Entangled

Don’t make yourself indebted to anyone but the Lord

This first section, the father tells the son to not make agreements with others that leaves them at the mercy of another. Whether that is making an agreement to help someone but likewise causes you to be in a difficult spot. This also applies to make gambles and bets that may cause you to be controlled by another. The father says, “don’t lay down until you have removed yourself from this debt”. Now you are too young to have a loan or to gamble. BUT when we make a “bet” or if someone asks us if they can borrow money and they “promise that they will give it back”. Both of these are often bad ideas. Because friends rarely give us our money back and bets often leave us at the mercy of someone else.

The danger of laziness

What this shows as we end the last section, is that there is danger in laziness. The father says “look at the ant, all they do is work, even when there is no one who is telling them where to go and it prepares for what is coming ahead rather than waiting for danger to come to it.

Have you ever found yourself stressed out about something that you knew was coming up from much earlier? Or remembering something after it was already too late. What the father warns against is laziness, because laziness will only lead to poverty and to begging. Laziness will take and take until you have nothing left.

Imagine, you will, an ant, and you saw it just sitting there, and it had a little cell phone, just looking at it, while all these other ants were walking with food for their own. That would be quiet the weird sight to see.

We don’t always see it, but there is danger in procrastination and in laziness. Trust me, I have lived my life as a procrastinator. I have always struggled against it. But I have had to learn how to not be lazy, how to map out goals for myself and know what is required to get a task done. To plan ahead of time rather than at the last minute.

If we fail to plan what happens is that we start to use all that we have till we have nothing left. But I am not saying that enjoying life, or doing fun things is wrong. BUT it is about using your time wisely. Instead of playing video games all night while you have that homework assignment sitting on your desk, go and do the homework so that you can now enjoy your game without the guilt of this assignment over your head.

There is this thing that happens with my kids. Where they will make the wrong choice but then be upset with the consequences when I have made clear what will happen if they don’t make the right choice. I will say “do this thing now that I need you to do and you won’t have to go to timeout and miss out on fun things OR you can keep pouting and complaining about having to do it and how you want to play AND THEN you will miss getting to do the thing that you enjoy doing.” Do you see how that works? Doing the right thing will help you to enjoy getting to do the thing that you want, but sometimes we have such a hard time making the right choice.

The Danger of the easy way out

Next what the father warns about is the “worthless person”. What does the worthless person do? Speaks dishonestly, is always gesturing towards trouble, always looking for the next way to get into trouble. But what happens to this person? His bubble bursts as quickly as what he received. Instead of trying to work