Taking Some Time

After posting 500 entries, I'm taking a little break! I'm reflecting on the future of GBM. If you have any comments or suggestions, please let me know.

Thanks for reading my blog.

GBM - The 500th Post!

Wow! It's hard to believe that it's been about 2-1/2 years since the first post on GBM on February 18, 2018. This is the 500th post. When I started it, I was posting almost every day, but over the past year or so, I've been posting twice a week, generally on Sundays and Thursdays.

I started the blog to offer encouragement, encouragement to seek light in the darkness. Sometimes, I just posted stories or brief passages from a book, article, or essay as light-hearted distractions. I hope it has been helpful.

I'll end this 500th post where the 1st post ended with a quote from one of my favorite Bible verses, Philippians 4:8:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Please continue to seek the virtuous in your life, the higher things, the better things...the Light. 

In God's Time

As I have mentioned, my wife and I are reading a devotional by Jon Nielson called The Story. Related to the reading of 1 Samuel 24, Nielson describes how David - while ordained by God to be the future king of Israel - waited patiently for his time to succeed Saul. This wasn't easy. Saul was hunting David with the intent to kill him. For many of us, it would have seemed easier for David just to kill Saul and take his place on the throne. But David was a man after God's own heart and he knew it was not his time yet. Nielson writes:

By the time the events of 1 Samuel 24 take place, it has been many years since Samuel's covert anointing of David as the king of Israel. David - wanted by King Saul - is a man on the run. Surely there were times when David was tempted to hurry things up a bit in terms of God's plan for him. If ever there was a chance - and seemingly a God-given chance - for David to bump off Saul, and take over the kingdom, it was now!

Nielson recounts the scene where David could have killed Saul in a cave, but instead just cuts off a piece of his robe:

Even after merely cutting a bit off Saul's robe, in fact, David is stricken with remorse. He wishes he could take back even that small action - that tiny affront to the king who had been once anointed by God through the prophet Samuel. This is the rightful king, the man after God's own heart, the man who will not grab for himself the crown, but will wait for his God to deliver it to him in his time and in his way.

Patience. Waiting on the Lord. Most of us are not good at this. We want to get married (or want our kids to find wives); we want the next best job or the next best place to live; we want that illness to subside or that virus to disappear; we long for the parent, son, daughter, aunt, uncle, sister, brother, niece or nephew to know God. Sometimes we want these things so badly, we act in less than righteous ways to try to make them happen. We want to move things along. When our hearts are like this, we would have killed Saul instead of cutting off a piece of his robe.

For believers, waiting on the Lord can be excruciatingly difficult. At the moments when we just can't seem to wait any longer, we risk exchanging God's will for our own. We proclaim in our hearts, "God, you don't know what you are doing."

But through the mercy of the Holy Spirit, we can stand down and recall His promises:

Likewise, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And he who searches hearts knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. - Romans 8:26-28

Nielson ends his devotional with this; good words to live by in impatient times:
"Pray today that your heart would be like David's heart. Pray that you would trust God to work his will in your life, in his time and way. Pray that you would work with all your strength for the cause of Jesus Christ, trusting that his power will accomplish his purposes as he has planned it."

God, Leave Me Alone

"When I say, ‘My bed will comfort me, my couch will ease my complaint,’ then you scare me with dreams and terrify me with visions, so that I would choose strangling and death rather than my bones. I loathe my life; I would not live forever. Leave me alone, for my days are a breath. What is man, that you make so much of him, and that you set your heart on him, visit him every morning and test him every moment?" - Job 7:13-18 

I read this passage a few weeks ago, wrote it down, but didn't know what to say about it. I still don't. I've been thinking about it: What would my life look like if God left me alone? I guess it is what life in hell is like. What would the universe look like if God left it alone? I picture some kind of alternate universe movie, A World Without God. I don't know. But this passage and the Book of Job says one important thing about God: A man can tell God - the Lord of the Universe - to go away and instead of doing that, He blesses him immeasurably and demonstrates His love, generosity, and mercy: 

