Faith & Family Business
Valuable lessons from your parents (Proverbs 1:8-9)
My first weekly series on Faith & Family Business viewed legacy, behavior and relationships through the Biblical story of the brothers Jacob and Esau (Genesis chapters 25-33). I examined how they dealt with each other in good times and bad, through difficult family circumstances, and through conflict and reconciliation. Each week I posed questions about what we might learn from their interaction.
My second Faith & Family Business series considers the book of Proverbs, a much more direct set of instructions for how to live wisely. Though written thousands of years ago by Solomon and others, these proverbs still have a timeliness and power today. My aim is to consider these maxims in the context of our current experience of living and working with family members. I’m always interested in your feedback, and appreciate your sharing of these messages with your friends and family business partners.
The first 9 chapters of Proverbs are longer meditations on several topics, instead of the discrete, pithy sayings we’ve come to know beginning in Chapter 10. Those early discourses focus on the importance of fearing God, and the process for gaining knowledge and wisdom, and for dealing with the lure of various temptations. This verse from the first chapter offers a good invitation:
Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck. (Prov. 1:8-9)
Your parents and other, older family members offer a tremendous number of lessons, and as a family-in-business, you have had a chance to glean such wisdom almost daily. You sometimes learn what not to do from your parents, but on the whole, our earliest and some of our best lessons come from our mother and father. The imagery of “wearing” wisdom as a “graceful garland” or “pendants” – things that have significant personal value – indicates how special such lessons can be.
What key lessons do you recall hearing from your elders as you were growing up? How have you adopted or modified them as you became an adult?