Week 25 Proverbs 31
Reading through the bible I know I’ve got to read it all. But reading Proverbs 31:10-31 can seem like a toss-up for a guy or for an unmarried woman since the passage describes ideal qualities of a married woman.
For something to do a couple of years ago I wrote down Lemuel’s 16 Qualities of a Quality Wife.
So then last year I was wondering if I could ferret-out anything useful from that list.
I started with the 16 wife-specific items I had.
Then I Gender Neutralized them (for example I adjusted ‘her husband can trust her’ to something like ‘that person is trustworthy’).
I also took away all the near-eastern society-specific cultural-domestic-&-household-tasks that were anthropologically-off-putting & distance-creating & contemporarily-inapplicable.
This year I trimmed-down & tidied-up my list and ended up with 10 transferable questions I could ask myself:
Am I entrepreneurial?
Do I work hard?
Do I have a sense of “self-worth”?
Am I concerned enough about disadvantaged people that I help them?
Am I a forward thinker? Do I plan and prepare for the future?
Am I strong?
Am I confident?
Am I wise (and also kind) when I talk to people?
Am I concerned about the well-being of my family?
Do outsiders see the quality of my work?
My answer is the same in every case: well…not really.
I don’t know how a woman feels reading chapter 31. But reading my modified list gives me a feeling of work-still-to-be-done.
Note: quote from Proverbs 31:11 (NLT)