Proverbs 19:11

Proverbs treats a short fuse not as a harmless quirk of temperament but as a lack of good sense — and it treats the power to let an offense go by as a kind of glory. That is a startling pair of judgments, almost the reverse of how we usually rank things. We tend to admire the person who will not be crossed, and to suspect that overlooking a wrong makes us a doormat, weak, easily walked over. The sages saw it the other way around. To be ruled by every slight is to be small and reactive, handing the controls of your mood to whoever happens to annoy you. To be able to overlook an offense — to see it clearly and choose not to make it the center of your day — is to be large. There is a freedom in it that grievance never has. A nursed offense is a kind of small cell: we lock the other person inside it, replay their crime, keep the case open. What we rarely notice is that we have to stay near the cell to guard it — that keeping someone else imprisoned in our resentment quietly imprisons us there too. Wisdom sees who is actually held captive by an unforgiven slight, and it does the counterintuitive thing: it opens the door. Not because the wrong did not matter, but because our one life is too short and too good to spend standing guard over other people's failures.

Smedes uncovers what the proverb means by <em>glory</em>. Overlooking an offense is not weakness losing a fight; it is a person walking out of a cell they had been guarding — which is why the sages called it not a loss but a glory.