“Does not wisdom call out?” — Proverbs 8:1
Before the first star burned, before the first human drew breath, before history began, Wisdom was there.
She was beside the Creator as mountains rose, seas found their shores, and life unfolded from possibility into being. She was His delight, the pattern woven into creation itself.
The Hebrews called her Chokhmah. The Greeks called her Sophia. Across cultures and centuries, people have sensed her presence. She has been called by many names, but she is always recognized by the same qualities: discernment, wholeness, and love.
Discernment sees what is good for life.
Wholeness sees what is beautiful and true.
Love reaches beyond itself, longing for the One who dwells with Her.
And here is the deeper truth: Wisdom does not merely possess love. She reveals its very nature. Love, by its nature, reaches beyond itself. It seeks union. It delights in the beloved. Wisdom recognizes herself in the pattern woven into creation—the order, harmony, and beauty flowing from the Giver to the receiver.
Proverbs 8 says she was “daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him.” She is not a passive observer. She is active, relational, and joyful. She sees God, and in seeing Him, she loves what she sees—because what she sees is the source of all goodness.
Then something changed.
We ate from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And knowledge, separated from relationship, took the reins.
Wisdom was buried beneath empire, ideology, bureaucracy, and the illusion of certainty. We substituted information for understanding; control for connection.
Never have we possessed so much information. Never have we wielded so much power. We can sequence the human genome, but we cannot answer why we are here. We can connect every person on earth, but we cannot sustain a single conversation across difference. We have become brilliant, but not wise. Powerful, but not whole. Connected, but profoundly alone.
And so we come to the fracture.
The Fracture
Our system is collapsing—not because we lack knowledge, but because we have mistaken knowledge for wisdom.
Finance extracts without creating. The media amplify outrage while flattening complexity. Politicians perform conflict while leaving structural issues unresolved. Our problem is not ignorance. It is the absence of wisdom.
Wisdom is the capacity to perceive reality as a whole—to recognize patterns, hold tensions, and act with discernment and humility.
We have become brilliant at asking “Can this be done?” and forgotten to ask “Should it be done?”
Human beings encounter the world in two different ways. One mode analyzes, measures, and breaks things into parts. The other perceives relationships, context, and living wholes. Both are gifts.
Knowledge is a marvelous servant. It helps us measure, classify, build, and solve problems. Wisdom is the master. It discerns meaning, purpose, and the relationships that give facts their place.
Both are essential. The problem begins when the servant claims the throne.
When analysis dominates, people become consumers, communities become markets, nature becomes a resource, and truth becomes something to manufacture rather than discover. We grow more sophisticated and less wise.
Imagine a civilization that begins not with “What can we build?” but with “Will this help life flourish?”—one that measures success not by GDP, but by trust, resilience, health, and wholeness.
Knowledge can tell you how to build a nuclear weapon. Wisdom asks whether humanity is better served by creating things that can destroy it.
Knowledge can tell you how to create a financial instrument that generates endless profit. Wisdom asks: at what cost?
Knowledge can tell you how to manipulate a population through media. Wisdom asks: toward what end?
Knowledge without wisdom is a loaded gun without a safety—powerful, efficient, and dangerous.
Lies are not the opposite of knowledge; they are a perversion of it. The most effective lies are built on carefully selected pieces of knowledge, stripped of context, deployed for control.
Institutions know how to preserve themselves. Media systems know how to capture attention. Political systems know how to mobilize fear and loyalty. They possess knowledge in abundance. What they often lack is wisdom—the capacity to see through their own incentives and ask: Is this true? Is this good? Is this serving life?
How Did We Get Here?
But naming the fracture is not the same as understanding its source. If our crisis is ultimately a crisis of wisdom, then we have to ask a deeper question: How did we lose it?
My answer is not primarily political or economic. Those are symptoms. The fracture runs deeper.
The biblical story names this pattern the Fall. You don’t have to read Genesis as history to recognize the pattern it describes. We reach for the fruit that promises knowledge apart from relationship, convincing ourselves that if we can only know enough, measure enough, organize enough, we will finally be secure.
