Job 17:5

They impress companions with their bounty,

   While their children’s eyes darken without.

I phrased this as a difficult verse. It is a harsh verse with people caring more about their position in society than the wellbeing of their kids. The worse thing is that so many people still let their kids go hungry in our culture today. And it’s not just the people we think might be poor.

‘Companions’ was mainly ‘friends’, but people like this don’t really have friends. One source had flatterer but uses ‘thoughts’ inplace of ‘bounty’. ‘Impress’ was actually the quite different ‘denouce’ or ‘inform on’ his friends for a bounty. Quite a different rendering and actually the normal outcome.

‘Darken without’ was also ‘fail’, ‘pine away’ (which goes well with the lack of food), ‘languish’, and ‘waste away’. I actually pulled darken without from a secondary rendering one source had.

One of the interesting quotes from the habits book was about the conscious brain only being able to do one thing at a time. If you are busy impressing your friends, you can’t focus on feeding your kid or caring for them in general. Our brain can put most bodily functions on the subconscious, but caring for others is not a set and forget kind of thing. The idea for the book is to keep doing the things that are important to you until your brain treats them as a habit and allows you to focus on what is urgent without losing the important. (Reference to another Habit book I read a long time ago.)

The book gets into some deeper psychology that is important from a science side, but not really part of the how as much as the why. The important part of the science side is that our thoughts, feelings, and emotions are key to us engaging an action as a habit. If we think or feel bad about an action, we are unlikely to keep it as routine. If we think or feel good about an action, then we might repeat it enough for it to work. And while our feelings are less under our control, we can take control of every thought (with the Holy Spirit’s help) and we can decide our values that influence our feelings.

Overeating makes my body feel good for a moment, but my brain knows it is eventually hurtful to my body and my mind. I need to train myself to ignore these momentary feelings and focus on the longer term negative impacts to curb my emotions. I need to think of what I truly want and put that in order above overeating in priorities. Eventually, I can get out of the habit of eating until I am stuffed. But the principle applies to everything I want to make a part of the better me I want to be. Overall, I have to align my thoughts and feelings to my desire to follow God and love others. Then I can build better habits.

Written 9/4/25, Posted 9/18/25, Job 401/~1070