Concerts Don't End At Nine O'Clock!
I remember leaving off Monday with the logs of firewood in our backyard -- well, now they're gone. Monday for Independence Day we're looking to have a family barbecue in our backyard, with Margaret bringing over the grill and everybody providing some food for it. It'll be welcome. So was the news I got at my checkup with Dr. Albertson this morning; I got there after I dropped the kids off early with Grandma and Grandpa and didn't have to wait too long after 0900. Blood pressure taken by Albertson's nurse Cheryl was great, and based on the results of my blood test last week I've been taken off two of the six phenytoin I've been taken and asked to check on my blood sugar twice a day, once before breakfast and once before supper, where I was checking it once. My blood sugar's nowhere near lethal limits -- one cause of my uncle Gary's death -- but we'd like it better. Dr. Albertson I can appreciate; she doesn't see more meds as the solution to everything.
If I can get off some, she'll take me off them.
We'll see if in four months' time (when my next checkup is scheduled) that yields some positive results. Now today's title comes from something Sarah said to Jeffrey on our way across East Burdick Expressway bridge; I'm guessing she referred to the lineup of concerts at next month's North Dakota State Fair, but what also caught my attention was Jeffrey's response: "[Of] course, they start earlier than that!" I smiled at that and thought that's somewhat implied -- OF COURSE something will start earlier than nine pm and not necessarily end then, along the lines of a church service that starts at ten am will not necessarily end at eleven particularly if the choir feels like showing off, a point we often get asked about by our kids. But didn't Martha and I, or for that matter any of us, at their age? I'm a little embarrassed to think about that now, and I pray I'm not going to the other extreme, where church is so important to me that I forget why I'm really there, to worship God.
Why I'm really there.
I did not plan that last sentence. The one previous to "Why I'm really there", I mean. I'm not sure what David king of Israel would put in place of "church" -- the Jewish house of worship know as a synagogue wouldn't begin to be built until during the Babylonian Captivity of the sixth century B.C. since the Temple wouldn't be built until his son Solomon became king -- in that sentence, but I have to appreciate what I think's a God-given irony. In my daily Bible reading I'm reading about David in First Samuel now and yesterday I finished Geraldine Brooks' novel The Secret Chord (ISBN 9780670025770) telling David's story from being "discovered" as the youngest of Jesse's sons and anointed as the next king of Israel to his wandering life as a Robin Hood-like bandit from Saul and then becoming king himself. Peace follows for a while, and then it's war among his own children that threaten to split the kingdom apart.
You get warts and all with people in the Bible; they're no better than we, and in some ways worse!
And the novel is told from the point of view of the prophet Nathan, the one who confronted David after he slept with Bathsheba and had her husband Uriah killed to cover up the pregnancy that wasn't his and one of the prophets that doesn't get a book of his own. Or does he? First Chronicles 29:29 refers to "the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they written in the Book of Samuel the Seer, and in the Book of Nathan the Prophet, and in the Book of Gad the Seer," but it's only Samuel's that we have intact. Interesting that Nathan's the only one here referred to as a prophet -- I must check up on that. Not to cast slight on the Word of God, but if you want a more ... digestible form of the life and times of David, you could do way worse than this. It didn't occur to me that when David pronounced that he would make the rich man who stole the poor man's lamb pay fourfold for his crime that he would do it with four of his children.
David and Bathsheba's firstborn. Amnon. Tamar. Absalom. They pay for the sin of their father.
The multiple heroes of Gordon Korman's novel Swindle (ISBN 9780545055918) are eleven-year-olds called together by Griffin Bing who found a rare baseball card, sold it cheap to a local collectibles shop, and found out HE'D been swindled for far, far less than the card was worth. So he plans to get it back and needs a little help from his friends with their various specialties from acting to hacking to lookout to break into the owner's store and then the owner's house. The Nickelodeon movie based on this 2008 movie has the card and has the kids but changes setting #2 to a hotel where the card's set to be auctioned off for a little over a million dollars ... and as adaptations go (my family and I have seen it twice) it's a tie between faithfulness to the story and keeping you going! Not that I would ever encourage Sarah and Jeffrey to go breaking and entering, but you never know, they MIGHT do it on their own if they believed the cause was right.
And the price, David
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