Proverbs 17:1

“Better is a dry morsel with quiet
than a house full of feasting with strife.” NRSV

Abraham Maslow is a psychologist who developed what he calls the “Hierarchy of Needs.” The basic premise is that one cannot focus on higher-level needs until the lower level needs are met. One of the lowest level needs is safety.

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past half-century about emotional abuse. And while I think that, as a people, we need to toughen up a bit (well, actually a lot), there is truth that, in order to withstand emotional assault in other places, we need to have at least one place that is safe. This proverb asserts that the one place of safety needs to be home. And I agree.

Home should be the one place where we can count on those around us. It used to be that loyalty to family was paramount. If you couldn’t count on your friends, on your coworkers, on your neighbors, you could count on your family. Sadly enough, that’s often no longer true. We live in a society where the people most likely to hurt us are those with whom we live.

Why is that? Why are we so untrustworthy with those who depend upon us the most? I think it’s because we have swallowed the lie that “a house of feasting” is worth the price . . . the destruction of relationships. We are so enamored with commercials that we believe what they say, lock, stock, and barrel.

I was married once before. My first husband was an alcoholic. He was also a very talented man who thought everyone hated him. And so, he just wouldn’t come home. He’d go to bars or liquor stores, buy alcohol (and other things), and simply not come home. One day in a very honest state, he told me that he wanted to be like the men on the beer commercials, the men who would surrounded by people who loved them and who thought they were just wonderful.

He was convinced that he could find love and acceptance among the other losers in the bar rather than to come home and receive the love and acceptance that his family was waiting to give him.

As Christians, do we look outside of our families for emotional safety? There are sometimes reasons why we do that: an unfaithful spouse, an abusive parent, a neglectful child. But rather than continuing to look outward, why don’t we work on developing a healthy family? It takes not only the work of those others, but ours as well. It takes prayer and patience and forgiveness. None of us is perfect (by a long shot), but we can work on having a house of quiet, even if we only have a dry morsel, rather than looking for that house full of feasting with strife.

© 2008 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved. International copyright reserved. This study may be copied for nonprofit and/or church purposes only without permission when copied in its entirety (including this notice).