Rock and Roll and Right Choices

Prepare your outside work,
Make it fit for yourself in the field;
And afterwards build your house.
Proverbs 24:27

Many stories are told of Jimi Hendrix, the great rock and roll guitarist of the sixties.  One of the stories that goes around is that he would occasionally pawn his guitar to satisfy some immediate desire.  This meant that whoever was trying to get him to the next show would often have to find out where his guitar was pawned and redeem it for him before he could play another gig.  It seems strange because the guitar was Jimi’s major source of income.  It seems that you would want to pawn absolutely ANYTHING before choosing to pawn the one thing that was likely to bring you the income needed to redeem what you pawned.  This is the purpose of this parable.  The “outside work” in this case would be attending to that which will provide for your needs and generate income.  The next step after that is to build and prepare your house.  This simple choice to keep things in order will keep life balanced between income and expense.  Or as Charles Dickens put it in his wonderful book David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."