This week's readings are Proverbs 4:5-7 and Luke 2:41-52.

I was listening to a podcast the other day about the power of learning a foreign language. The gentleman being interviewed described how encountering books written in French as a child had started him on a journey of discovery in languages that changed his life. It led, ultimately, to a new career developing language learning materials for others, and even to meeting his wife. He admitted that his first attempts at YouTube videos and other media had been pretty bad — but because he started, and kept going, he eventually made a success of it. His closing reflection was not just about languages but more broadly about passion: if you’ve found something that excites you, overcome the fear of failure and engage with it. Better to start badly than not at all, so that you can grow in the things that give you identity and purpose.

It’s a message that resonates strongly with the little snippet of Proverbs in front of us this week. The author encourages their readers to “get wisdom”, and gives some strikingly simple advice on how to begin: “The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom!” Or, as Nike would put it: Just do it!

That may not feel like particularly helpful advice — a bit like telling someone the best way to train for a couch to 5k run is just to get off the couch and run 5k, or that the best way to learn another language is simply to start speaking it. But perhaps it makes more sense when we realise that Wisdom here is not an abstract noun, but a person. We’re not being urged to get an “it,” but to get to know a “her.” And how do you get to know someone? You just do it — you hang out with them, talk, play, cry, laugh together. The process begins the moment you start, and it unfolds over a lifetime — and maybe even into eternity.

Wisdom isn’t just any person, though. In scripture, Wisdom appears as divinity — an attribute, or personification, of God made manifest in the world and tangible to human beings. To “get wisdom” is, for the author of Proverbs, to “get God” — to spend time with them, to talk and laugh and weep with them, so that we are shaped by them into the fullness of our identity and purpose. That’s how we learn to live in their ways and make the choices that are truly best for us, for our world, and for everyone we share it with. Which is where we land back at our usual definition of wisdom, is it not?

Our gospel reading this week shows us how ordinary — and how extraordinary — that can be. For Jesus as a child, it is the most natural thing in the world: with time to spare (or so he thinks), of course he goes to the Temple; of course he spends his time drawing closer to God’s heart and mind. And yet to Mary and Joseph, weighed down by more grown-up responsibilities, this behaviour looks baffling and disruptive — so much so that the Temple is the very last place they think to look for him, after three days of searching.

Maybe you feel an increasing longing for knowing God, or growing in faith. Or maybe it hasn’t even occurred to you amidst everything else going on. But if any part of you feels that tug, or longs to rediscover that simple childlike joy Jesus shows in knowing his Father — well, the beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom! Just do it!