Proverbs 28:19 · World English Bible
Proverbs 28:19 Meaning One Who Works His Land Will Have
One who works his land will have an abundance of food; but one who chases fantasies will have his fill of poverty.
What does Proverbs 28:19 mean?
To work one's own ground is to attend to the mind itself, the only field where anything real is grown, and a mind that tends its own thoughts is fed, because it is drawing on what it actually has. Bread is the natural increase of attention rightly placed, the fullness that comes to a mind cultivating truth instead of chasing shadows.
From the Christian Psychology reading below.
Proverbs 28:19 through 1 lens
The same verse, read by one tradition.
Christian Psychology
CHRISTIAN PSYCHOLOGY
Christian Psychology
To work one's own ground is to attend to the mind itself, the only field where anything real is grown, and a mind that tends its own thoughts is fed, because it is drawing on what it actually has. Bread is the natural increase of attention rightly placed, the fullness that comes to a mind cultivating truth instead of chasing shadows.
To run after empty figures is to look for fullness outside, in appearances that promise and cannot give, and this only teaches the mind it is poor. Poverty is not a punishment but the plain result of seeking substance where there is none. The mind is fed by what it tends within and starved by what it pursues without.
The land: the mind itself, the one ground where real thought is cultivated and real increase grows Vain persons: the empty appearances the mind chases outside itself, promises of fullness that leave it convinced of its own lack
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Live Proverbs 28:19 today
- Give twenty minutes today to something inside your own reach, your own attention, your own next small piece of work, instead of refreshing a feed to see how other people are doing. You get fed by what you tend.
- In a conversation, ask what the other person is actually working on rather than comparing your life to theirs. Curiosity grows something; comparison just reports a shortage.
- When the scroll starts and you can feel the hollow set in, put the phone face down and do one real thing with your hands. Dishes count. The feeling lifts in the doing, not in more looking.
What have I been chasing outside myself that I could be tending right here?
The same truth in other traditions
Buddhism · Dhammapada
See to your own ground before worrying about anyone else's; the fault you can actually tend is the one in yourself. Your own field is the only one you can plant.
Stoicism · Epictetus
Some things are in your hands and some are not, and peace begins with telling the two apart. Working the first and releasing the second is the whole of the practice.
Sufism · Rumi
What you are looking for is already looking out of you. People go searching the world for a treasure buried under their own floor.
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