Doing 50 MPH In A Parking Lot

Imagine yourself in a car...
Doing 50 MPH in a parking lot...
A parking lot with many parked cars you want to avoid hitting...
You want to slow down...
But the brake seems a bit beyond the reach of your toes...
And the brakes aren't responding well anyway...
Is that a cop car over at the end of the parking lot?

Does this scene seem fun to you?

Not to me either.

And yet variations on this scene are my repeated experience.

At night when I'm dreaming.

It doesn't take the wisdom of Joseph to interpret this dream.

God have mercy on this soul.

Who doesn't want to be a danger to himself.

Or others.

And yet cannot seem to bring his life into safer orbit.

Jesus Christ. Son of God. Have mercy on me.

A sinner.

The Widow's Offering: A Postscript

In a rather obscure (but all agree, the oldest) version of Mark's gospel, there are some verses at the end of chapter 12 that are not included in Bible translations commonly used today.

I think the extra verses are important and so here present the two passages together, included as one.

The Widow's Offering

Mark 12:41-44 (NIV Translation)
41 Jesus sat down opposite the place where the offerings were put and watched the crowd putting their money into the temple treasury. Many rich people threw in large amounts. 42 But a poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a fraction of a penny. 43 Calling his disciples to him, Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, this poor widow has put more into the treasury than all the others. 44 They all gave out of their wealth; but she, out of her poverty, put in everything—all she had to live on."

=========================

(newer manuscripts do not include verses 45 through 49.)

Mark 12:45-49 (Textus Incepticus)
45 And Andrew spoke unto Jesus, saying, "Look, Lord! One of her mites missed the opening to the receptacle and rolled into a corner and fell into a deep crack between two stones." 46 And Jesus replied to him, "That does not concern me. I do not care about the money." 47 And the disciples were amazed at him. "Lord," Peter asked, "why then have you chosen to sit here and watch people as they give?" 48 And Jesus replied, "Are you still so dull? My father in heaven owns all things. 49 But I care for these people, and what they do with their money reveals their hearts to me. These others love very little. But this widow loves very much."

A confession: There is no Textus Incepticus. I made verses 45 through 49 up myself one day, while reflecting on the difference between money itself, what we do with it, what happens to it, and how we feel about it.

I hope this fictional postscript conveys this word of grace: What matters most is not what happens to money after we give it away.

Obviously we do want our gifts to make a difference. To be used well. To serve the Lord's purposes. This should indeed be our goal.

So we make every effort to invest the Lord's resources wisely.

But what matters most to God is that we give with a right spirit.

I hope this thought will prove an encouraging one for those of us who have seen money "fall into the wrong cracks" after we gave generously to the Lord's work with the best of intentions.

Having seen more than a few of my gifts fall into some very dark cracks, I certainly did need the encouragement.

Dispute Between a Man and His Book: Part 2 of 2

...Continued from Part 1

So my young son is well-versed in Ancient Near East culture.

In my first part of this reflection, I reveled in the sheer lunacy of it, making him out to be a closet scholar precocious beyond his years.

Reality is a bit more complicated, and not quite so humorous.

My son knew this ancient word Ba because he had been reading books from a certain genre. I knew that Rick Riordan had brought the Greek gods to life (witness the popular Percy Jackson movies) but was unaware that he also has a series of books set in ancient Egypt.

My son drank deeply from that well. While I wasn't looking.

Realizing that he was probably not the only one who had been reading these books, I asked my oldest daughter if she knew what a Ba was.

She did.

This is the daughter for whom school-related memorization of "boring historical facts" is an enormous and terribly unpleasant chore.

I'm not sure how I feel about all this.

On the one hand, I'm glad the kids are reading.

On the other hand, I am disquieted by what they are reading.

In one sense, perhaps my disquiet is misplaced. These are all dead gods. Gods that passed from the scene about 2,000 years ago.

In another sense, I'm a bit apprehensive as to how successfully these gods are making a resurgence in today's culture.

Now realistically speaking, I am not concerned that my children will come to believe that the Greek gods or the old Egyptian gods are real.

