5775

Let's see, the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah, please forgive my making hash of saying it) 5775 begins tonight, it's the third day of fall, and there's REALLY less than a hundred days left of the 2014 (Gregorian) calendar year? Ninety-eight, according to my wall calendar -- and me, because I still know how to count! And today started interestingly enough, I'll grant you that ... Well, this morning alone I first scurried about for my wallet, found it before daylight, and when I left the house to get to work, I locked my house keys (and my office keys are on the same ring) in my house! But thankfully my wife Martha had her set of house keys with her at work across town, so before work I was able to borrow them, get back to our house, and I felt INSIDE my pocket ... and there were my house keys.

I was about to grumble, but then I laughed hard and loud!

Anyway, I got Martha's house keys back to her and got to work from there! (The car key for the vehicle she had for the day is with her house keys, so she wouldn't get very far without them.) The kids worked on their spelling with me before I brought them to school this morning; I still hold back a tear as I just let them out at the curb across from Longfellow and they get out of the van -- or the car, depends which vehicle I have -- and look both ways before running across the street now. Last night after I met them in Bethany Lutheran's basement for Jeffrey's first Cub Scout den meeting of the year, we went to dinner and for the first time in a while Sarah wanted to sit next to me! Seriously, this is a bone the kids pick whenever we sit down for dinner ... it was nice for her to ask.

Seriously, I remember reading Reader's Digest's Great Mysteries of the 20th Century (part of its 20th: The Eventful Century series, ISBN 0762102683) a few years ago, but it must have been an earlier edition. This is the 1999 one, and its mysterious deaths, strange disappearances, and other paranormal phenomena that seems to fit -- or not -- within our historical record, much like the magazine itself, presents most cases in two to four pages, and often many cases on the same pages. A disappearing Australian prime minister in the late 60s and the opening of many Soviet vaults with Gorbachev's glasnost policy of the late 80s (come on, who's young enough here to remember that? I was a teenager then) are just the beginning of some mysteries I knew, that I thought I knew, or have gotten even more mysterious. (Didn't include my personal favorite though; the disappearance of the crew of the Mary Celeste -- but that might be because it happened in the nineteenth century. Snif.)

And he put forth the form of an hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the inner gate that looketh toward the north; where the seat of the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy.

Of all the major Old Testament prophets, I believe Ezekiel is the only one who hasn't been portrayed on the big or small screen. (I guess Isaiah hasn't either, but he gets so much press through the life of Jesus as the fulfillment of his prophecies.) With a scene like this that I read in my Bible study this morning -- that's chapter eight verse three above -- I think it'd be worth making! The "he" being the Lord who picked Ezekiel up by the side of his head! Just when there are moments in the Bible that. really. drag. (hey, I can admit it) you come across something like that. The rest of the chapter is what Ezekiel sees going on behind the scenes, and the Lord GOD pulls him out of a meeting with Judah's elders to see it. I guess it's giving him a sense of urgency.

But don't we all need that?

David