A Marvelous Prospect

I got up early (well, earlier than usual) this morning to exercise a little and to read My Utmost for his Highest. My day just seems to be on a better plane when I start of like this. Reckon why that is?

Anyway, the on-line MUfHH has a read-through-the-Bible-in-a-year link at the end of each day. Today it was Leviticus 15-16 and Matthew 27. I groaned when I saw the Leviticus, knowing how full of archaic rules it is. But today! Read the first 10 verses and tell me what you see? Do you realize that in the 18th and even 19th centuries, Europeans had no idea where disease was coming from? They thought stuff, like tadpoles in mud puddles, came “ex nihilo” – out of nothing. And yet here in Leviticus, God is giving the Israelites instructions for dealing with sick people (those with discharges). Keep them away from others. Wash stuff they touch. Anyone who touches them needs to wash up afterwards and stay away from others. Well. Duh.

Maybe I should be reading God’s word a bit more regularly. No telling what sort of wisdom I will encounter.

I started this post last summer and bumped into it a couple of days ago. Granted, it is the middle of winter, but hey! Perhaps a little gardening thought will warm us all up.

I was weeding yesterday afternoon and discovered these principles about weeds. Previously I’ve described some of their characteristics – like – the longer we let them live, the riskier is their extraction. Yesterday I was pulling cleome (spider lily) by the 1000′s from my perennial bed. Also some other nasty summer weed.

So, where exactly do all these stinking weeds come from, anyway? Simple – they come from the seeds that last year’s plants dropped by the bazillions. Same thing for us. Where do our selfish thoughts, our impure thoughts, our careless and thoughtless actions come from? Last year’s seeds – habit.

What’s the lesson? I can clear the garden of weeds today and look and see it nice and tended. but the seeds are there. they will germinate. so I have to weed again and again and again. So it is with our lives. We can quit doing something, and look and feel good, but the seeds are there and will germinate.

What are we to do? Here’s one answer. Several years ago I got a load of fresh manure from Farmer Brown down the road. Nice stuff. Spread it all over. A couple of weeks later these nasty weeds started sprouting everywhere. Thorny. Ugly. Hard to pull. But every time we saw one, out it came. This year I’ve seen maybe two. Point – we got them out before they flowered and went to seed. So it is with sin and bad habits. Attack them full head-on. Lean into them. Root them out – without delay, so they don’t have time to establish roots or flower and make seeds that will come back again and again.

A couple of more weed/life thoughts:

When are weeds easiest to pull? Right after a rain shower. How is our thought life dealt with best? Right after a rain shower – the living water of the Holy Spirit by spending time with God and His Word.

Where are they toughest to deal with? Right at the base of a good plant; they seem to hide there and get rooted in. Same with our lives – it is so easy for self-righteousness or other evil to creep in and establish itself under cover of goodness.

And finally – where do they grow the poorest? Under the shade of a stand of good plants. A healthy, flourishing bed of plants also tends to keep the weeds at bay. So we nourish and tend and protect our thoughts and actions – keep our good works glorifying God (and not ourselves), AND in community with others – we shade each other’s roots, making it tough for the weeds to get established. That’s why God gave us the church – a community of believers to help and protect one another, to hold one another accountable.

And you guys thought it was just a patch of weeds!

Or is it “are” just so wrong? I read this on a piece of first-grade work pinned to a colleague’s office wall yesterday. It struck a chord in my soul. A discordant chord.

I’m getting old. 62 in less than two weeks.

I confess that I used to like diagramming sentences in junior high school. (What does that make me?)

“Me and Susie talked. Me and Freddie played ball. Me and George had lunch.” This grammatical aberration is now common usage. I know living languages change, and I don’t have problems with that – too much. I’m curious to see how they teach this, since when I was in school “I” was the nominative pronoun, and “me” was the objective – used as the object of action, not the actor. (“Susie hit me,” not “Susie hit I.” Nobody gets that wrong.)

We don’t say, “Me went to the store.” So why do we say, “Me and Susie went to the store.”? Everybody, almost, talks that way, except we old nerds who liked diagramming sentences back in the day. The convoluted grammar rule required to describe how we use “I” alone, but “me” in compound sentence subjects makes me break into a cold sweat. Not that today’s grammar teachers even know or bother with it. (But that’s another rant, isn’t it?)

