Wisdom-Trek / Creating a Legacy
Welcome to Day 646 of our Wisdom-Trek, and thank you for joining me.
I am Guthrie Chamberlain, Your Guide to Wisdom
Harmony And Restraint - Proverbs 17


Thank you for joining us for our 5 days per week wisdom and legacy building podcast. Today is Day 646 of our Trek, and it is Wisdom Wednesday.  Every Wednesday along life’s trails we dig for the nuggets of wisdom that are found within the book of Proverbs.  Today we will explore Proverbs 17 from The Voice Translation which will give us a fresh perspective on this book of timeless wisdom.

We are broadcasting from our studio at ‘The Big House’ in Marietta, OH.   If you are a regular listener or reader of the Wisdom-Trek Podcast and Journal, you may realize that we are publishing these episodes a couple of days late this week.  This is due to an unfortunate and serious accident I had this past weekend.  I will be chronicling the accident and my subsequent recovery on our Tuesday and Thursday “Wisdom-Nugget” episodes for a few weeks.  I published the first segment on Wisdom-Trek.com/day-645 if you would like to follow along with my saga of “Life Lessons Learned the Hard Way.”  I think that you will enjoy the story as we all realize that at age 60 there are still some hard lessons about life to be learned.

Our granddaughter Hazel will return to Columbus Children’s Hospital for more blood work.  If the counts are high enough she will begin her next regimen of chemo treatments, if not they will test her bone marrow again to make sure that it is continuing to produce the good cells needed for full recovery.    Life is one of balance.   Proverbs 17 describes it as:
Harmony and Restraint
The proverbs are so good! Check out the first verse in this chapter about household harmony: “Better to gnaw on a bit of dry crust in peace than to feast in a house full of stress.” Solomon gets it--whether you’re a father, son, brother, friend, old or young, harmony is always more favorable than strife.How do we foster harmony? Because harmony comes from exercising restraint, these proverbs really emphasize self-control. Look at the chapter’s design: the first 14 proverbs end with a compelling image about self-control: (“Picking a fight is like leaking water from a crack in a dam, so walk away from an argument before the outburst.”), while another 14 proverbs end with even more wisdom on self-control over our words. The self-control at the end is about how we use our words. Words can get us into a lot of trouble, and Solomon reminds us that less is often more.

Much of the wisdom in this chapter is directed at the fool, particularly the foolish son. It would seem, from Chapter 17, that the household is the natural place where fools learn and grow. Let’s instead make our homes laboratories of wisdom! As I read Chapter 17, think about your home and how you can make it a place that embodies self-control.Listen intently as I read Proverbs chapter 17:

1 Better to gnaw on a bit of dry crust in peace
than to feast in a house full of stress.
2 A wise servant will be put in charge of a child who behaves badly
and will take a share of the inheritance like one of the family.
3 Silver is purified in the crucible, gold in the furnace,
but motives of the heart are judged by the Eternal.
4 Wrongdoers perk up when listening to gossip,
and liars lean in close to hear talk of mischief.
5 Anyone who makes fun of the poor disparages his Maker,
and those who celebrate another’s misfortune will not escape certain punishment.
6 Grandchildren are the crowning glory and ultimate delight of old age,
and parents are the pride of their children.
7 Elegant speech sounds odd when it comes from a fool,
and a lie on the lips of a leader is even more out of place!