Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control.
Proverbs 25:28 (NIV)
Walls Get Built Early
Down the hall from an operating room there’s a family room with a phone on the wall and a television left on with the sound off. A man is in there early with his wife’s reading glasses in his shirt pocket, because she handed them to him at the door and there was nowhere else for them to go. Every time the doors at the end of the hall swing, he’s on his feet. Whatever comes through them gets all the way into him before he can do a thing about it.
A city with a gap in its wall keeps everything it had the day before. The houses are standing and the people still sleep in their beds. It has lost the say over what walks in, and in Proverbs the person who lacks self-control is that city.
The person who governs himself keeps that say: the sentence he uses when he’s tired, the hour when nobody is watching him, the answer he gives before he’s had time to think about how it looks, and what he does with an evening that has nothing in it. He builds it in the flat weeks, on the mornings he’d rather not bother, when saying no to himself costs him almost nothing and buys him nothing he can see. He doesn’t build it on a morning like this one.
So take something you’d have said yes to without thinking, and say no to it. Do it in a week when nothing is riding on the answer.
The doors swing again. He’s up before they finish moving, with his wife’s glasses still in his shirt pocket, and a nurse holds one of the doors open and says, “You can come back now.” What would you want already standing in you the next time nothing at all is up to you?
A Prayer to Remember
I’ve spent my best hours on things that could have waited. You’ve seen what’s left of me by the evening, and you’ve seen what I do with it. Give me some order in the ordinary weeks, before I have any use for it. Work on me now, while nothing is being asked.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
