King of the Fig Tree

Five years ago ...

Isaiah 54: 1-8                                                           January 19
husbands and wives; Jared and Lindsay                  11001.19

In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment; but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the LORD thy redeemer. 8

[Throughout this three page journal entry of mine you'll also find that I was studying 2 Samuel 24 that morning -- where King David of Israel orders a census and is punished by a plague that stops at the "threshingplace of Araunah the Jebusite" -- as well as reading through How to Win Friends and Influence People once more, blogged that day, did a crossword puzzle on Yahoo! and ate a chocolate graham cracker crunch for I glued the label inside! Then we come to this.]

If I look, I can be productive and have something to write about! I walked two miles plus at the [Minot State University] Dome this morning and found that May who's there with her husband David was a secretary in MSU's science department from 1965-1995, and that's how she knows Om, another walker who taught biology there in that time frame. Penny and Ashley just started today and Ray was back at Dakota Pawn today after a vacation with his daughter and grandkids in Germany, where his grandson Andrew's troop was on a 16K hike through the path of the Battle of Bastogne and in the London Underground saw station 9 1/2 where Hogwarts students in the Harry Potter series catch the train. It could work if you've got the right key, just remember Clarke's Law ...

[Clarke's Law: [from author Arthur C. Clarke's writings] Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.]

Thursday through Saturday [I go too long this is really gonna drag] ...

Thank God no one got hurt in the accident I was in on Main Street Thursday! To be blunt, I caused it -- the brakes on my van as I was backing out of a parking space wouldn't lock and I ended up rear ending the vehicle next to me and that knocked into the side of the vehicle next to it. Again, no bloodshed was involved either in the accident or the accident reporting, just a fine for me and our insurances working it out, but it's a big blow to my pride. Lord knows I need those sometimes.

I had taken this Saturday off from working at Marketplace so I could host a Shaklee open house at a area hotel -- we had a good local crowd, mostly regulars (so much of what we did with "Going Bananas, Brunch, and Bingo!" was preaching to the choir, but choir members quit the church too) to sample and in some cases order some of our smoothees and meal bars and my business partner's homemade veggie pizza and banana bread. In the bingo we played the family even won some!

Before that, I got to go to Breakfast with the Boys at my church where sixteen of us enjoyed an awesome meal and Bible study -- so yes, this time everybody stayed or was able to! As we went through the lesson from John 1 on Jesus' calling Philip and Nathanael to be His disciples, Nathanael's first reaction, "Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?" in verse 46 and his seeming complete turnaround in verse 49 especially intrigued me.

Jesus, King of the Fig Tree. (The fig tree's representative of Israel in the Bible, and with prophecy concerning that nation -- whether this refers to nation in a shared ethnic and bordered heritage or Westphalian geopolitical sense, I leave open -- on overdrive since 1948, it caught my attention.) Nathanael wondering how Jesus knew who he was and as a result acknowledging Him as "Rabbi ... the Son of God ... [and] the King of Israel" shows that nobody should have faith lightly.

And I hope we don't, David