Tiny Devotional for RED Friday, 08-06-2021

 A great good morning to all my friends and neighbors in Internet Land! And to family members who have dropped by, it’s our tenth anniversary!

“A little sleep, a little slumber,
A little folding of the hands to rest,”
Then your poverty will come in like a drifter,
And your need like an armed man.
Proverbs 6:10-11, NASB

(Kenneth didn't oversleep)

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

Need is always with us, and that, in the appropriate dose, is a good thing. It drives us on, and we all benefit from inventions. Wrapping tamales in corn shucks? BRILLIANT!

The person who first came up with THAT genius move was actively engaged in trying to feed people. They took what they had, and made what they needed: a portable meal. 

As a sometime food preparer, a great thing about the portable meal is that I can make it, give it to the kids, and send them away. THEN I can fold my hands and take a nap!

It’s not the nap that this proverb warns against, it’s the sequence. You have to do the work first, or it all goes wrong; you can’t take a nap when the family is wailing with hunger in the next room.

It occurs to me that there are other things we must have other than tamales. We need friendship, for example. We need things that friends can do, that we can’t do. Your car breaks down in the middle of the night? Ten thousand other things go wrong? It’s time to call a friend. And like tamales, friendship needs to be prepared in advance.

I suppose there are many better examples I could give about the scheduling of rest AFTER performance of work, but I’m out of words.


Peace be on your household.

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