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Proverbs 10:1 · World English Bible

Proverbs 10:1 Meaning The Proverbs of Solomon

The proverbs of Solomon. A wise son makes a glad father; but a foolish son brings grief to his mother.

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What does Proverbs 10:1 mean?

The son here is the mind itself, and its gladness or its heaviness is nothing other than the teacher it has chosen. A mind awake to love rests easily in its source and knows itself welcomed, and that ease is what is called a glad father.

From the Christian Psychology reading below.

Proverbs 10:1 through 1 lens

The same verse, read by one tradition.

CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY

Christian Psychology

The son here is the mind itself, and its gladness or its heaviness is nothing other than the teacher it has chosen. A mind awake to love rests easily in its source and knows itself welcomed, and that ease is what is called a glad father.

A mind that listens to the ego carries a weight, the heaviness of guilt, and feels its origin as something grieved rather than a home. Yet the father and the mother are not changed by either choice. Only the son's experience changes, and it changes the moment he remembers whose he is.

Son: the mind, the Son of God, whose gladness or heaviness is simply the teacher it has chosen Father: the mind's source and the love it comes from, felt as welcome when the mind chooses rightly Mother: that same source seen through the ego's guilt, an origin the mind imagines it has grieved

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Christian Psychology lens

Live Proverbs 10:1 today

  1. Sometime today, catch which voice you are listening to in your own head. One of them makes you feel heavy and accused. The other is calm. You get to pick, and you can pick again in an hour.
  2. Send one message that assumes the best of someone, a text, an email, a reply in the group chat. Treating a person as welcome changes the room you are both standing in.
  3. When you make a mistake in front of people today, own it plainly and skip the inner speech about what kind of person that makes you. Fixing the thing takes two minutes. The heaviness can take a week if you let it.

Which voice have I been letting narrate my day?

The same truth in other traditions

Dhammapada 1

The mind leads everything. Choose the gentler thought and ease follows you like your own shadow. Choose the bitter one and the weight follows just as faithfully.

Stoicism · Marcus Aurelius

You are not being crushed by the day but by your verdict on the day. Change the verdict and the same hours feel entirely different.

Tao Te Ching

The child who knows the source rests in it. Nothing has to be won back, because the stream never left the spring.

Mid-century illustration of Jesus teaching the crowd on a hillside above the sea

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