Disappointment, despite, laziness ... if you take the verses I’ve chosen from Proverbs 15
as representative of the whole, you might get the idea that Solomon’s a bit of
a wet blanket.
Thankfully, for nearly every sluggard he describes, there is
an upright man. For every broken spirit there is a “tree of life” and a “healing
tongue”. For every grieved mother there is a rejoicing father.
It all depends how you want to look at his instruction, and what
you decide to take away from it.
Assorted Proverbs (Proverbs 15:1-33)
The Broken Spirit
“A healing tongue is a tree of life,
but perverseness in it breaks the spirit.”
How many times have your role models let you down? I’m not
talking about football players, actors or musicians, of course — sane
people expect celebrities to be less
than the sum of their inflated accomplishments and polished, phony images. When
they flame out in public we don’t gasp in surprise so much as nod knowingly at
the inevitable.
No, I’m talking about teachers, grandparents, fathers, mothers,
elders, uncles and aunts, or anyone else you’ve looked up to and later found to
be morally deficient in some previously-undetected way. People about whom you
once might have said, “I want to be like _____________.” People to whom
you would not hesitate go for advice. People whose advice you’d recommend to
others. People who characteristically fix things instead of breaking them.
It happens. I can think of at least three in the last ten
years just off the top of my head, and a few more who were not role models for
me, but certainly were for Christian women.
Thankfully, major, humiliating, testimony-demolishing moral
defeats are fairly rare among mature Christians. More common are the small
disappointments that result from unexpectedly discovering our role models are
as human as we are. That they can be petty and small-minded at times. That they
can take a position on something important to us that is genuinely boneheaded,
and then won’t budge. That they possess an acquisitiveness or propensity for
vindictiveness we had no idea existed. That in certain unexpected situations
they are fearful when they modeled courage, tentative when they had always
displayed faith, or tight-fisted when they preached generosity. Small stuff
compared to others around you, but devastating because you believed them incapable of it.
These are the disappointments that are hardest to get over, precisely
because you never imagined you would have to.
Need I add “Don’t be that person”?
Children and Parents
“A wise son makes a glad father,
but a foolish man despises his mother.”
Here’s one where reminding ourselves that proverbs are often
parallelisms winds up helping us correctly interpret it. Read the second line
on its own, and you might be inclined to rewrite it to mean something like “It
is foolish to despise your mom.” That is certainly true, but we cannot forget
to consider the first line, which seems to indicate that how the son’s conduct affects the parent is what’s in view, rather
than what the son’s conduct tells us about him.
Thus we might reasonably read the second line as something
like, “By living foolishly, a man shows his disregard for his mother.” By messing up his own life and not caring what becomes of him, he
demonstrates that he does not have the slightest concern for the feelings of the person who troubled herself to bring him into the world. He diminishes her sacrifices, trivializes her affection and disregards her convictions and experience. In short, he insults her to the core by making nothing of her greatest efforts in this world.
I think that’s the sense of it.
The Hedge of Thorns
“The way of a sluggard is like a hedge of thorns,
but the path of the upright is a level highway.”
Jesus said, “To the one who has, more will be given, and he
will have an abundance, but from the one who has not,
even what he has will be taken away.” Here the idea is probably similar: the person who begins a task diligently and
operates in a straightforward manner makes every subsequent step he takes easier,
in much the way that compound interest increases your savings.
The reverse is also true: compound interest will eventually
kill you if you allow debt to accumulate. So too, taking days off, working too
slowly, allowing yourself to be bogged down, delayed and unnecessarily distracted
means that when you hit real difficulties that are not within your control, you’ll
never get anywhere at all. If you’ve ever tried to make your way through a
hedge of any kind, let alone a hedge of thorns, you’ll know it’s a very apt metaphor.
Now of course it’s possible to run into problems even on a
level highway. A wheel could come off your cart, or a pack of bandits could
show up unexpectedly. Nobody can defend against such things. But if you’ve
already made three successful trips down the same highway and reached your
destination intact before the bandits arrive, losing one load won’t put you out
of business.
If, on the other hand, it’s four p.m. and you’ve only just staggered out of
bed ...
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