Curiosity Needs Wise Caution

Daily writing promptWhat are you curious about?View all responses

Before you allow your curiosity to nudge you to pursue something, it’s best to use mental caution. Innocent curiosity if not monitored and guided by wisdom can lead down dangerous paths. A person (or a cat) who is overly curious about the wires in an electric box can die with a sudden shock. How often we allow curiosity to lead us into anxiety, trouble, pain, addiction, and other dangerous traps of evil.

I strive to keep my curiosity focused on things that are good, wholesome, helpful, and filled with life-enhancing excitement. I use mental caution to protect myself from the mentally, emotionally, and physically dangerous, “cat killing” types of curiosity. (After all, “Curiosity killed the cat.” What has curiosity killed in you?)

When I begin to be curious about something I ask myself, “Is pursuing this going to help me, distract me, or harm me (or other people)?” I intentionally resist and avoid harmful (and even distracting) curiosity by forcefully and consistently keeping it out of my mind. I persistently and passionately pursue curiosity that will help make my life better, more peaceful, and more content.

Curiosity unmonitored and uncontrolled by wisdom is very dangerous. Curiosity causes many people to fill their mind with nonsense and even worse — to fill it with harmful thoughts, words, and images. Curiosity continually encourages people to ignore (and even to arrogantly deny the existence of) warning signs.

Unchecked curiosity wants to know too many things that aren’t worth knowing. Set your curiosity on the things that have great value and meaning in your life.

There is always something good to be discovered. Why waste your curiosity on what’s purposeless, wrongful, or ruinous? People seem to have relatively little curiosity about the purpose and meaning of life? How about you?

Curiosity can be good or bad. It all depends on how you use it. Choose your curiosity wisely. Focus on what is wonderful not on what is wicked.

Curiosity about Jesus has kept me pursuing Him. I stay inwardly driven to purse the presence of Christ through the Bible, through prayer, through brokenness, through repentance, through kindness, through radical honesty with myself, through humility, through faith, and through the direct nudgings and revelations of God the Holy Spirit within my innermost being. (John 9:37-39)

Every single moment that’s a continuation of your life is a miracle. Most of those miracles pass by unnoticed and unappreciated. Now that’s something to be curious about!