Many seek the favor of a generous man, and everyone is a friend to a man who gives gifts. [Proverbs 19:6] Money can’t buy love, they say, but that’s manifestly false. People ‘buy’ friendship and love all the time. The grossest forms of this, of course, are sex slavery, prostitution, and pseudo-prostitution. We live in…
Living in a world of information flooding requires the proper navigation equipment. Imagine you’re riding a surging river over cataracts, eddies, and waterfalls. If you don’t have means and methods of sorting through the excessive propaganda, separating it from the truth, you will get sucked under the swirls and get bashed against the rocks. Starting…
Our children carry the effects of our stress into their bodies as we prepare them for the world. A Yale study suggests that better stress management can lower our children’s risk of obesity and its poor health outcomes. As parents, we strive for our children to have a better life than we have lived, whether…
A false witness will not go unpunished, and he who breathes out lies will not escape. [Proverbs 19:5] I might, as I have probably done in other parts of this series, focus on the ways in which God has woven this into the earth, and to some extent, those mechanisms will appear here. But today…
Wealth brings many new friends, but a poor man is deserted by his friend. [Proverbs 19:4] No man has more friends than when his star is in ascendance, when his hand is on the scepter, when his paycheck is freshly cashed. A ‘fair-weather friend’ is a common sight. The halls of power flock with them.…
When a man’s folly brings his way to ruin, his heart rages against the Lord. [Proverbs 19:3] When we hit our rock bottom, we will do anything except admit that we’re to blame. This talent we inherited from Adam, and this talent we pass along to our children. Everybody can be to blame, except myself.…
Desire without knowledge is not good, and whoever makes haste with his feet misses his way. [Proverbs 19:2] The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. It’s a dangerous thing to desire without knowing what we desire, a recipe for folly, destruction, and disaster. Yet we’re all too prone to the…
Better is a poor person who walks in his integrity than one who is crooked in speech and is a fool. [Proverbs 19:1] Integrity is the quality of holding together under pressure, in all circumstances, as a whole. A building’s integrity lies in its ability to stay upright and undeformed through wind and storm and…
A man of many companions may come to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother. [Proverbs 18:24] In a world so rough and fractured as this we poor sons of Adam create, it is easy to despair of finding true relationship, to despise all search for it, to expect treachery…
The poor use entreaties, but the rich answer roughly. [Proverbs 18:23] Above all else, men desire to be rulers of themselves. This statement holds for the righteous and the wicked- except that these two understand rulership in very different ways. The righteous man would rule himself in stewardship, honoring and following God with all at…