I attended a Town Hall meeting at work today where the president of our business and his staff talked and took questions. As a part of the Q&A, someone stood up in the back and asked this question (I’m paraphrasing here):

“I’m reminded of an old wise saying: ‘do not put new wine in old wineskins, because the wine will expand, the skins will burst, and the wine will be lost.’ With some of these [new work things] being a sort of ’new wine’, are there ‘old wineskins’ we should be aware of and risk that we should mitigate?”

I immediately, of course, recognized the Biblical reference, and appreciated that the questioner didn’t explicitly call it out, but just kept the wisdom of Jesus’ saying. But it was striking to me how few people in the room appeared to recognize it, how it took each of the leaders in the Q&A a second to really parse through it, and then hearing people after the meeting commenting on that question and how deep and profound it was.

I’m not telling this story to complain about Biblical illiteracy; it is what it is in our world today. But I find myself thankful for the coworker who asked the question, and hopeful that the saying will worm its way into a few peoples’ minds today, maybe even to the point where they decide to look it up.