Vomit in the Proverbs

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Here's the question and answer from this week so far:
Monday: Paul, Timothy, and Silas were gentle among the Thessalonians like what? (I Thess 2)
1 Thessalonians 2:7 7 but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children.

Tuesday: What do the rich and poor have in common? (Proverbs 22)
Proverbs 22:2 2 Rich and poor have this in common: The LORD is the Maker of them all.

Wednesday: What does the senseless man not know and the food not understand? (Psalm 92)
Psalm 92:6-7 6 The senseless man does not know, fools do not understand, 7 that though the wicked spring up like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be forever destroyed.

And here's the question of the day:
Thursday: What sort of ambition—what kind of life—is Paul advising the Thessalonians to pursue? (I Thess 4)


And here's the reflection of the day:
Did you know the word vomit occurs in the Bible 11 times? And did you know that Proverbs contains 30% of those mentions? Strange, isn't it? And 2 of those 3 mentions are part of our "Year of the Bible" readings for today.

Proverbs 25:16 16 If you find honey, eat just enough-- too much of it, and you will vomit.

Proverbs 26:11 11 As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly.

These two proverbs have something to teach us about wisdom; er, rather the LACK of wisdom.

First of all, Proverbs 25:16 teaches us the wisdom of moderation. Now this could be moderation in terms of rich food--like honey--but it also can apply to more than just that. Too much of anything is a bad thing--that's another commonly known proverb, right? We know that life should be lived in moderation, with a sense of balance: a balance between work and play, serving others and taking care of ourselves, blessing others and allowing others to bless us. This is what God would like us to strive for in our individual lives.

Proverbs 26, then, addresses what happens when we lose that sense of balance--when we "eat too much honey" and get sick. Shame on us for giving in to our weaknesses, of course. But it's bound to happen once, right? In this Proverb, the wisdom comes by not repeating our "folly," like a dog returning to its, well, you know.

I have a friend who struggled with the temptation to "eat too much honey." And when he would give in to the temptation, he would call the consequences of his overindulgence "vomit." So after he "vomited" then we would talk about how to clean it up and how to avoid making the same mistake again. I know this is a rather graphic description--we could never talk about this stuff over dinner!--but it's a very effective way to think about overindulgence--no matter what you overindulge in. Really, who among us would return to our own (literal) vomit??

So why is it we return so often to our figurative vomit? that we repeat our mistakes over and over again? Perhaps you should think of adopting this more graphic approach to sin. . . . I know it's changed the way I think about overindulgence in every aspect of life!