The Dichos My Grandmother Said That Are Actually IN the Bible

My grandmother had a saying for everything, and not one of them was ever explained. She just fired them. You broke something - a dicho. You came home crying about a boy, and before you got the second sentence out she said eight words in Spanish and went back to her beans, and that was the entire counseling session, mija. And then one afternoon a few years ago I was reading the book of Proverbs - just reading, not looking for anything - and four chapters in I had to stop, because I was hearing my grandmother's voice coming off the page. Not similar to her. HER. And I sat there thinking: this woman never went past the third grade. She could barely read. Where did she get these? In this episode of The Mexican Mother's Bible, Bertha puts seven dichos side by side with the Scripture they are standing next to: • "Dios aprieta pero no ahorca" - the squeeze is real, but the limit is His (1 Corinthians 10:13) • "El que con lobos anda, a aullar se enseña" - and the joke history played: Paul was quoting a street proverb too (1 Corinthians 15:33) • "No hay mal que por bien no venga" - close to Romans 8:28, but NOT the same, and the difference is the difference between comfort and a lie (Genesis 50:20) • "Cada quien cosecha lo que siembra" - not a resemblance. That IS the verse (Galatians 6:7) - plus the encouraging half nobody ever quoted (6:9) • "De la abundancia del corazón habla la boca" - not a dicho at all. That is Jesus, word for word (Luke 6:45; Matthew 12:34) • "Ayúdate que Dios te ayudará" - and here Bertha says NO. It is not in the Bible, in any language, and in one important way it is backwards (Romans 5:6; 2 Corinthians 12:9) • "El muerto al pozo y el vivo al gozo" - the one her grandmother said the day of the funeral, that took thirty years and one verse to understand (2 Samuel 12:20-23) She holds the seventh back for the end on purpose, because it is the one she got completely wrong as a girl - she thought it was the coldest thing a woman could say about a man she had slept beside for forty-one years. It was not coldness. Stay to the finish, mija. "Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it." - Proverbs 22:6 💛 An honest word: I am not going to bless every old saying just because it came from a woman we loved. Two of these are folk wisdom, not Scripture - and "God helps those who help themselves" is not a verse, it is not in any translation, and for the person watching this from a bed or from the far end of a long illness, the difference matters enormously. Effort is a good thing God asks of us. It is not the price of His help. If it were, the people who most need Him could never afford Him. I am not a pastor. I have no letters after my name and no pulpit to stand behind. I am a mother with a worn Bible, passing down what was passed down to me. When I tell you what I believe a passage means, go and read it for yourself. Do not take my word for it. Take His. If this brought your grandmother's voice back for a minute, please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE - and send it to your sisters, because they will remember sayings you have forgotten. God bless you, mija. 📖 Tell me YOUR family's dichos in the comments - as many as you can remember, in Spanish, in English, however she said it. Say who said it and what she said it about. Half of you are going to read the comments and find a saying you had completely forgotten, in somebody else's grandmother's words, and it will bring your own back. If you know a verse that goes with one, put it there too - teach me, I mean it. And tell me your county. I read every single one.