Tiny Devotional for Sunday, 10/25/2020

A great good morning to all my friends and neighbors in Internet Land! And to family members who dropped by, Sam’s Club has a GREAT frozen chicken pot pie.

It is better to live in a corner of the roof
Than in a house shared with a contentious woman.
Proverbs 25:24, NASB


There are four places in the Bible addressing what it’s like to live with a contentious woman, and they are all in the Book of Proverbs.

In the years since I started reviewing books, I’ve picked up bits of author wisdom. One of these is “write about what you know.” It’s not a PERFECT rule; nobody knows about exploding spaceship battles, or wizard schools, and yet, you’ll find good and popular reading available with these as a setting.

Here’s the thing: King Solomon was born into royalty. Why would he know about sleeping in the corner of a roof, or living in a desert land?

On the other hand, he was absolutely certain to know about contentious women; the Bible says he had 700 wives, and 300 concubines. If you think they all lived together in harmony, you have a basic misunderstanding of human nature, and you likely have never been around a blended family. While it’s true that some step fathers/mothers/children DO find a pathway to peace, the best that can be said of others is that they provide an intense training program for understanding human behavior.

Let us not go too hard on the women, though. It was Solomon, after all, who put them all together. We can excuse some of the wives as a means of forming political alliances, but “Solomon held fast to these in love” (I Kings 11:2b); it wasn’t ALL political.

Peace be on your household; stay off the roof.



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