Proverbs 26:13 · World English Bible
Proverbs 26:13 Meaning The Sluggard Says
The sluggard says, “There is a lion in the road! A fierce lion roams the streets!”
What does Proverbs 26:13 mean?
Fear invents a danger to justify staying where it is. The mind reluctant to move toward love conjures a threat in the path and points to it as reason, when the beast in the road is nothing but its own unwillingness wearing the face of peril.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 26:13 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
Fear invents a danger to justify staying where it is. The mind reluctant to move toward love conjures a threat in the path and points to it as reason, when the beast in the road is nothing but its own unwillingness wearing the face of peril. The obstacle is made, not found.
The correction is to see who set the lion there. A mind that does not wish to go will always discover a reason it cannot, and the danger it names is the disguise of its own resistance. What frees it is the recognition that the way is empty, that nothing bars it but the fear it projected outward and now believes is real.
Lion: the imagined danger the mind sets in its own path, its unwillingness disguised as a threat from outside Streets: the way toward love the mind avoids, the open road it fills with invented peril
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Christian Psychology lens
Live Proverbs 26:13 today
- Name the thing you have been putting off and write down the exact disaster you are picturing. Read it back, and see how much of it you invented.
- Make the call, send the message, or say the hard sentence to the one person you have been avoiding. Five minutes of real contact usually dissolves weeks of imagined danger.
- When the pressure is on and you hear yourself explaining why now is not the time, take the smallest real step anyway. Open the document, dial the number, stand up.
What danger have I placed in my own road, and who put it there?
The same truth in other traditions
Stoicism · Seneca
We suffer more in imagination than in reality. The thing we dread is mostly built in the mind, and the mind is a generous builder.
Buddhism
The arrow of fear you feel is the second one, the one you shoot into yourself. The first was only a situation, and it had no lion in it.
Tao Te Ching 64
The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. The one who stands measuring the distance has not yet found a reason, only a way to stay.
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