Jacob 6:12

I am thankful for wisdom. I like to think that there is a difference between intelligence and wisdom. People who are intelligent are smart, but people who are wise tend to use their smarts for a few laughs. I'm pretty sure that is where the term wise guys came from (ask Encyclopedia Britannica). Today we went to the funeral of my great uncle Gary (I also think that old people came up with the idea of adding great to the front of older relatives job titles. Because, can the father of the father of the father of your father really be great enough that it has to be stated more than once?). Back to Gary. I would consider him to be a wise guy. I remember a time when my brother Jed and I went to our grandmother's (Gary's sister) house to install a ceiling fan for her. Gary lived in the house in front of her and was interested in seeing how we were going to get this task accomplished. He wasn't the only one, considering that neither Jed nor myself had ever done it before. I remember him being in the room with us and asking us what tools we were going to use and wanting to know what our plans were. We pretty much told him we were going to learn as we went. He then disappeared for a short time. I think it was because he knew that we were going to be dealing with electrical wires and he didn't want to get blamed for anything. When he came back to check on us he seemed quite surprised to see that we had replaced the light fixture with the fan and were in the process of just attaching the blades. After having attached two of the blades, Jed asked me to hit the switch to see if it would work (we hadn't tested anything up to this point, because it really didn't say to in the instructions that were in what I assumed was German). Gary stood there watching our little brains think this idea over briefly and then stepped out of the doorway. Jed was still up on the ladder as I flipped the switch. What happened next was quite a funny thing to watch, unless you were somebody on top of a ladder with a couple of fan blades swooping down at your head at a high rate of speed. I don't know which law of physics was responsible for the fan doing that when all the blades weren't attached, but I learned not to do that the next time I installed a ceiling fan. Jed was immediately yelling to turn it off and Gary stood there with a look of "I knew that was going to happen on his face." When I think of Gary, I think of that story. Gary was a wise guy and I am thankful for wisdom.