The Beginning of Everything

 

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge, but fools despise wisdom and instruction. Proverbs 1:7

Dr. Arnaldo Peixoto, Ph.D., gazed at the stack of books on his desk and felt nothing but a deep, hollow exhaustion. The spines boasted his name in gold lettering: Paradoxes of Power, The Deconstruction of Myth, Sociology of the Postmodern Crisis. He was prominent in his field, a celebrated intellectual whose lectures filled auditoriums. His mind was a palace of complex theories and erudite quotations, but his heart was an empty room.

The problem was not the books. It was the audio message vibrating in his pocket—the tenth one he had ignored that day. It was from his wife, Helena. Her voice, a mix of pleading and exhaustion, said the same thing it always did, “He’s still not home, and he’s not answering my calls. I’m going to pray.”

Lucas, their son. Twenty years old, a bright future ahead of him, yet a soul that seemed to be sprinting toward an abyss. Plummeting grades in college, questionable friends, the smell of alcohol on his clothes. Arnaldo had already tried everything. He had used logic, psychology, intimidation, bribery. He had argued with the eloquence of a debater and strategized like a general. And he had failed. Miserably.

“Pray,” he muttered to himself, with a disdain that tried to mask his own powerlessness. “Outsourcing responsibility to some cosmic entity.” To him, Helena’s faith was a coping mechanism—quaint, perhaps, but useless. Knowledge was power, and he, Dr. Arnaldo, was a man of vast knowledge. How could he have no power over his own son’s life?

That night, he left the university later than usual. The campus was silent, almost spectral under the yellowish glow of the lampposts. As he passed the humanities building, he heard the familiar squeak of a cleaning cart. It was Mr. Afonso, the night janitor, a man with skin weathered by the sun and hands calloused by life.

“Good evening, Professor. Long day, huh?” Afonso said with a simple smile, pausing his mopping.

Arnaldo just nodded, wanting to be on his way. But something in the man’s peaceful gaze disarmed him.

“Too long, Mr. Afonso. And useless,” he replied, the bitterness escaping without a filter.

Afonso leaned on the handle of his mop. “Useless is a strong word, Doctor. You teach so many important things.”

“What good is understanding society’s crises if I can’t solve the one inside my own home?” The confession tumbled from Arnaldo’s lips before he could stop it.

The janitor did not offer cheap advice or a catchphrase. He just looked at the polished floor and then at the professor’s anguished face.

“You know, Doctor,” he said, his voice low and serene. “There’s a lot of good knowledge in books. But sometimes, the knowledge we need most isn’t in our heads. It’s on our knees.”

The line, so simple, struck Arnaldo like heresy. A simplistic aphorism from an uneducated man. He thanked him with a curt nod and quickened his pace toward the parking lot. But Afonso’s words followed him.

“It’s on our knees.”

At home, the silence was an accusation. He walked into Lucas’s room. The untouched bed, the smell of dirty laundry. On the desk sat a picture frame with an old photo: him and a seven-year-old Lucas, smiling, on the day he taught him how to ride a bike. He remembered the joy, the boy’s trust in the hand that held him steady.

Where was that trust now? Where was his hand?

His palace of knowledge crumbled. He did not know what to do. There was no theory, no quotation, no book that could give him the answer. He was a fool. A fool with a Ph.D. who scorned the only instruction that might actually matter.

Sinking beside his son’s bed, Dr. Arnaldo Peixoto, for the first time in his adult life, knelt. There was no eloquence in his prayer. Just one word, repeated like the mantra of a drowning man, “Help.”

There was no bolt of lightning, no audible voice. But on that cold floor, in that act of total surrender, he felt something new. The beginning of something. It was not the solution to his son’s problem. It was the dismantling of his own pride.

It was the beginning of knowledge.

(Made with AI)