Star-fish

    When things aren't going right in your life, who do you blame? We live in a society that can't place blame quickly enough. It can't possibly be the actions of the individuals involved. It must be a faulty system of some sort, an environment that causes poor behaviors, or a person using some mind altering chemical. It can't be that people sin and sin causes consequences and those consequences are usually worse than ever imagined.      We seem averse to taking responsibility for our actions. It's almost looked upon as a weakness to apologize. Rather, we employ lawyers, mediators, and others to hid our guilt and shame, trying to convince all who will listen that we are in the right. Someone else has failed us, causes us to get that angry or jealous, and do things we know in our hearts we should not do.      I read Genesis 42 today and the "blame game" appears to go back thousands of years! You probably remember the jealous brothers of Joseph, the...

      As a teacher of middle school students (for a short period of time in my life), the response, "Whatever," was not uncommon, especially when a student was caught making less than helpful choices and didn't want to take responsibility for his or her actions. By definition, whatever means a lack of restrictions as in, "I can do whatever I want." Or it can mean "at all," as in "You are no help whatever." But some have changed the definition, at least informally, to mean a "reluctance to discuss something or indifference about something."      In the Bible, the use of "whatever" has a totally different meaning than an indifferent teenager would express. Colossians 3:23 states, "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." Mark 11:24, continues this use of whatever to indicate not indifference, but complete faith, "Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask fo...

      I have been reading Genesis recently, and the twins Esau and Jacob are an interesting pair. The Bible tells us in Genesis 25 that "the babies jostled each other within her" womb (v. 22). Esau was a hunter and Jacob "stayed among the tents" (v. 27). One day Esau came home hungry from a hunting trip and asked for some of Jacob's red stew. Jacob agreed to give it to him under one condition, that Esau would "sell" Jacob his birthright first (v. 31). Esau agreed because he was dying of hunger (v. 32).       In Genesis 26, Isaac, the father of the twins, did as his father Abraham did to his wife Sarah and told the people of the area, the Philistines, that Rebekah was his sister and not his wife as he was afraid of the people of the land and what they might do to him to get his beautiful wife. In the mean time, Esau was intermarrying with women from the land, both Hittites that became a "source of grief" to Isaac and Rebekah (v. 35).   ...