And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job, when he had prayed for his friends. And the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before. Then came to him all his brothers and sisters and all who had known him before, and ate bread with him in his house. And they showed him sympathy and comforted him for all the evil that the Lord had brought upon him. And each of them gave him a piece of money and a ring of gold. And the Lord blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning. And he had 14,000 sheep, 6,000 camels, 1,000 yoke of oxen, and 1,000 female donkeys. He had also seven sons and three daughters. And he called the name of the first daughter Jemimah, and the name of the second Keziah, and the name of the third Keren-happuch. And in all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job's daughters. And their father gave them an inheritance among their brothers. And after this Job lived 140 years, and saw his sons, and his sons' sons, four generations. And Job died, an old man, and full of days. - Job 42:10 - 17

Please Lord...never leave me alone.

Joshua Did More Than Conquer Jericho

I may have mentioned this already, but I'm reading through the Book of Joshua. Joshua is a very important figure in the Bible, but we don't hear much about the book's namesake. We hear a lot about Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon and others, but Joshua...not so much. But Joshua was used by God to fulfill the promises he gave to Abraham and Moses: he led God's people into the Promised Land! The trajectory of the first five books of the Bible is the establishment of the Promised Land and Joshua led the Israelites there. Quite an accomplishment! One could say that the book of Joshua could be accurately named "Eisago," the Greek word for "enter," just as Exodus is the Greek word for "exit."

Perhaps Joshua is not celebrated - at least in modern times - because of the violence and destruction that Joshua applied to the inhabitants of Canaan. It is well-documented that God required Joshua to completely conquer the territories and in the process kill many men, women, children and animals. What is less documented is the level of depravity that had overcome the Canaanites and the other inhabitants. These people were participating in idol worship, child and other human sacrifices, murder, and other deep offenses to God. They had become so depraved that their destruction was necessary. 

Still...that was the Old Testament and not something that Jesus Christ would participate in or condone. After all, he came to bring peace to the world. Well, yes...and no. God the Father and God the Son are one God, with identical wills and purposes. God the Son does not argue or disagree with God the Father and vice versa; the same, of course, applies to God the Holy Spirit. The Second Person of the Trinity agreed with the destruction of Canaan. As a matter of fact, he led the charge:

When Joshua was by Jericho, he lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, a man was standing before him with his drawn sword in his hand. And Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you for us, or for our adversaries?” And he said, “No; but I am the commander of the army of the Lord. Now I have come.” And Joshua fell on his face to the earth and worshiped and said to him, “What does my lord say to his servant?”And the commander of the Lord's army said to Joshua, “Take off your sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.” And Joshua did so.

According the Reformation Study Bible, "The commander is evidently an appearance of the pre-incarnate Son of God, The Divine Warrior and His army are prepared for war." In this passage, the commander of the Lord's army tells Joshua to remove his sandals, just as God told Moses to remove his because Moses - like Joshua - were in the presence of God. The same imagery is reflected in Revelation 19 when Christ returns as a warrior in the final acts of establishing his kingdom: "Then I saw heaven opened, and behold, a white horse! The one sitting on it is called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he judges and makes war."

The conquering of Canaan was a fulfillment of a promise made to Abraham and Moses, but it was also a judgment on the inhabitants of that land who had fallen into horrible sin and depravity. The final judgment of this world will be no different, led by the gentle Son of God filled with compassion and mercy for his people, and the fierce warrior filled with righteous judgment for those who refuse to bow the knee to Him. 

The book of Joshua can be a hard read, but it - like the rest of the Bible - reflects the true, unchanging nature and character of God.

What's Your Fortune?

Last week, after a long day at work, we decided to order out for dinner and we decided on Chinese. Like the 100's of times before in my life, we got a bunch of fortune cookies with our meal. Most of the time the sayings are usesless or meaningless, especially when the fortune cookie company does literal translations from Chinese to English. ("Never drive a flat car with tires.") But once in awhile, the cookie crumbles and the little slit of paper offers some thought-provoking wisdom. I got one of those last week. Here's what it said:

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point."

