A couple of tips from Proverbs

Today is the last day of my Mum and Dad's visit to us. Tomorrow they fly back to England. Nothing in life is certain, so I expect that at the airport we'll hug them tight and pray that God will give us the blessing of another meeting before too long. Relationships are precious, and every moment with elderly parents is a gift from God. So today we've been doing things together, and although I've been meaning all day to write a short note about this morning's reading from the Book of Proverbs, I'm just getting around to it now!

When I was a Church Army student many years ago, a good friend and I each independantly got into the habit of reading through the books of Psalms and Proverbs regularly. We would read the daily psalms set in the old Book of Common Prayer (a system of reading morning and evening that takes you through the entire psalter every month), and we would read one chapter of the book of Proverbs every day of the month (there are 31 chapters). So we got to know Psalms and Proverbs pretty well. I remember one day getting one of those 'encouragement' cards from my friend on which he had written the words: 'Proverbs 15:17: I would eat a dinner of vegetables with you any day'.

Proverbs 15:16-17 reads as follows in the NRSV:

'Better is a little with the fear of the LORD

than great treasure and trouble with it.

Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is

than a fatted ox and hatred with it'.

This is sanctified common sense and we all know instinctively that it is true: if you have good relationships with the people in your life, then you can get by with the barest necessities of life and still be happy, but if your relationships are not good, no amount of material wealth can make up for it.

But the very next verse hits me between the eyes:

'Those who are hot tempered stir up strife,

but those who are slow to anger calm contention' (v.18).

I've struggled with a hot temper my whole life long, and I know that it does not help me nurture those good relationships which verses 16-17 say are so important. I would much rather be 'slow to anger', so that I can help calm contention rather than stirring it up. I remember the words of James: 'Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger, for your anger does not produce God's righteousness' (James 1:19-20). I know this to be true; so often in my life, my anger has hurt people and damaged relationships, especially with those I love the most.

So my prayer tonight is that God would help me to be content with the necessities of life and to focus on building relationships of love, and to that end, that he would teach me to be 'quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to become angry'. In this, of course, I will try to follow the example of 'The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness' (Exodus 34:6).