But to me this grammar conundrum is not the real wrongness. The real problem is the attitude behind it. We were taught, “Susie and I…,” not “I and Susie…” and were taught this – because it was considerate and proper to put Susie first, not myself. Our culture has become wholly me-centered. (I-centered?), and this attitude is reflected in our speech. “Be all you can be.” “If it feels good, do it.”

I did a little poking around on the Internet and discovered that I am not the only one who has noticed this (not that they noted the grammar connection) – googled “self-centered culture” which Google auto-suggested to “self-centered cultures narrow your viewpoint,” which yielded – http://www.lifescript.com/Soul/Self/Growth/Common_Traits_Of_The_Self-Centered_Person.aspx —

“Young people today do not show the same amount of concern that youth of past generations expressed for the state of their country or for current affairs that either directly effect (or will soon directly effect) them and their loved ones. Self caring means that you have concern for others, but not at the expense of yourself. Those of today’s generation have taken it to an unprecedented level and seem to take pride in being self-centered and for caring only about their needs and wants. ”

Except that I argue it is not just the younger generation, it is all of us.

We need less “me and Susie” and more “Susie and I.” Maybe it would help if that is what our schools taught again, and that we all reminded ourselves of it from time to time.

Isn’t that a great word!

What is insipid? Basically, it’s something that’s so tasteless, but not really, as to cause you to want to spew it out of your mouth.

The Laodicean church in Revelation (3:15)

Moviprep

American Christianity (The Faith page 206.)

Will you pray for me? I have a lot of ideas that I’d like to share. I started to say “good ideas,” but who am I to judge? But I just don’t take the time to record them. I think it’s sloth. That isn’t a virtue.

Giving thanks. Have you read my last two posts? Glance at them and notice that both involve my home water system.

It’s out again. Looks like I’m going to have to pull the pump this time. Sigh. But that’s another blog post. Maybe I’ll just write it in a minute.

This one is about giving thanks to God. I don’t think we can do it enough, but I have a proposal about how we can do it more: every time you use water, pause and thank God for who He is, for the life He has given you, and for his eternal love for you as expressed in his incarnation as Jesus, the Messiah, the Word made flesh.

Here’s an experiment. See how long you can go without using water – any water.

This is a shorthand description of my actions and thoughts over the past couple of hours this morning. Forgive the incomplete sentences and bad grammar, please…

Our water is dead. No water. I awoke at 3:30 this morning thinking about my course of action for the day. Will my neighbor let me connect to his well temporarily? Do I pull the pump myself, or hire it done? Who could I get to come help me? Where is that hose that I can run over to Mark’s?

So I got up, and I went outside to find the hose. Is it next to the garage under all those wet leaves? Nope. Digging in them with my hands surely left them dirty. Ah. Maybe it’s out by the garden shed. Yep. Drag it up front. Hands are dirtier still, since it’s been lying out there for a couple of years. Now there’s gunk under my fingernails. Dipped my hands in the pail under the garage gutter downspout, then wiped them on a red rag in the garage. Kinda clean. Oh! Look – a gallon of spring water! Thank you, Lord! Bring it in to the kitchen.

At some point a bit earlier I decided to brew some coffee, since I was up and going to stay up. Oh, wait. No water. Duh.

Now I have some water, I can brew that coffee. While the water is heating, I drink a bit of the spring water. I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything so good in all my life.

Making coffee… I use a French press. It has yesterday’s grounds in it, and a little liquid. Normally I dump it into the compost bucket and then rinse it under the kitchen faucet. No water. How am I going to clean it out? OK – wipe it with a paper towel. Good enough.

The water is boiling, ready to pour. Pour it into the press and stir. Now, rinse the grounds off the spoon and put it back in the drainer. Oh. There’s no water. Rinse it with the drip of left-over hot water. Steep the coffee for four minutes. Pour. Add sugar and cream and stir – with that spoon. This time I just lick the spoon and put it back in the drainer.

In the course of about 15 or 20 minutes, I had started to use water that wasn’t there about 6 or 7 times. Do I take a ready, almost unlimited supply of clean, fresh water for granted? You betcha! Should I? I think not. If you’ve ever traveled into the third world, you know this. Romania? Dominican Republic? Haiti? Congo? Water is precious.

So now, for a little while at least, each time I turn a tap on or flush, I’m going to pause and thank God for that water, and for Him. I don’t think it will be too often.