Today in my reading I came across a Scripture that has always intrigued me. Proverbs 14:1 says…”Every wise woman buildeth her house: but the foolish plucketh it down with her hands.” KJV
I always try to apply Scripture, and I always try to gain a picture that will help me draw out every aspect of what is being taught. This verse has two pictures – one is the wise woman who builds and the other is the foolish who “plucks”. Now to start with, “plucketh” is just a funny word and when I think of it I think of chickens. Of course chickens cluck, but that sounds like pluck and wouldn?t it be appropriate to say that chickens pluck worms and grubs and what not out of the ground when they eat. So to start things off the foolish woman is a chicken woman. She’s immoral because according to my Sunday school teacher when the Bible talks about foolishness it’s talking about immorality more so than ignorance. She’s always clucking and plucking. The only problem with this analogy is that it says she “plucketh it down with her hands.” Hmmm. I’ve never seen a chicken with hands. So, how do you pluck with your hands? I’ve plucked my eyebrows before and it doesn’t feel good. You can’t pluck nicely. Plucking is a determined purposeful act and I picture this lousy chicken woman pulling bricks out of a house one by one. She doesn’t carefully ease a brick out so as not to mess up the structure. She’s no expert at Jenga. She is acting out of spite and she is clucking the entire time. She destroys her home by her words and her selfishness.
What is really sad to me is that she doesn’t realize that she is destroying her home. She thinks, she’s only pulling out a brick here and a brick there. She’s trying to get attention, trying to make a point with each hole she makes in the walls of her home. She’s only taking out the bricks she doesn’t like. The way her husband doesn’t pay attention to her when she tells him about her day – she has to get rid of that brick. The way he talks a little too friendly to that pretty girl in church – she has to make him see that these things bother her. So often these women think they are going to make things better by getting rid of the annoyances in their homes – unfortunately if you keep pulling bricks out, the walls just get weaker and bricks that were perfectly fine begin to show signs of imperfection. It won’t end until the walls cave in and no one is left with any respect.
So what is this wise woman up to? It just says she’s building. Is she adding on? My take on it is that she is strengthening what she has. She’s protecting, thickening, building up and supporting what is already there. Maybe, she has the same issues with annoying traits in her husband. Maybe he’s even worse than chicken woman’s husband, but she doesn’t pluck – she builds. She encourages the good things and prays over the bad. She doesn’t seek to destroy what she doesn’t like, and she doesn’t try to change it either. This wise woman decides to surround what she doesn’t like with admiration. She inserts bricks of praise, for characteristics she likes, under, beside and above those weaker, crumbling bricks. Not to support what she doesn’t like, instead to provide so much strength in what she does like that the other doesn’t matter anymore. She picks her battles and then gives them to God to fight – she doesn’t do any of the dirty work. She just builds.
When Kris and I got married I heard a lot of advice from well meaning women on how to train my husband. I didn’t marry a puppy and I hadn’t planned on training him. I learned early on, that my job was not to change, correct, or fix Kris. My job was to help him. I could support him, I could encourage him and he, being a discerning human adult, could fix his own problems. Besides – I had enough of my own problems to fix. Why in the world would I want to tackle his? I think he appreciates that.
I wouldn’t say I never have chicken woman days, but I’m striving for wisdom and building instead.