This month already had two verses about money arriving the wrong way. On the twentieth it was easy money, and the problem was the missing process. On the twenty-first it was dishonest money, and the problem was the trap.
Today the subject is different, and considerably more uncomfortable, because it is not about money at all. It is about the clock.
And the chapter hands you the commentary two verses later, in verse 22: "selfish people are in such a hurry to get rich that they do not know when poverty is about to strike."
Reflection
1The Verse Is Not Setting Rich Against Poor
Start with the pair Proverbs actually chose, because almost everyone reads it wrong.
On one side stands the honest person. On the other, the person in a hurry. The opposite of hurried, here, is not poor. It is honest.
Look at the size of that. The verse is not condemning the wish to prosper, and it is not praising poverty. It is pointing at speed as the place where honesty usually springs a leak.
And that tracks with how it actually happens. Nobody wakes up deciding to be dishonest. A person accepts an impossible deadline, and to fit inside the deadline they skip a step. Then they round a number. Then they promise something that does not exist yet. Hurry never asked anyone to lie. It just created the only conditions in which lying looked reasonable.
2Hurry Blinds You
Now verse 22, which is where the day gets serious: "selfish people are in such a hurry to get rich that they do not know when poverty is about to strike."
Stop and picture the scene, because it is almost comic in its absurdity. The person is running toward wealth. Poverty is walking toward them. And the two pass each other without being seen.
The reason is physical before it is moral. Speed narrows the field of vision. Whoever runs sees the finish line and loses everything sitting off to the sides.
You have watched this up close. The business owner who never looked at the cash flow because he was closing the next sale. The person who signed without reading the whole contract because the window was closing. The couple who never noticed they had stopped talking, because both were building the same dream.
And here is the most useful piece of information of the day. Urgency is the favorite tool of anyone trying to sell you something bad. Today only. Last spots. If you don't get in now, you lose it. Whenever somebody tightens your clock, that person is trying to switch off your peripheral vision.
3Where the Hurry Comes From
What is missing is the layer underneath, and it is the most honest one. Why do we run?
It is almost never pure ambition. Most of the time it is fear, or comparison. Fear of being left behind, of not managing, of turning fifty with nothing built. And comparison, which is fear with a name attached: that acquaintance your age who already made it.
There is also a theology hiding inside hurry, and hardly anyone notices they believe it. If I don't secure this now, nobody will. That is faith in the clock, standing in the place of faith in God.
And a distinction has to be drawn here, because plenty of people will read this while genuinely squeezed. Legitimate urgency exists. A bill falling due, medicine to buy, a child to keep in school. That is not greed, it is pressure, and God does not scold anyone for being under pressure.
The difference is easy to see. Pressure has a number and a date. Greed never arrives, because the target moves along with you.