sound—or feel—like wisdom to me.
Goldingay has a vivid comment about this verse, and about the folly of looking too far into the distance. He says that folly “. . . is promiscuous in its interests (17:24) . . . .” And promiscuity is not a good thing in any area of my life.
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