“My
son, pay attention to what I say;
turn
your ear to my words.
Do
not let them out of your sight,
keep
them within your heart;
for
they are life to those who find them
and
health to one’s whole body.
Above
all else, guard your heart,
for
everything you do flows from it.
Keep
your mouth free of perversity;
keep
corrupt talk far from your lips.
Let
your eyes look straight ahead;
fix
your gaze directly before you.
Give
careful thought to the paths for your feet
and
be steadfast in all your ways.
Do
not turn to the right or the left;
keep your foot from evil.”
Proverbs
4:20-27
Once again,
over a month has passed without one word written down to remember it by. My life is sliding into memory month by month
instead of day by day or week by week.
When the month of May began, I remember saying to myself, “I just have
to get through this month, and then I’ll have more time to, to….” to do what?
Clean the house, blog, spend more time with my family instead of at work? The
problem with this way of thinking is that your priorities become skewed very
quickly. The least important thing suddenly become the most important because
you are putting these things first for the time being….until you complete that
big project or land that big account. Well, there’s always going to be another
big project looming around the corner or another big account to land. As the weeks pass, the time for my oldest son
to leave the island (where he was born and has spent the first 11 ¾ years of
his life) to move back to Alabama with his dad is drawing near. And where have I been? At work…a lot. Even when I am here, he’s not much. He is at
the age where he wants to be with his friends more than his parents, but still,
this is the first weekend in a long while (being a long, 3 day weekend) that I
have felt able to focus just on my home and family and not worry about the
coming week or even have to go into work at all. It’s nice…I’ve mostly just been deep-cleaning
the house with the help of my husband and the boys, of course, but even
cleaning the house together is more “family time” than I’ve had recently with
them. In fact, this weekend, cleaning
time became a “wisdom imparting” session for my husband and I with my oldest
son. The conversation turned to video
games that were made more for adults than for children, which led into bad language,
and eventually reminded me of the
aphorism, "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." If your mind is always on violent video
games, and your ears are constantly filled with negative and ugly language,
eventually, the words coming out of your mouth will be ugly, and violent
thoughts rise to the surface first instead of kindness and peacemaking. Your heart becomes harder and harder instead
of softer and more sensitive to the love and joy in the world and from God.
At any rate,
this aphorism, led me to look in the Bible as I knew there were similar sayings
there. In fact, that’s probably where the aphorism came from. In Matthew 6:21,
“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” and in Proverbs 4:
“Above all else, guard
your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Bottom line, I want my son to
be aware of where his thoughts lie, where his heart is at any given moment, so
that the new world of the states that he is about to enter on a more permanent
basis is not going to turn him away from what he knows in his heart is right
and good. So, today, this week, this
month, and all the months to follow as both my sons grow, I am dedicating
Proverbs 4 to them, the entire Proverb, which was written by King Solomon as a
personal plea to his own sons to heed the wisdom God had blessed him with
during his reign as King. If you have sons, I encourage you to go to the Bible
and read the entire chapter of Proverbs 4. Or better yet, read the entire book
of Proverbs, as there’s a bit of Godly wisdom contained within for all of
us. When you find those bits of wisdom
God is speaking into your heart follow the advice of Proverbs 3:3 below:
“Let
love and faithfulness never leave you; bind them around your neck, write them
on the tablet of your heart.” Proverbs 3:3
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