Go be an idiot

Joshua was an idiot.  Joshua was also a warrior.  Having been priviledged to know some warriors from fairly close quarters, I can tell you he lead a pack of manly, macho, rough, belching, farting, pink-hating dudes. 

HOO-ah!

Some of them may have even had the refinement to be warrior poets, but I can assure you they didn't compose verse about daisies and moonglow.  Not the kinds of dudes to show up to a battle carrying ribbons and trumpets, of all ridiculous things.  But that is exactly what Joshua took to the walls of Jericho.  Trumpets!  I have an idea what the manly, macho, belching, farting, pink hating dudes at Jericho said to them when they got there.  (I have spent enough time around infantry types to know the exact verbage is not printable in polite company.  Use your imagination or watch Jarhead if you can't fill in the blanks for yourself.)  Joshua marched his army around the walls of that city for an entire week, with no evidence that they were doing anything other than making complete idiots of themselves.  (And, honestly, a nation's image is more than just pride.  A weak image builds the courage and determination of the enemy, we learned that lesson from Mogadishu. I imagine this crossed Joshua's mind a time or two.)   Joshua did it anyway. 

Gideon was an idiot, too.  Gideon was told to go out and conquer an impossibly strong enemy with way too few men.  God told him he had too many and had to eliminate the vast majority of his army before he could win.  Made no sense.  Gideon did it anyway.  Then God told him he STILL had too many men.  I have to think that at least once, this thought went through Gideon's mind,  "Ok, not only are we going to be pulverized, but we're going to look like retards while we do it."  I'm pretty sure which of those was more terrifying to the pink hater.  But he did it anyway.

Noah was the biggest idiot of all.  Noah was told to build a boat on dry land in a place where it had never rained.  HUGE idiot!  MAJOR laughing stock of the entire neighborhood.  And, here's the kicker, he continued doing this for YEARS!  Seriously, go check it out.  I'll wait.  (Genesis, chapters 6-9)  The man was told by God one time to do something utterly ridiculous and he labored on that for, literally, lifetimes.  I bet the wife stopped nagging him about it after, ya know, 60 years or so.

The thing is, how willing are you to jump out on a limb and be an idiot?  God told you something and you won't do it or believe it because your friends and your family all tell you it's idiotic to hold onto that, pray for that, believe in that.  Some of these people are even Christians who profess with their mouths that they believe God can do anything.  And you are willing to be stopped by that.  Would these people still be pounding nails with you building a boat in the desert 100 years from now?  Would they go to war with you carrying a tambourine?  No?  Then they aren't the companions you need.

Is there some apology you need to make but you know that person is just going to heap ridicule or retribution on your head?  Who cares?  Do it anyway.   Is there some huge mountain in your life that God has said he would move for you but you need to take a step out on faith that will make you seem like you've lost your marbles?  So, what.  Do it anyway.

Do it today.

Go be an idiot.

Tis the season again

Ventured out to hunt on Sunday.  Not one single deer ambled by me.  It's almost like they knew what I was out there for.

Boo.

The curse of Eve

"The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church."

Snort.  I can't tell you how many times I heard this in church and dismissed it as arcane nonsense.  I kind of thought of a man being head of the household in the same way the Queen is head of England.  Sort of a decorative, honorary thing.  (**pats the husband on head and gives him his biscuit**)

See, here's the thing: I figured out pretty early that there really isn't one single thing someone else can do for me that I can't do better for myself.  And I really don't mind doing everything.  It's just easier that way.  Stuff gets done, and we don't have to worry about it.

But God's plan was for the husband to be head of the house.  There must have been some reason for that.  I'll be honest, I have never observed why in particular it should be the MAN as opposed to the woman, but I have observed the effects of defying this instruction.

My first husband was meek, gentle, argeeable, passive (and I learned too late, also harboring a great deal of anger as a result of these things).  I am none of those things.  It seemed like a reasonable combination.  But as the years rolled by, he gave into his passive nature and abdicated more and more of his responsibility in the household knowing I wouldn't let things go undone.  I, believing it was the only way to preserve the marriage that I would rather die than see fail, picked up the slack.  At one point, I agreed that I would do everything.  E.  Ver.  Y.  Thing.  (Earn the living, raise the child, file the taxes, pump the gas, mow the grass, mop the floors, buy the groceries, cook the meals, wash the laundry, dig the new septic lines (seriously), drive us everywhere we needed to go, change the A/C filters, fix the electrical outlets, repair the drywall, tile the floors, paint the walls, pay the bills, maintain the cars, the house, the bank account, make all decisions, initiate all discussions, direct intellectual, phyiscal and spiritual growth.  Everything) and if he would just shave his face once a week, we'd call it even.  And he wouldn't even do that. 

The night he told me he was leaving, he said was so angry that he had to get out before he acted on his oft-repeated fantasies of bashing my head in with a shovel which he feared would be sooner rather than later.  I agreed that if he felt that way, his leaving was probably best.

I was angry for a long time.  And, honestly, I don't know what I would have done differently.  All those things had to be done, and if I had refused to do them, not only would my child and I have withered away in squalor, but he simply would have left earlier.  But I am starting to understand that the beginning of the problem was that our house was not arranged according to God's plan.

"The husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is head of the church."

I speculate that the actual mechanics of this vary by household, and I am the last person who is going to dispense marital advice on an individual basis, but I have observed some things that work and others that do not.

I have been priviledged to observe from close quarters many marriages that "worked" (and, obviously a HUGE number that have not) and I can say without exception that the marriages that worked fit this description:

The husband actively leads by nurturing, supporting and encouraging the household.
The husband keeps his promises.
The husband is capable of making decisions.
The husband is responsible for the moral, spiritual, and social culture of the house and does not abdicate this responsibility to the wife, the children, the school, the church, the television or the government.

Maybe, just maybe, God knew something that Betty Friedan did not.

St Elmo's Fire, the meteorological phenomenon not the 3rd rate 80's brat pack movie, historically was considered a work of God.  Sailors who observed it often took it as a sign that God was protecting their ship through storms.  Now that we are more "enlightened" and understand its exact mechanics,  science dismisses it as explainable and therefore not the work of God.

Let's say one night in my basement, I create an amazing machine from technology that noone else has ever understood before, and I give it to mankind for his use.  And mankind disassembles it and studies it for centuries and then says, "AHA!  THIS is how it works!  Therefore, Barbara didn't really make it or operate it.  All believers in Barbara are superstitious idiots."

Let's say that you meet a stranger from a land you never heard of and he teaches you a word in his language.  You now know a word you didn't know, but you also know that there is an entire language, of which you are ignorant, that you didn't even know existed.  So, what you learned increased your knowledge by one word, but it increased your awareness of your ignorance by an entire language and culture.

If we take any lesson from discovery, it should be that the more we know, the more we realize we don't know.  A wise man understands that learning merely gives us a glimpse of the vastness of our ignorance.

The only reason "science" and "God" are incompatible is that science is too ignorant yet to explain the ways in which God works.

My question is: When will we as a race in the "age of reason" let go of our arrogance that says that once we finally explain the exact mechanics of something God does we can begin to dismiss God's works?

Contempting prophesy