According to medieval Cathlolic writings, there are four Cardinal virtues: prudence (deciding and acting wisely); justice (loving your neighbor); temperance (self-control or restraint); and courage (fortitude, bravery, valor). According to my fortune cookie (I think), when we are required in a given situation to act with prudence, or demonstrate justice, or respond with temperance, we will need courage to do those things. 

For example, when a teenager stands up to others who are bullying another student...that requires courage to act. Loving one's neighbor is easy to do in our minds, but acting on that virtue takes courage. Or in a situation where someone is asked by friends to do something destructive or plain stupid "just for fun", it takes courage to say 'no' and risk alienation. We've all been there. In many of those circumstances it wasn't knowledge of right and wrong that let us to the right or wrong actions, but the presence or lack of courage. 

I'm certainly not an expert on medieval notions of virtues and vices, but I guess I know enough to see the wisdom in this fortune cookie. 

I never know the source of my next blog post. Who would have thought that an order of lo mein and an egg roll would bless me with one.

Even Hillbillies Can Change

I just finished reading Hillbilly Eligy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance. This book was a surprise best seller a couple of years ago. It's the story of the life of J.D. Vance, a hillbilly from a poor working class region of Western Kentucky, more commonly known as Appalachia. Vance's life could have become a tragedy: drug-addicted mother married five times; constant relocations, living with men his mother barely knew and he did not know at all; family alcoholism and abuse; on and on. Apparently, this is the story of most people in that part of the country - the plight of the vast majority of the white working class there. Fortunately for Vance - and he attributes some of his fortune on his loving, but often harsh grandparents, and his wonderful older sister - he manages to crawl his way out of that mire, attend Ohio State University and eventually earn a law degree from Yale University. An outcome that just does not happen for hillbillies from Appalachia. 

It's difficult to quote from the book or offer a brief summary. While the story of his life is linear, the circumstances (especially before college) are not, more swirling and chaotic, and his thoughts about that part of his life are the same. To take an isolated quote about his thoughts on government assistance, for example, may lead one to believe that he thinks that the government cannot help the poor. But that's not his position. He realizes that government programs (like Food Stamps) do help the poor, but he also acknowledges that those same programs have hurt the poor by creating a culture of dependence and, to be frank, laziness. A major theme of his book is that individuals have to take stock of themselves, look inward for the sources of their troubles and stop blaming the world. External circumstances can change and in many cases should, but if there is no introspection, if there is no responsibility taken for individual choices, then those external changes will ultimately not change an individual's disposition and, therefore, his situation. Again, single quotations from the book do not encompass Vance's entire position, but I think this one gets to his point:

Similarly, when people do fail, this mind-set allows them to look outward. I once ran into an old acquaintance at a Middletown bar who told me that he had recently quit his job because he was sick of waking up early. I later saw him complaining on Facebook about the “Obama economy” and how it had affected his life. I don’t doubt that the Obama economy has affected many, but this man is assuredly not among them. His status in life is directly attributable to the choices he’s made, and his life will improve only through better decisions. But for him to make better choices, he needs to live in an environment that forces him to ask tough questions about himself. There is a cultural movement in the white

working class to blame problems on society or the government, and that movement gains adherents by the day.

Vance's focus is on the white working class - and while this sentiment may be more prevalent among his people  - they are not alone in this sentiment. This crosses over to other ethnic groups, classes, and peoples -  we all do this to some degree. And if we don't blame the government for our problems, we blame our misfortune on our family tree, schools, neighbors, the weather - everyone and everything, but ourselves. To blame ourselves would require us to attack the one monster that we don't want to fight: pride. 

While communities foster this thinking, we also do this as fallen human beings - it's in our nature. When I was taking counseling classes years ago, one of my professors would say that the seed of change is to admit that "my biggest problem is me."

While there is much to think about and learn from Vance's book, this is what I took away from it: before you start looking outside of yourself for the source of your troubles, take a good hard look at yourself. You probably won't like what you find, but confronting yourself and your troubled heart will lead to the change that will truly transform your situation and your life.