But the opposite happens. The more control we seek, the more fragmented we become. The more information we accumulate, the less we understand ourselves. The more we attempt to master the world, the more disconnected we become from each other, from nature, and from the source of life itself.
A civilization built on analysis over relationship reduces everything to information. People become data. Relationships become transactions. Education becomes credentialing. Politics becomes management. Wisdom becomes quaint—an ornament rather than a necessity.
That, I believe, is the deeper disease. Financialization did not create it. The managerial state did not create it. They are expressions of it.
History tells the same story again and again. Empires centralize power. Institutions serve themselves. Extraction replaces stewardship. Trust dissolves. Eventually, the structure collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Ours is no exception.
The Collapse Is a Gift
Collapse feels like an ending. Sometimes it is a beginning.
A forest fire destroys, but it also clears dead wood so new life can emerge. A broken bone heals stronger where it has been fractured. History often moves the same way. When one way of seeing reaches its limits, another becomes possible.
We are living through that now. The institutions we trusted are losing credibility. The stories we inherited no longer explain reality. More and more people sense that something is profoundly wrong, even if they cannot yet name it. They know the numbers no longer add up. They know the spectacle is just constructed narrative. They know they are being managed instead of served.
Something in them is rising, becoming more attuned to what they can’t yet see or hear clearly.
Wisdom has never stopped calling. She was neglected, dismissed, and buried beneath noise, but she was never extinguished. Perhaps the Garden wasn’t lost. Perhaps we simply lost our ability to see and recognize it.
“Does not wisdom call out?”
Yes. She calls through disappointment. Through betrayal. Through the quiet ache that whispers: this is not how life was meant to be.
The fracture we see in civilization is also the fracture within ourselves. As above, so below. The same patterns that shape empires shape families. The same hunger for domination that corrupts institutions can quietly corrupt our own hearts. The journey back begins in both places at once.
Sophia is still calling. The question is whether we are willing to listen.
I know this because I have heard her. Not as a voice from the sky, but as a presence that found me in the broken places.
The Garden
From the inside, my childhood felt like a garden. There was music in our home—both literal and symbolic. My parents loved each other with a quiet tenderness. We sang around the fireplace as a family. The world felt coherent. Safe. Love was simply part of the atmosphere I breathed.
Children assume the garden will last forever. They don’t know it can disappear.
When I was twelve years old, my parents divorced. The world I knew split in two. Two homes. Two stepfamilies. Two competing versions of reality. I didn’t simply lose the family I loved. I lost my trust that wholeness was possible. The people who had once been my solid ground became uncertain territory.
When my father disappeared emotionally from my life, it created a wound I did not yet have words for. I did not know then how deeply that absence would shape the choices I made later. I only knew that someone inside me was searching for what had been lost.
Throughout my teenage years, I learned to survive, to adapt, to become whoever each world wanted me to be. But beneath the surface of myself, I was just a little girl, waiting for someone to see her and come find her again.
It was in that brokenness—in the first weeks of college—that something unexpected happened.
A traveling group of missionaries came through my dorm. A woman named Robbia was part of the team, and she had been given the task of recruiting students to attend a revival meeting.
I don’t know why I said yes. I was not the type to go to revival meetings. But something in me—something I could not name compelled me to go.
I was the only one on my floor who did.
I don’t remember what the speaker was talking about that night. I only remember what happened next.
At some point, he stopped speaking. He looked across the room and pointed directly at me.
“Stand up.”
I froze.
“Yes, you,” he said. “Come. God has a message for you.”
I was embarrassed to be singled out. But I was even more embarrassed by the thought of refusing. Slowly, I walked down to the front.
He took my hand and began to pray. Then something changed. His voice shifted—the tone, the pace, the certainty. In that moment, I no longer felt as though I was listening to him. His rhythm changed, and it felt as though God was speaking directly to me through him.
And then he said the words that broke through every wall I had built:
“You don’t know the love of a father. You don’t even know what it is. God is sorry for your broken heart. He wants to be your Father if you will open yourself and let Him in.”
There was more, but I could barely hear it.
I tried to hold back the tears, but they came anyway. I wept in a way I had never wept before—the sobs of a child who had finally been seen.
