Live Wise

Live Wise is a guidebook to a life wisely lived, the Live Wise Life. The first teaching in the Live Wise Project (LWP) journey is: A life wisely lived, the Live Wise Life is initially entered into by a person developing a wise understanding of life and reality (ULR): a wise ULR. What is a ULR? A ULR is everything a specific person understands (including misunderstandings) about all dimensions, facets of life and reality: historic understanding, such as our mother’s sisters’ names, who is our favorite historical person and why, etc.; our portfolio of everyday how-to-skills understanding, such as how to drive a car, bake a cake, use a smart-phone to view, post on social media, etc.; our academic and applied scientific understanding, such as what are symptoms evidencing our being ill and warranting going to a doctor, what is hypothermia, etc.; emotional understand, such as what makes someone loveable, what are the fun, humorous aspects of life, what is depression, etc.; our understanding of morality, right-conduct, including what is a functional way to treat, respond to someone that inadvertently (alt., deliberately) steps on our foot in an elevator, how do we graciously receive an unexpected, unmerited lavish gift, etc.; self-understanding such as are we naturally, as-born an introvert or extrovert and to what degree, what are our three most virulent anger triggers and what are their origins, etc.; professional understanding being everything we know about work both its technical and interpersonal dimensions, such as our ability to build, code a website graphic, how-to successfully address customer complaints, receive or deliver negative performance feedback, etc. These are but a few categories of understanding in a typical ULR. How is our ULR formed, developed, cultivated, crafted, discovered, corrupted, garbled, confused, impoverished, sabotaged, etc.? Throughout our lives, we progressively, one unit of understanding (UOU) at a time develop, cultivate, craft, and in some of instances, discover our ULR substantially from the various explanations of life and reality (ELRs) we encounter during our unique journey to maturity (e.g., biological, emotional, relational, cultural, spiritual, cognitive, competencies, etc. maturity) and path through reality. Each person’s ULR is as individual as their fingerprints. Initially, our ELR sources are our at-birth caregivers, which typically are the various members of our nuclear family-of-origin with our mother, most likely, being primary. Next in importance is our father, if present and parentally engaged. Additional ELR instruction typically comes from older childhood siblings/playmates, extended family members, others who were so like-family to us we believed them to be in-fact, biological relatives, and the intimate slice of life and reality into which we were born. Sadly, some ULR elements are marks of our being misinformed, garbled, etc. Our ULR cultivation, development becomes more structured, systematic, complex, and intentional (progressively more formally outcome-focused) as we enter into: first, semiformal structured learning activities such as parent taught personal-care, mom-and-me play-groups, and perhaps some form of preschool (both at home and at some form of semiformal school) activities; and, then, formal education endeavors that can range from having attended only the primary grades (or sadly, not attending any formal schooling) to extensive post-graduate masters/doctoral studies and internships abroad. In addition, the reality around us, be it urban or rural, seashores, or mountaintops, is both something we live in and experience but also something we learn from. Reality is itself a life-long source of information, its own ELR (e.g., water is wet, but it can drown you; snow arrives as snowflakes, but it can crush you; flowers have smells as well as beauty, but can harbor allergens; the sun is essential for growth and a source of warmth, but also a sunburn, even skin cancer, if we are chronically overexposed to it; etc.), and it is important, helpful that we recognize it (reality) as such in the development and management of a Live Wise ULR. Contemporary live liberal or die culture teaches an ELR to ULR formula that yields a bone-crushing, despair saturated, suicide cultivating ELR to ULR dynamic: It identifies one’s origin as being from mere amoral, random pond-scum-soup chemical processes; add, one’s ongoing existences has the ambiance of no-design, no-purpose, hyper meaninglessness but is inherently an assembly of realllllly repetitive, monotonous and at times, equally realllllly painful boulder rolling processes; and it defines the grave as one’s common to all final inevitable destiny into which one is tossed to simply rot: rot, def – to undergo decomposition from the action of bacteria or fungi. Isn’t that a wonderfully life affirming, health and wellbeing encouraging UOU to embrace in one’s ULR? One must ask, “Is that a truly, authentically wise ELR for sourcing one’s ULR?” The correct, winning, wait for it, life-sustaining, W2L (will to live) enhancing, suicide preventing answer would be a “No!” Followed by “Negative, nein, cha, niet, ไม่ (maï) / ไม่ใช่ (maï chaï), pù shi” just for maximum multi ELR to ULR linguistical clarity. We wonder why some of the brighter, wicked-smart, physically healthy, sometimes even affluent at times young disciples in popular culture’s church replacements, social support gatherings (i.e., any Team SRPH gathering like Mensa Intl, graduate studies within the Ivy League, online niche groups, etc.) commit suicide? Get a clue, please. To the young exceptionally astute, Mensa-mind gifted (cursed?) folks can see/understand the logical conclusion, end-game to this version of The Games; and, suicide just means, I move myself along more expeditiously to relativistic orthodox liberalism’s ultimate, inevitable blind, pitiless null-set-indifferent-nothingness “That’s-All-Folks!” end sooner and avoid all or at least more of life’s ultimately meaningless, but intermittently painful, at times boring, frequently challenging, Sisyphusesque boulder rolling! But wait! There is an in fact and love a better, authentically timelessly wise ELR, an ELR with perfect, eternal explanatory power, value. By God’s design, life is intended to be in-fact and in-love an eternally meaningful, eternally fruitful outcome focused process, journey! So, put down the valium, whisky-shot, or worse, your personally preferred method of immediate self-destruction. And rejoice that there is a God who sent His eternal light to shin into the relativistic humanity sourced ELR engendered darkness (2 Corinthians 4:4-6)! There is in fact and love God sent Good News (John 3:16)! God has authored a divinely sourced explanation of life and reality (ELR) that both promises and delivers eternally effective Good News! The God of the Bible offers us wisdom (an ELR) that is timeless, truths that exist outside the bounds of mere time, beyond the limitations of an empirical-only, human-only, existential-only explanations of life and reality. God’s ELR is a guidebook to The Games that does in fact and love always results in a life wisely lived, a Live Wise Life! Not just for a few talented, fortunately born, gifted, or just chronically lucky folks; but for ALL who embrace God’s ELR as their first, preeminent source for their ULR (1 Timothy 2:3-5). Thus, equipped with the divine wisdom only God can provide through revelation plus a super-normal love relationship with an alive Jesus, we can in-fact and in-love face the complexities and messiness of life and reality today but also in our life eternal. Stop. Think. Believe. You make the call. Live Wise.