[Pharisees] love the uppermost rooms at feasts, and the chief seats in the synagogues,

And greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi.

Matthew 23: 6-7

Well of course they love that stuff. That stuff is heady.

I recently have had a number of dealings with some Latin Americans. Because I’m American, because I speak veddy proper Castilian, and because they are respectful people–or perhaps because they have the inner wisdom to discern my true grandeur haha– that is it no doubt – they treat me as a distinguished person. It feels good, man. Very good. It also feels just a little off. The pleasure is not altogether wholesome.

I think the only pure version of that feeling I have ever had is being a father.

There is a point to be made here about God’s glory and his fatherhood.

And thou shalt make an altar to burn incense upon: of shittim wood shalt thou make it.

A cubit shall be the length thereof, and a cubit the breadth thereof; foursquare shall it be: and two cubits shall be the height thereof: the horns thereof shall be of the same.

One of the messages of the OT for me is that God is no respecter of personality types.

There are people who like this kind of thing.

Maybe everybody likes this kind of thing if its something they love enough.

Some people are second order vegans for the health benefits, and I’m not arguing against that but for me it’s really about being ethical.  So much of the jaguar meat you get at the store comes from factory farmed jaguars and I don’t think that’s right

I have this idea about chitchat.

I think it serves the same purpose as recording the background before your actually start your audio.  It gives you the baseline. The emotional status, the body language, the posture, all that.

Let’s talk about the parable of the debtor. I’ll eat my hat if you have not heard it already. I will eat multiple hats.

Summary: this guy gets in debt. He’s run out of time to pay it off. Oh no, he says, how shall it ever pay off this debt? Please Mr. Lender, won’t you have mercy on me?

But the lender says, if I give you mercy I’m out the money. Give me justice.

Then in the canonical versions they go back and forth for a bit. What about mercy? What about justice? But what about mercy? But what about justice?

Then a good friend of the debtor steps in and solves the dilemma. He offers to pay the lender back and give the debtor new terms that involve an extension of time. Then he wraps the whole thing up with a bow. Mr. Debtor, you have your mercy. Mr. Lender, you have your justice.

That is the parable as you have heard it. Obviously Christ is the friend and we are the debtor. The lender is more ambiguous. The lender is the law that we have violated I suppose.

But justice has not been satisfied in one very important respect.

(more…)

I believe that everything we accomplish in this life are like juvenile scribblings hung on the family fridge.

Writing

Art

Theorems

Discoveries

Adventure

Start-ups

Organizations

Products

Some are better than others but if they are eternally valuable its because they are cute and God loves us.

God hangs them on his fridge.

Cleanse the Temple of the Constitution.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf

We regret to report shocking continued declines in both the quantity and the quality of JG badinage due to Mr. Putin’s Aggressive War.

We are pleased to report, however, that our sacrifices on your behalf is filling us with the warm self-satisfaction of . . . well, lets be frank, of heroism.

Plans to roll out battery-powered electric badinage which does not catch fire all that often and only costs in the thousands proceed apace.  You’ll love it!

Random dream incoming.  The muse was bored.

I had a dream that the new LDS hymn book came out.  But it was a supplemental hymnbook.  It wasn’t meant to replace the old.  There was an interesting feature where a number of the hymns had words bracketed showing you where it would be easy to put in replacement words to change the meaning of the hymn if you wanted to create a variant.  But this new hymnbook also had a bunch of essays.  I remember thinking to myself  I missed the part where they added an essay to the  hymn contest.  The preface said they were planning on putting out a new supplemental hymnbook every year or so to replace the prior years.  It was meant to be a transitory product.  Well, that was fine.  Good idea, really.  The paper was cheap and some of the pages were perforated so you could tear them out.

It must have been a recent addition, the essays I mean, because a lot more than half of them were about Ukraine and Russia and all that.  And in a very deeply contemporary way.  About half of those complained about the fascist russians, and the other half complained about the marxist Russians.

And then they read over the pulpit a letter saying that all of the replacement hymns and new essays were going to come from members’ accounts on a digital platform called Steem.

The end

Contention is a luxury good.

Everyone’s heard of the idea of prosperity making people fat and happy and then to their decline. Everyone knows the fat and happy luxuries have to be discarded when hard time comes.  But I think everyone has the idea that those luxury goods are whee! spree I-feel-free doing-nice-things-for-me goods.  I normally do.  My associations with getting lean for hard times ahead are more beans and rice and barely nudging the temperature controls and backing off on trips to green mountain valleys, on foreign vacation, on new electronics.  The cars look less new and shiny, the swimming pool isn’t installed in the backyard.

The big surprise to me is how many of our luxury goods are just worthless, ugly, and disgusting. How many civilizations on the downslope after glory years see they frittered away their greatness on nothing. On narcissistic witch hunts, on regulations and litigation, activism and ngos, and a million greedy grabbers all fighting each other like the calico cat to get their hand in the pot.. Some grasshoppers spend the summer singing and dancing, some grasshoppers the summer chiding each other.  What if all the rococo you managed in your flourishing years were the rococo of org charts?

Chart of relationships among project stakeholders, simplified [yes, I realize this is not Rococo]

It’s your standard fantasy quest with a young farm boy hero.  But the young farm boy hero is very much a southern boy.  He is awfully polite.  Just as courteous as can be.

His call to adventure comes, he’s up in the mountains .  In a cave.  And the smoke is rising, the scented smoke, and the old sage is teaching him his quest, his prophesy, but the sage is an old man.  He mumbles and speaks gutturally and gums it, and the young lad can’t understand hardly a word of it.  He politely asked the sage to repeat.  The sage is a bit annoyed, but start repeating it.  It’s just as bad as before.  The young hero seeing the sage is annoyed, is too polite to ask him to repeat it again.  He courteously sits through the whole thing without understanding a word of it. At the end, the young boy politely nods, smiles, thanks the sage warmly and heads back down the mountain.  No wiser than when he went up.

He is going to have to fulfill his quest without knowing what the quest is.

He is going to have to puzzle the riddle of the prophecy without knowing the riddle.

What happens next?  (more…)

And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal Saul’s daughter looked through a window, and saw king David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.

. . . .

20 ¶ Then David returned to ^abless his household. And ^bMichal the daughter of Saul came out to meet David, and said, How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who ^cuncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself!

21 And David said unto Michal, It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the Lord, over Israel: therefore will I play before the Lord.

22 And I will yet be more vile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight: and of the maidservants which thou hast spoken of, of them shall I be had in honour.

23 Therefore Michal the daughter of Saul had no child unto the day of her death.

-thus 2 Samuel 6

An oddly contemporary conversation.

Michal had not children, and if David hadn’t other wives, neither would he.  If this is a contemporary conversation, is it a coincidence that birthrates are falling?

For couple scripture study, she and I sing a hymn together.

With schedules and all the busy busy we found it was something we could fit in and do consistently.

We also appreciate the change of pace.

I think the worst part of being at a nudist colony would be being naked around a bunch of naked people and also they are the kind of people who would be at a nudist colony.