Proverbs 11: 29
“He who troubles his own house will inherit the wind, and the fool will be servant to the wise of heart.”
This is a very profound verse in my mind. It seems I see many people “troubling” their own houses. I see men staying out all night or just living with the woman that they supposedly love without marrying them. I see women nagging their husbands non-stop or being irritable. I see children deceiving their parents, lying, stealing, etc. The word for “trouble” in this verse means to stir up, to afflict, or to bring evil upon. There are many many ways that a person can “trouble” their own house from actually hurting their families to simply mismanaging money. It may not be apparent, but this verse actually alludes to two separate and distinct results for troubling one’s house. The first is that this person will inherit the wind. What does that mean? Well it depends on who does the troubling. To illustrate how this can apply to a child, consider this story. There was a young man about the age of nineteen. He came from a middle-class family where his mother and father worked to provide for their three children’s futures. The parents saved enough money to send the children to college, to have a nice home, and to have ample supply of food for their children. Then one day this teenaged boy began to associate with other boys of the same age who were used to engaging in general mischief and criminal behavior. Because their own parents could not supply them with a vehicle, the boy asked his parents to borrow theirs and so they allowed him. That night, while roving the streets looking for excitement the boy and his friends decided to break into a house and rob it. What they did not anticipate when they arrived was that the home owner would be home and would defend his home using a gun. During the attempted robbery, the home owner shot and the robbers shot. One of the robbers was mortally wounded in the altercation. In a vain attempt to save their friends life, they loaded him into the borrowed car and sped off into the night. The friend did not make it to the hospital and died there, in that car that night. Scared and confused, the boys decided that the best thing to do in order to protect themselves was to light the car on fire and flee the scene. That is what they did. Of course the police found the scene, pieced together the evidence and all of the surviving assailants were arrested. The parents who loaned their boy the family car, in the end, spent all of the college funds and all of their savings to defend him and now he has nothing left for his future. He was sentenced to many years in prison and has since been released. However, all of the money, the inheritance has been wiped out due to his own actions - he has inherited the wind. Further, this foolish decision has made himself and his parents’ servants of those who have made wise decisions. They have had to become servants because of these choices affecting their ability to survive financially. This is the perfect example of this verse. Another would be a woman or a man who commits adultery on their spouse and finds themselves divorced, fighting to survive on only their income… All because they troubled their own house! Therefore, let us choose wisdom in our lives and gain a good inheritance instead of choosing to trouble our own houses because of immature and foolish notions.
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