“At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore” (Ps. 16: 11)
Growing Dominion, Part 48
My father-in-law likes to joke that fifty percent of all doctors graduated in the lower half of their class at med school. And if there were a school that all businessmen and retail merchants had to graduate from, then the same thing would be true for them. But because this is still (largely) a free country, and just about anybody can open a shop, and the free market provides all the schooling that a small business owner might care for, it might be safe to say that a larger percentage than fifty percent are in the lower half of the class.
Walking into a business that is competently run is a very distinct experience from walking into a business that is not. There are sadly many merchants out there who do not really know what they are doing, and just “being a Christian” or “trusting the Lord” will not necessarily change that. And when their customers complain about it, they feel aggrieved-these people obviously “don’t know what it is like” to have to manage all this and all that. The point to be made here, however, is that simply “having experience” in a particular field is not the same thing as having wisdom in that field. It is an unfortunate fact that many tend to calculate wisdom in terms of time put in, instead of in terms of lessons learned.