Conventional Wisdom

I have been leading a series of discussions on Wednesday nights with the college kids about "conventional wisdom" type sayings and their validity. Specifically we have been looking at those sayings through the lens of scripture and seeing if they are fact or crap. It has been some good discussion of late.

Our topics have included:
"God will never give you more than you can handle"
"Everything happens for a reason"
"He's in a better place now" (after someone dies)

The main point of doing these discussions is to get the college students to challenge "conventional wisdom". Sometimes that which is commonly accepted is a bigger pile of manure than we might think. In other words, just because "everyone" believes it, doesn't make it true.

If you are a Christian, I challenge you to do a little digging into these commonly accepted tenets. You might be surprised at how easy it is to provide a valid challenge to them.

If you are not a Christian and someone delivers one of these "wise" sayings to you, I ask you to be polite and thank them for the encouragement. Often people say things like these because there is nothing else to say. They feel that it would be rude to say nothing, so they fall back on "conventional wisdom" that seems to be profound.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I ask you to consider the words you say to people when THEY are in crisis. What you think could be profound may actually prove to be an annoyance or possibly even offensive (think about "he's in a better place"--a spouse passes away unexpectedly, wasn't sick or anything, maybe a car crash, does the surviving spouse really think that the dead spouse is in a better place than right there with his or her family watching their kids grow up--doubt it).

Hope all is well for you. Would love to hear your thoughts on these sayings and any others that I could maybe use for my class.