That night, I gave my life to Christ.
Not because I understood theology.
Not because I had all my questions answered.
But because, for the first time, I encountered a love that did not require anything of me—
a love that saw the wound beneath the behavior,
a love that did not condemn the orphaned child inside me,
but invited her home.
In the days that followed, Robbia became my anchor. She walked with me through the confusion, the questions, and the overwhelming newness of this decision to rebirth.
She did not simply minister to me. She became my friend.
And through that friendship, I began to believe something I had struggled to believe before: Maybe I was worth loving after all.
The Words Spoken Over Me
A few days later, a team of missionaries baptized me in a hotel swimming pool. Afterward, they gathered in a small room to pray over me. They didn’t know me. I barely knew them. Robbia wasn’t even there.
As they prayed, several of them began speaking about my future—about wounds they could not have known, gifts I had never recognized, and a life I could not yet imagine. Someone recorded the prayers on a cassette tape. Decades later I converted it to an MP3.
For thirty-seven years, I kept it private. This is the first time I have shared it publicly.
I did not know what to make of those words for most of my life. They seemed too large for the person I was.
One spoke of healing for my mistrust and said I would become someone other women would look to for discernment. Another compared me to Catherine Booth—a woman whose quiet faith was matched by extraordinary courage—and said I would one day speak with that same boldness. A local woman opened to Daniel 2:22 and gave it to me: “He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with Him.” She told me to hold onto that promise, because God would reveal hidden things to me.
Another sensed that rejection had shaped my life more deeply than I understood, but that confidence would one day replace fear. One young man described a picture that puzzled me for decades: he saw two little girls following me wherever I went—because they wanted to be close to me, to know me, to understand what God had done in my life.
Finally, a woman prayed over me with remarkable intensity. She spoke about timidity giving way to courage. About standing upright instead of shrinking into myself. About shoulders held back, not curling inward. God was straightening my back out. And she said I would one day speak words that would reach far beyond the few people standing in that room.
At eighteen years old, none of it made sense. Thirty-seven years later, I hear those recordings very differently. Not because every detail unfolded exactly as spoken, but because they pointed toward a person I had not yet become.
If you’re curious, I’ve made both the recording and transcript available here: 1989 Prophecy.
How I Became a Writer
When Robbia left my university, she pulled me aside and handed me a cloth-covered journal. It was white, covered with pink and purple roses, and carried the faint scent of lavender, which is still there. Inside she had written a note that I treasure:
September 27, 1989
Wendy, I wanted to purchase you a book for a journal so that you can write all your ideas, favorite quotes… Also if you have any questions or grievances or exciting things you can keep them in a fun little book. I go back and read mine and find it very encouraging and can see my growth. Also at times it has become my best friend. It also has helped me to be honest with God thus being honest with myself. I love you so very much and am very grateful for our friendship and care very much about you.
Robbia
I filled that journal—and many more—with everything. College. The Peace Corps. Africa. Ecuador. Heartbreak. Questions. Failures. Hope. When life became too heavy to carry, the page carried it for me.
My journal became the first place I could tell the truth without fear of judgment. It held what I could not yet say aloud. It became my witness, my confidant, my sanctuary.
Looking back, I think that’s where I learned to write. Robbia gave me a blank book and permission to be honest. She had no idea she was planting a seed that would grow into a lifetime of writing—but that is what she did. I learned very young that writing could hold what I could not carry alone. And that lesson has never left me.
East of Eden
The words spoken over me the night I was baptized were seeds. They pointed toward a future I could not yet imagine. But prophecy does not erase the wounds that formed us. Salvation does not mean every pattern disappears overnight. God saves us first—and then He begins the long work of healing what still separates us from Him.
I had sincerely given my life to God. I had felt a love unlike anything I had known. I had been told that God wanted to heal the father wound I carried. And yet, the wound was still there. I was still aching for a love I wasn’t letting God fill for me. I didn’t surrender that wound to Him. I tried, instead, to heal it myself.
Almost immediately, another story began unfolding beneath the surface. The very man I had unconsciously looked to as a substitute for my father began pursuing me.
