Even if clouds and rain cover your life, and you can’t see the sun, it’s there, and it’s only rising higher, never lower.
Proverbs
Pain is more than weakness leaving the body
Outside of the Christian worldview, mistakes and setbacks can lead to reflection and self-examination…but you can never, without a great leap of imagination, believe that the universe is lovingly correcting you with a determined eye towards your eternal growth and good
Wisdom is like a sherpa
You must know and confess that you need direction from somewhere else – that left to your own resources, you actually won’t travel down the best pathways. You will get lost; you’ll encounter dangers; you’ll run into dead ends.
Fear the Lord to start the game
Fear of the Lord means starting everything with God. It means recognizing God is the central reality in the universe, not me, not even the universe in its past, present, or future form
Great people start with service
In short, it is good to hold the highest view and vision of your spouse, but no man is married to the Proverbs 31 woman, and no woman has Proverbs 31 on her resume.
We’ve all got a boss
Org charts and hierarchical structures matter, and the interplay of those relationships are fragile, precious, and borderline sacred, even if we would prefer that they weren’t there, or we try to pretend we’ve transcended power dynamics
When you argue with a fool, you are wasting your time
A fool is always right in his own eyes. He is not interested in learning something new. He is not interested in being challenged. He is not interested in growing. Why should he be? He has already arrived.
Marginalized Oppressors
Don’t assume, because you have experienced poverty or marginalization of some sort, that you are automatically above inflicting the same sort of oppression that you received.
A true friend knows how to wound you
It is not the act of wounding you that qualifies somebody as your friend; rather it is the quality of being your friend that enables someone to wound you in a good way.
Dealing with false accusations
In our world, name-calling and labeling is often a shortcut substitute for the hard labor of moral reasoning. You can quickly find yourself on the wrong side of the aisle, regardless of which side you hope to belong to.
Wearing out your welcome
As much as we might wish this was not the case, and plead the contrary, we conduct all our relationships within a transactional frame.
Wisdom can help you win
When we enlist the pursuit of wisdom to strive for an optimal outcome, what we are seeking is to align our own thinking as much as possible with God’s thinking.