Monday Musings: What King Solomon Wanted Me to Know

This summer a friend and I have decided to read through a few different passages in the Bible. For the month of June we decided to keep it simple and go to the book of Proverbs, there's one for each day so it wasn't hard to remember what we were suppose to read!

I've read through Proverbs many times but this time some things really stuck out to me, which is what this post is all about!

Last summer we got a lot of rain in the month of June, and I mean A LOT. Every time it would rain the floor of our upstairs bathroom would be soaked and the ceiling would continue to drip most of the day. We couldn't figure out where the leak was or how the water was getting in but eventually, the leak was getting bad enough that we called out a roofer to take a look. As it turned out, there were some shingles that were put on backwards, thus trapping the water instead of letting it flow off the roof, the water then made it's way down a pipe, into our fan vent and onto our floor. Once the roof was patched, things were as good as new (other than the pealing paint, cracked drywall and fried van vent)!

So why tell you all about our leaky roof? As I was reading through Proverbs I came across a verse, not once or twice but FIVE times...

“a wife's nagging is a continual dripping of rain” 19:13

“it is better to live on a corner of a housetop than in a house with a quarrelsome wife” 21:9

“it's better to live in a desert than with a quarrelsome and fretful woman” 21:19

“it's better to live on the corner of a roof than to share a house with a quarrelsome wife” 25:24

“a continual dripping on a rainy day and a nagging wife are alike, to restrain her is to restrain the wind or to grasp oil in one's right hand” 27:15

I feel like King Solomon must've really wanted us to pay attention to this, otherwise he'd just needed to mention it once and be done with it. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that this is an area that we as women (especially wives) really struggle with. Not me of course, and I'm sure you don't either!

I was curious, so I looked up the meanings of nagging, quarrelsome and fretful, just to see if by chance there was a picture of me next to any of them!

Nagging:

To annoy by constant scolding, complaining, or urging.

To scold, complain, or find fault constantly

To be a constant source of anxiety or annoyance

Quarrelsome:

Inclined to disagree, belligerent, to dispute angrily

To find fault

To complaining

Fretful:

Inclined to be troubled

Marked by worry and distress

Thankfully there wasn't a picture of me next to these definitions but boy did they hit close to home. Like I said, I'm sure none of you are the nagging wife so I'll just speak from my own experience here... I would like to think that I don't struggle with these things but I will admit that from time to time I can drive my husband to insanity, although he has yet to move his belongings to the corner of the roof.

That leak in the bathroom was seriously annoying, we could hear it dripping during the day if we didn't have the door shut, and I cannot tell you how many times I stepped in a puddle with socks on, talk about a constant source of anxiety.

When I asked Tim “what do you think of the verse “a continual dripping and a nagging wife are the same?”, his response made me laugh “a nagging wife is worse that a continual dripping” he said, “at least you can leave the room that the dripping is in, the wife tends to follow you around the house until she's sure that you heard her.” Now, he said it with a smile on his face, but I'm sure that deep down he was trying to tell me something.

So what's the point? Well, let me share two other verses that struck me:

“an excellent wife is the crown of her husband” 12:4

“an excellent wife who can find? She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good, and not harm, all the days of her life” 31:10

I don't know about you, but I would much rather be the crown of my husband than the leak in his roof. How do we go from being the “nagging wife” to the “excellent wife”? If I've learned anything in the 5 years we've been married I've learned that we can't do anything in our own strength. It's only when we ask God to do a work in our hearts (notice I didn't say “ask God to change our spouse so it's easier to be an excellent wife”) that we truly become more like Him and get closer to becoming the excellent wives He designed us to be.