The Complacency of Fools

A fearful incident will focus one’s attention and prompt decisive action. It could be your child falling down the stairs; a notice of foreclosure due to unpaid bills; an unwelcome report from a doctor due to long-ignored health conditions. Those kinds of things, and many more, will get your attention. Wise and reasonable people will respond.

This, of course, rarely applies to parental instruction. We all have received warnings and directives that we have long ignored. It seems the more often we hear them, the more we tend to not even hear, like the drip from a faucet. Of course, moving up and out helps too.

Not all parental instruction is gospel truth. Nor is every word preached from the pulpit. But there, too, heedings and pleadings are too often regarded as Sunday, rhetorical flourishes. The preacher wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t say those things. Hey, we even know what he’s going to say even before he says it. And, if you don’t like hearing it week after week, you can go somewhere else, or nowhere at all. But the tough considerations needed to put things into practice and effect change are most often long lost by Monday morning.

Proverbs 1 is an introduction to the task of parents and preachers. It is also an appeal for those who would truly listen in order that they might actually heed - please, heed - the message and take appropriate measures. And it is in this Bible chapter, - wisdom calling out, finding distressingly few hearers/reponders, - that we find the phrase that heads this article: the complacency of fools. 

Urgency is stolen away by complacency. Sharp focus is dissolved by distraction. Preachers preach, but delay and comfortable patterns of life rule the day, and the next, and the next. And then, what will happen indeed happens. The consequences of foolishness, born out of the complacency of fools, will one day fasten themselves upon you, no matter how wise and reasonable you fancy yourself to be. There will be an accident, perhaps more serious than before. Debt will devour your future, and you will be left grasping for a bailout. Your health will fail you, perhaps because you failed your health. Or, ultimately, you will stand before God, with precious little to say. And you will have earned the title that the Bible gives to those who will not listen to good parents and preachers: fool. And then it will all be crystal-clear, on that day when “they are destroyed in a moment! They are utterly swept away by sudden terrors!” (Psalms 73:19)