When I was twelve, as my father disappeared emotionally from my life, I had found a new father in my karate instructor. He was the father I always wanted—charismatic, funny, affectionate, and kind. He filled an emptiness I could not name. But he was twenty years older than me, and married with children. He recognized the wound before I did—and he nurtured it to get what he wanted from me when I became of age.
The man who had once filled the place where my father was absent now represented something else entirely. Slowly, I found myself drawn into a hidden relationship that contradicted everything I had just experienced. I was eighteen years old. I had received the love of the Father, but I had not yet learned how to live as a daughter secure in that love. I mistook attention for love. I was living in two worlds at once. One part of me longed for God. The other part was still searching for the father I never truly had. The wound deepened.
I tell you this because my story is not unusual. It is ancient. A child loses security. She searches for what was lost. Someone offers counterfeit love. The pattern repeats.
Civilizations do something remarkably similar. The wounds we refuse to face within ourselves eventually become the patterns we build into the world around us. We are promised freedom and discover dependency. We are promised prosperity and inherit debt. We are promised connection and receive isolation.
The switcharoo is not only political. It is profoundly personal.
Only years later did I understand that I was reliving the oldest story in Scripture. Adam and Eve hide. They cover themselves. They blame. Exile begins long before they leave the Garden. I was following in their footsteps.
I hid behind relationships instead of letting myself be known through them. I covered my shame instead of bringing it into the light. After three years it was over, but I kept searching for someone else to repair what only truth could heal. I wouldn’t allow God to restore the deficits inside me.
That wound deepened further, and the pattern lasted much longer. Again and again, I found myself drawn toward emotionally unavailable men, hoping each one would somehow heal the wound left by the one before.
Now, I can finally face my wound in a way I could not back then.
I was not searching for love—I wanted proof that I was not the unlovable child I secretly believed myself to be.
I was not looking for a husband. Not really. I wanted to find the father I never truly had.
I was not choosing freedom and love for myself. I wanted to be chosen, and I was willing to sacrifice who I was to belong to someone else.
I do not condemn the young woman I was. I grieve for her. She was trying to solve a spiritual wound with human affection. It never works.
But God was patient with me.
Journal after journal, year after year, I kept writing long after I stopped journaling. The page became my witness. Writing became prayer. Prayer became honesty. And honesty, slowly, became healing.
There was no single epiphany, no dramatic deliverance. Just a different perspective.
I began to see my own mistakes without flinching. I am not the perfect parent. I was not the perfect wife. I am not the most loving and giving friend. I can be selfish and self-righteous. And that is my truth.
I am just as broken as the world around me. The difference was not that I fixed myself or was miraculously transformed. The difference was that I simply stopped hiding. I stopped covering myself among the trees. I let myself be seen—not as the person I wished I was, but as the person I actually am.
Only then did I begin to see my real value through eyes that were not my own—through the quiet persistence of God’s presence, through words spoken over me decades earlier that I was finally ready to hear.
The Bridge
Tomorrow, I turn fifty-five.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped chasing. I stopped auditioning for love. I stopped trying to build homes in places where I could not be held or rest.
Looking back, I can see the path more clearly than I could while walking it. There may have been a shortcut to Wisdom, to Sophia, but I took the long road. Do I regret it? It doesn’t matter. What matters is who I am today.
In recent years, Sophia’s call has become unmistakable. She doesn’t call from the tops of towers; you can only hear her voice down here in the dirt. Her voice resonates not as a pronouncement, but as a pattern—a quiet thread running through people, conversations, friendships, and unexpected moments of grace.
Recently, two readers—a mother and daughter—have lifted me up through their friendship. And they have done some serious lifting. Not only do they support my work, but they drove three and a half hours simply to spend the day with me and stayed overnight in my little town. They brought a beautiful gift. They brought no agenda. Only kindness, encouragement, fellowship, and love.
Not long ago, I shared with them my old prophecy recorded thirty-seven years earlier. One of them wondered, “The two little girls following you wherever you went. Hmm. Could that be me and my mom?” she asked. The thing is, I was wondering the same thing. Now I wonder if prophecy is often less about prediction than recognition. Sometimes we only understand its meaning after we have lived our way into it.
