One of my favorite author’s is Nassim Nicholas Taleb. In 2014 he wrote a book titled, “Antifragile, Things That Gain from Disorder”. The premise of the book centers around the truth that book knowledge is no match for experiential knowledge. Let us suppose I buy a book on lawnmowers and the mowing of lawns. In that book, I learn about lawn machines and their functions. But until I actually get on a lawnmower and operate one, I do not really know much about lawnmowers.

Experience is king. There is nothing wrong with knowledge, but knowledge becomes more knowledgeable with experience. Being antifragile is seeing life as it really is. It is being practical of things beyond our control. It is gaining knowledge through experience.

Here is one quote that brings the point home.

“But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, form children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer mom compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds, that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning, actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, time as an aimless (but rational) flaneur benefitting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock. Even their leisure is subjected to a clock, squash between four and five, as their life is sandwiched between appointments. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life, with (as we saw in Chapter 5) the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.”

This concept of antifragility is not new. In fact, there are numerous examples in the Bible of men and women who lived life with a randomness that had a divine purpose behind it. Consider Rahab the prostitute in Jericho (Joshua 2).

She lived in a pagan society that had no use for the God of the Jews. Even though they were well aware of what God had been doing as the Jews crossed the dessert. God’s reputation always precedes Him. And those of Jericho knew the stories and rumors (that were actually facts) of God parting the Red Sea, the cloud by day, the pillar of fire by night etc… Yet everyone in that city except Rahab paid no attention to this God of the Jews who was antifragile.

But when the Jewish nation arrived at the gates of Jericho, Rahab knew what to do. She hid the Jewish spies, asked for her family to be spared, and placed the red string outside here window. All these actions were antifragile. They went against the grain of common sense. She has put herself and family at risk. Yet when the walls fell, her house on the outer wall remained intact.

The fact is she when on to be included in the family line of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Antifragile is a way of life we should all embrace.

Be antifragile in your faith and watch what God will do.