Whoever pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity and honor.
Proverbs 21:21 (NIV)
Chase Righteousness and Love
She found it in March, going back through three years of job sheets for something else: a rate she’d been applying wrong, twelve customers, none of them large. Nobody was ever going to notice. Two of them have died since.
She wrote to all twelve. Three wrote back. One of them rang to argue that the amount was wrong, and it was wrong, in his favor by nine dollars, and she agreed with him and sent what he said. He rang again the following week about something else.
Whoever pursues righteousness and love finds life, prosperity and honor. Proverbs collects observations about how life usually runs, and this one puts two things in front of you to go after.
Righteousness here is the daily sort: paying what you said you’d pay, telling the truth on a day when it costs you something. Love is hesed, Israel’s word for loyal kindness, the sort that keeps turning up for a person who can’t return the favor.
Kindness comes easy to me. I can be decent to somebody who’s clearly having a bad week on no sleep and no warning, and I’ve never had to work at that part. Alongside it the proverb asks for the plain doing of right, and that one I have to decide on.
Both of them keep moving, which is why the verb is pursue. A man doesn’t arrive at loyal kindness and stand there. He goes after it on Thursday and has to go after it again on Friday, and it’s the ones still out after them who find anything.
Life, prosperity and honor, says the proverb, and nine of the twelve never answered. Proverbs writes down how things generally run, not what is owed, and the men who put the book together had watched the exceptions go by as well as anybody. What the pursuit turns up is real and it is not a receipt you can hand anybody.
Nine of the twelve never answered. The checks went out anyway and most of them haven’t cleared. She keeps the list in the drawer under the till, and she hasn’t thrown it away, and every few months she tries the two numbers that still ring.
A Prayer to Remember
There’s a man who’s still waiting on me to make something right, God. Give him better than he’s had from me, and don’t let the waiting sour him. Start me today on the one thing I’ve been meaning to make right and haven’t.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