But I am a bit concerned that by taking these gods so lightly, even in book-land, we invite a nonchalance about all religious systems, treating them as good for entertainment, and not much else.

Religious systems make for dangerous playgrounds, but we as a culture have forgotten that simple truth. The situation I blogged just a few days ago was, in hindsight, entirely predictable.

We now have teachers and educators who have lost all sense of mooring and who therefore give blasphemous homework assignments without even realizing the nature of the offense.

Parents for their part are likewise blind — and voice no complaint.

If I had not spoken up, that homework assignment would have proceeded without a hitch. The only problem, so to speak, was me.

I am reminded of a passage from Nehemiah:

Nehemiah 13:4-8
Before this, Eliashib the priest had been put in charge of the storerooms of the house of our God. He was closely associated with Tobiah, and he had provided him with a large room formerly used to store the grain offerings and incense and temple articles, and also the tithes of grain, new wine and olive oil prescribed for the Levites, musicians and gatekeepers, as well as the contributions for the priests.

But while all this was going on, I was not in Jerusalem, for in the thirty-second year of Artaxerxes king of Babylon I had returned to the king. Some time later I asked his permission and came back to Jerusalem. Here I learned about the evil thing Eliashib had done in providing Tobiah a room in the courts of the house of God. I was greatly displeased and threw all Tobiah’s household goods out of the room.

Nehemiah had helped to restored the temple to its proper, holy state... only to see a non-Israelite take up residence in the temple as soon as Nehemiah left town. It happened with the priest's blessing.

When Nehemiah returns, he throws Tobiah back out. But I can almost hear the priest Eliashib muttering under his breath.

"The only problem here is Nehemiah."

Maintaining purity in this world is a task of constant gardening.

In our culture today I see few gardeners. Even among our priests.

Anyone looking here for final conclusions about those Rick Riordan books will come up disappointed. I'm not sure where I'm falling on this. The kids did nothing wrong in this matter, and I'm not even sure the books are of the sort I should ban from the home. I read fantasy books as a child, too.

I'm just putting pen here to my disquiet, my growing dis-ease.

Dispute Between a Man and His Book: Part 1 of 2

I was being scholarly. Reading through the Old Testament at a snail's pace, supplementing my reading with commentary from a commentary that provides obscure background information on Old Testament readings that are obscure enough without the additional help.

Having just finished Esther, I was soldiering through a small prefatory article covering the "wisdom literature" books that were coming up next... Job, Ecclesiastes, etc.

As I said, I was being scholarly.

Or attempting to be.

I turned a bit school-boyish, however, when I got to a comment about there being similarities between Ecclesiastes and (among other things) an ancient Egyptian text from that period titled The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba.

Ba?

Now I cannot speak for others, but I found the word "Ba" pretty funny, given the context. Rather un-scholarly. It almost sounds like the name a child would give to his security blanket.

After chuckling for a moment over this silly book title, I read on, expecting to find out what a Ba is.

My smile quickly faded from my lips. No definition.

Seriously?

You're going to give me a book title like that? With no explanation?

Yep.

So what began as The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba quickly turned into A Dispute Between a Man and His Book.

I began to write a tart comment in the margin.

"No, wait. Don't tell me what a Ba is. I want to guess."

While I was still writing these very words, my early-rising 9-yr old son wandered into my basement office.

He still sleeps with Blue Orsor (his title for Blue Oso, a blue furry blanket with a teddy-bear head in one corner).

He ought to know what a Ba is.

So I showed the book title to him, figuring he might find it funny too.

My son looked up at me after reading the words and said in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, "Isn't Ba an Egyptian word for a spirit?"

I must have looked a bit dumbfounded, because he quickly clarified himself.

"Yeah, and when a man goes to sleep, it wanders around in the form of a chicken or something."

Not so long ago I was reading this child Ba, Ba, Black Sheep.

Apparently he's moved on.

It's good to have a scholar in the home at times like these.

Just for backup, you understand.

This reflection continues in Part 2...