The Echo That Fills the Universe

In 1964, two Bell Labs engineers in Holmdel, New Jersey — Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson — couldn't figure out why their radio antenna kept picking up a persistent, low hum. They cleaned pigeon droppings off the dish. They recalibrated every instrument. Still, the noise remained. It came from every direction, at every hour, in every season.

What Penzias and Wilson had stumbled upon was the cosmic microwave background — the residual glow from the very birth of the universe. It had been radiating across the cosmos for billions of years, filling every corner of space. It wasn't hidden. It wasn't quiet. It had been calling out all along. They just finally had ears to hear it.

Proverbs 8 paints a strikingly similar portrait of wisdom. She was there before the world began, rejoicing as the master craftsman at the Almighty's side. And she hasn't gone silent since. She calls out at the crossroads, raises her voice at the city gate, cries aloud from the heights along the way. Wisdom isn't locked in a vault for the privileged few or whispered only to scholars. She saturates creation the way that ancient hum saturates the cosmos — constant, everywhere, available to anyone willing to listen.

The question Proverbs poses isn't whether wisdom is speaking. She is. The question is whether we've stopped long enough to hear what has been calling to us since before the foundations of the world.