Perhaps it was not the king’s inexperience that allowed problems to develop in the previous section, but his laziness and gross mismanagement of his time. In Solomon’s proverb, the sagging of the rafters signifies a developing worsening problem that must be dealt with as soon, before the situation becomes catastrophic. The lazy manager, however, simply hopes that the problem will somehow go away and simply hopes for the best – but such problems do not go away, but go on getting worse until the roof collapses – and the whole enterprise, as represented by that house, goes bust.

It is interesting that Solomon’s parable concerns the roof of a building, and although the disaster quietly developing there may be quite obvious to anybody looking up, the busy occupants will tend to spend most of their time looking down and around. Accordingly, in any problem situation, it can be helpful to employ mechanical thinking technique designed to deliberately rotate attention over every aspect of the operation, seeing it from all directions, and carefully analyzing every detailed element, searching for ways to correct shortcomings or make improvements. This was in fact the intent of simple yet powerful brainstorming techniques described by Alex Osborn in his class book “Applied Imagination” and is now the basis of modern attempts at boosting business and manufacturing efficiency sometimes called “re-engineering the corporation”.

The diligent home-owner will certainly not ignore a leak, which serves as an early warning signal far worse to come, perhaps a burst water tank in a modern house and rotting timbers and slipped roof tiles in and old one. Solomon says that the leak is the result of idle hands – the hands of a manager who could not be bothered with such essential measures as preventive maintenance.

Although the situations Solomon describes may be fairly obvious with a building, their metaphorical equivalents in an organization are far more easily overlooked, perhaps until it is too late and the roof falls in. How aware are we of what is going on around us? A key characteristic of successful leaders is the ability to find the real facts of a situation – to separate fact from hearsay and opinion, and to untangle the important from the unimportant.

From a spiritual point of view, how well do we maintain and care for the house that Jesus urges us to build on a rock foundation? Perhaps Paul has a similar principle of spiritual maintenance in mind when he says, Quote: “Let us live up to what we have already attained” (Philippians 3:16).