Bind them on your fingers; write them on the tablet of your heart. – Proverbs 7:3

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 31, 2013): Proverbs 7

When we know something well we often say that “we know it like the back of our hand.” It is a strange little saying – and I am not sure how much differentiates the back of one hand from that of another. But the reality is that we see the back of our own hand more than we see any other part of our body. Our hands are very familiar to us. So we often bind things on our hand to help us remember them. I have friends that will tie a piece of string to their fingers so they will remember to pick up the milk on the way home from work, because every time they look down at their hands during the day, which we do a lot, they see the string and remember the milk. (I have tried the system, but I can never remember what the string is for. Maybe I need to tie a second string to remind me what the first string is all about.) By the way, our marriage rings perform the same function. Yes, they tell other people that we are in an exclusive relationship with someone. But the rings also remind us of that relationship. And if there is an argument for guys to wear engagement rings, this might be a good reason – because we need to be reminded of the ones to whom we have made a commitment.

So the author of Proverbs again addresses these words to his son. And he says to wear wisdom on his hands like a ring. Let it always remind you. Again, like so many of the early Proverbs, Dad is specifically speaking about sexual unfaithfulness. His words are that the things he is saying are important enough to wear on his son’s fingers – and to write on his heart. Again, the word heart here means the core of your being and the seat of all action and, therefore, all morality. The intention is that the father wants his son to know these things so well that he will be able to act in these situations without even thinking – that morality will become automatic.

And Dad is right. Morality always needs to be journey toward the automatic. The truth is that we are too good at finding the loopholes for our own bad behavior – and we are too good at finding excuses to do whatever it is that we want to do. So, if we are going to live a moral life, then moral teachings have to become the default. And that is why it is so hard to break a bad habit – the bad habit is the action that has become automatic in our lives.

I am convinced that people who seem to live a moral life have just allowed right action to become the default. It is not that they do not struggle with the same temptations that the rest of us struggle with – because I know that they do. But they have trained themselves; they have tied right action around their fingers until it became written on the core of their being. And when that happened, they found that the right action they had been struggling with became the automatic response when stress seemed to demand an immediate action.     

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Proverbs 8