Your Dying Spouse 707 - What Jesus Wrote

We have the Bible; God's word, right?

So why do we try to read things into the Good Book?

One of these is 'divine health', that believers should 'walk in God's will for their health'. Well, it's nice, but why did Paul have to put up with the 'thorn in his flesh'? Surely Paul was a top-shelf believer, and yet he was not relieved of this.

And what was the 'thorn', anyway? People try to figure it out, but no amount of scholarship will now tell us.

It may be God's privilege to conceal things and a king's privilege to discover them (Prov. 25:2), but some things are not going to be known.

And it may be that they won't be known because we need not concern ourselves; the thorn was Paul's business, not ours.

Likewise, when the nasty men were about to stone the adultress, and after rebuking them Jesus knelt to trace a pattern in the dirt...what did He write?

Maybe it was a list of names and sins, maybe it was a just doodling...maybe, maybe, maybe, and we will never know in this life.

We use our guesses to try to force Jesus into a corner, that He would be writing what we secretly believe we'd have written.

I can just see Him, with a mysterious Mona Lisa smile, saying, "I'm the Lion of Judah, not your pet cat."

Then, after a pause, "And have you ever tried to get a cat to do what you want?"

We try to figure what He wrote

with His finger in the dust.

A list of names, cartoonish goat,

or "In God We Trust"?

We want to pin Him into place

to feed our preconceptions

as if there's not sufficient grace

in the Resurrection.

I wonder if He laughs at us

in His holy glee,

and gets His beard and hair all mussed

as He slaps His knees.

Did He know when He made the Earth

that we'd be supplying so much mirth?

Here's Switchfoot, with This Is Home, from the soundtrack of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian.

Thanks to Carol Ashby, Blessed Are The Pure Of Heart is back on Kindle, and will be available in paperback soon.

Friends are everything. I couldn't have done it.

Marley, the canine waif from Afghanistan, whom WE helped save, has a Facebook page! Please drop by to see how happy he is today.

Below are my recent releases on Kindle -please excuse their presence in the body of the blog. I haven't the energy to get them up as 'buttons' in the sidebar. You can click on the covers to go to the Amazon links.