beat #40 - jasmine [proverbs, day 13] (Thursday, May 16, 2013 / 9:20 AM)
v. 12 says, "Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life."
Proverbs seems to be punching everything it can out of this "tree of life" image.
In this verse however, it was the first half that really spoke to me.
As someone who is steadily working on her dreams, I can understand the antsy longing for fulfillment.
Hope deferred again and again really does suck, in the face of failure, rejection and loneliness.
The catch however, is that my hope is not really deferred. Because my hope is permanent, and my hope is fulfilled already in the person of Christ.
To me, what cures a sick heart is to place my hope in that which does not defer. And Christ never defers.
The Kingdom of God can be given now, and eternal life begins when I realize that hope is never deferred.
Longing, that intense longing for permanence and immortality we are so obsessed with, fulfilled in our relationship with Jesus really is a tree of life.
The words at this point seem to expand into a whole web of associations and images.
Ah, the beauty of the bible.
v. 15
"Good understanding wins favor, but the way of the unfaithful is hard."
Good understanding -> unfaithful are set up in relationship to each other.
It almost seems as if, the unfaithful are really just people with poor understanding.
That makes a lot of sense, because good understanding, we remember from Proverbs 3, is part of what the world was created out of.
Wisdom and understanding are intricately tied together, part and parcel of what it means to be intimate with Christ.
To be faithful, is to have a good understanding of who we serve, who we love and why we place all our hope in Him.
Do I understand?
Or am I unfaithful?