Yesterday I stood with one of those women as she was married at age 63. Not just married, but married to the love of her life—the man she believed God had brought to her when she finally surrendered her control to Him. She had prayed that God would give her eyes to recognize this man if and when he came into her life—and He did.
Watching her begin a new chapter, a new life united with a man, I felt something inside me settle. Not because every question or doubt in me has been answered. But because I could finally see the bridge.
The distance between exile and homecoming. Between the frightened young woman I had been and the woman I am still becoming. No longer separated by shame, but held fast in the embrace of grace.
The Rise of Sophia
When I began this essay, I said that wisdom has many names. The Hebrews called her Chokhmah. The Greeks called her Sophia. Other traditions speak of the ordering principle of reality, of divine reason, of the hidden pattern that gives shape to creation through different languages and symbols.
They share a remarkably similar intuition: reality is not held together by power—it is held together by wisdom.
For Christians, this Wisdom is not separate from Christ. John begins his Gospel with the Logos—the Word through whom all things were made. The early Church recognized in Christ the fullness of divine Wisdom made visible. In Him, the love of the Father and the wisdom of God were united without division—the qualities we so often separate into masculine and feminine, held in perfect wholeness.
Jesus wept. Jesus washed feet. He confronted hypocrisy without fear. He welcomed children without embarrassment. He embodied strength without domination and tenderness without weakness.
That is what a whole humanity looks like—Jesus.
In many Eastern traditions, the goal is to bring opposing forces into harmony. But Jesus does not simply balance these forces; He embodies their complete integration.
In Him, the clarity of the mind and the openness of the heart are not divided. He possesses the courage to confront hypocrisy and speak difficult truths, yet He also carries deep compassion—the willingness to weep over Jerusalem, welcome the broken, gather the vulnerable, and wash the feet of His disciples.
Jesus does not move back and forth between strength and tenderness, justice and mercy, or truth and love. He holds them together in perfect unity. He represents the wholeness humanity has spent centuries seeking—not as an abstract ideal, but as an actual invitation. The fracture we feel in our minds, our relationships, and our civilizations is precisely the space He came to heal, by reuniting what we have torn apart.
I have noticed a pattern: many people today struggle to feel deeply or to express what they feel. We are still hiding among the trees of the garden—not just men, but women too—hiding behind identities and ideologies, adopting harder, more defensive postures to survive in a fractured world.
We are still covering ourselves. Still blaming. Still exiling ourselves from the garden of our own wholeness.
Wisdom is not something we manufacture. It is something we receive. It is through relationship that we encounter the dormant parts of ourselves waiting to be awakened.
Which brings us to the strange irony of our own age.
Artificial intelligence can generate books, summarize libraries, answer questions, and imitate understanding in seconds. Yet none of this has made us wise. If anything, it has exposed how desperately we need wisdom.
Knowledge processes data. Wisdom perceives meaning. Knowledge explains mechanisms. Wisdom asks what they are for. Knowledge can imitate understanding. Only relationship can transform a life.
The return of wisdom is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a matter of survival.
Perhaps our crisis is inviting us to recover something. Not less knowledge, but greater wisdom. Not the rejection of science, but the restoration of meaning. Not the abandonment of reason, but the reunion of reason with love.
Perhaps that is what Sophia has been waiting for all along—not to conquer, not to dominate, but to be welcomed home.
Perhaps you have already heard her.
Perhaps she came as a question you could not answer, a grief you could not explain, or a longing you could not silence.
Perhaps she came as a quiet ache—the feeling that the world was made for something more than endless distraction, extraction, and control.
If so, pay attention. That longing is not a weakness. It is wisdom calling you home.
“Does not wisdom call out?” (Proverbs 8:1)
She does. She always has.
The world tells us that wisdom comes from mastering more. Sophia reminds us that wisdom begins by learning to receive, for she comes through relationship rather than knowledge, through invitation rather than force.
May you recognize her call. And may you have the courage to follow where it leads.
In the next essay of this series, I trace Wisdom to her very beginning—before the world was built, before the fracture took hold—to ask: what did we lose when we forgot the Mother, the Pattern, and the family we were always meant to be?
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