Suffering Fools

Years ago, I had a client who was a convicted felon. This person had served the court assigned sentence and was in the process of rehabilitation. Months of meeting with this person had given me many opportunities to witness the change and growth of what this person’s life was becoming. I would say the person’s transformation was an act of God.

 

Then one day, a friend of my client alerted me to the fact that a blogger in town was using my client’s personal and criminal history to sling mud on a particular business entity that both my client and the blogger had a past relationship with.

 

With a little digging around, I found the email address of the blogger. Only tangentially had I ever heard of this blogger, but I certainly knew my client long and well enough to advocate for him. I wrote an email to the blogger, letting the blogger know I had first-hand knowledge of my client’s changing life. I asked as kindly as I could if the blog post that referenced my client could be taken down. I quickly received an angry response by email, and then was notified that the blogger posted a name-calling entry about me.

 

Since I had no relationship at all with the blogger, I was initially taken aback. Perhaps I was misunderstood. I wrote a second email in which I restated the case and asked again, respectfully, for the blog post that contained my client’s name and history to be removed. This time I did not get a return email, but there was another blog post about me with more name-calling.

 

Given the fact that I had no history of relationship with the blogger, I found the name-calling mildly humorous. But what the blogger was doing to the name and reputation of my client was a clear violation of the Ninth Commandment (and likely the Sixth and Eighth as well), and I could not just sit on that. With a little more digging around, I found the church where the blogger worshipped. I made an appointment with the pastor and asked him if he’d be willing to broker a meeting with the blogger and me. I had hopes that the church would help bring peace to a chaotic and painful episode.

 

But the pastor said no. We discussed the issue for maybe thirty minutes, and he acknowledged the blogger was a problem. I learned that the blogger had an apparent vendetta against that business entity and had spent years railing against it publicly. Yet the pastor’s approach was essentially a passive one. He was concerned that if the blogger was confronted, the blogger would leave the church. The pastor’s preference was to say nothing directly and hope instead that the weekly preaching of the Gospel would bring the blogger under conviction.

 

I have no idea what’s become of the blogger because, as I drove out of that church parking lot, I made an assessment and a decision. I assessed the blogger to be some category of what the Bible calls a fool. And based on that, I made the decision to get back to work helping the ex-convict and not waste time playing games with the blogger.

 

If you suspect you have a fool in your life and want to know the profile of such a person, here are some sobering descriptors from the book of Proverbs:

 

Fools despise wisdom and instruction (1:7), they hate knowledge (1:22), they cannot be corrected (9:8), they enjoy creating mischief (10:23), they are right in their own eyes (12:15) and are quick to anger (12:16), they hate stopping the evil they’ve created (13:19), they are deceitful (14:8), they are arrogant and careless (14:16), they despise authority (15:20), they do not respond well to discipline (17:10), they do not understand wisdom (17:16), they are opinionated and will not discuss any viewpoint but their own (18:2), they provoke others into arguments and their smart mouth gets them into trouble (18: 6-7), they are argumentative and contentious (20:3), they repeat their foolishness over and over with no sitting down to reason another perspective (26:11), they ultimately trust in their own heart (28:26), and they cannot resolve conflicts (29:9).

 

To say this another way, including additional statements regarding fools in the Bible, fools love being in control. One of the ways fools maintain control is to create mayhem. Which is why fools hate things like boundaries and non-engagement—it robs them of the only power they have. Fools never ask for forgiveness because they are never wrong. It’s also clear from case studies in the Bible, like Nabal (1 Samuel 25), that being a fool does not preclude material success. That’s because foolishness is a moral category, not an intellectual one.

 

The Christian Bible gives a rich and developed spectrum of fools and foolishness. From simpletons to scoffers, Scripture lets us know that these proverbial hot potatoes are a challenge to handle. If you hang around a fool too long, you’ll take on the same foolishness. If you try to challenge, let alone correct, a fool, you’ll suffer for it. In the end, once you identify someone as being a fool, Scripture’s best advice is to keep your distance.

 

Finally, any honest Christian is humbled by the recognition of periodic foolishness in one’s own life. But a growing Christian also wants to see and know about their foolishness, however painful that may be, so they can repent of it and make amends. The difference maker is an active relationship with Jesus Christ, the Wise Man, who, by bringing a disciple closer to Himself, exposes both our native and learned foolishness and replaces that with a heart of wisdom.  

 

Because there are countless ways to be a fool but only one way to become wise.