Many Christians have their favorite verses of the Bible. I have mine. Micah 6:8 is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of bed in the morning – “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?” (KJV). The poetry of it rolls off the tongue, even when grumbled into a pillow. And the book of James? Just all of it. Sometimes, when I’m enjoying a meal alone, I imagine that James is there, and we talk about his book and what a grand thing the kingdom of God will be when all of that comes to pass.
You know what passage I don’t love? Proverbs 31.
To be fair, it’s probably not Proverbs 31’s fault. It’s possible that it’s been overused by (hopefully) well-meaning people to teach me what I should strive to be as a woman. It’s likely that I have been told so many times in so many ways that I fall short of the feminine ideal *cough*stereotype*cough* that my automatic defense mechanism is to discard mentally anything that is supposedly “for women.” It’s conceivable that I’m tired of hearing story after story of women who are stuck in the muck of condemnation because they don’t think they can ever measure up to this to-do list but have been told that they have to in order to be a good Christian.
It’s probably not the passage itself. It’s just that I’ve been stabbed with this particular edge of the sword of truth a little too often to have happy thoughts about it.
Yet there it is, in my Bible. Taunting me with its unseen-by-me treasures. Calling out, “Spend time with me. I’m good stuff. I promise.”
So we’ll see.
I’m going to be spending some time with Proverbs 31. I’m going to jot some thoughts down here, and I welcome your comments. Expand, extol, critique, disagree. There’s room for all of it.
More later. Thanks, friends.
M. Suzanne Terry 
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