RANDOM SAYINGS (3)

Monday December 11 2024

More random sayings (3), perhaps better described as

“incoherent utterances.”

??“Why is everyone so grumpy?” the New York Times asks. The answer mentions Covid and Inflation, but misses the real cause: “The main reason is that all of creation is in a down mood, because we are the trees, the animals, the birds, the soil, the air……”

I have been re-reading some old books. In my second and third reading I often discover great truths I missed. One of these is in “The Hidden Face of God”, by a professor of Hebrew: Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman. He alerted me to Deuteronomy 32: 20: “I shall hide my face to see what their end will be”. That ending is what we are experiencing NOW.

“Amusing ourselves to death”, is the title of a book Neil Postman wrote, referring to Television. TV has conditioned us to digest visually entertaining material, but it is given to us in bits and pieces, effectually eliminating prolonged public discussion and rational communal affairs. TV brought us Donald Trump: the face of Satan. These are serious times, and TV fails to inform us. No wonder I stopped watching it.

There is a saying: “time will tell”, but time is running out: literally. Time too is a disappearing substance that has a beginning and an end. Eternity is upon us, is upon all God’s children, but not on others. For them time continues to exist and with it, pure anxiety.

“Eating ourselves to death” finds it origin in the fast-food business. “Curing ourselves to death” finds place in hospitals, the most dangerous of places.

Churches are called House of God. The Bible calls creation the House of God. When will churches learn that simple truth?

The name “automobile” comes from the Greek word Auto, meaning ‘self’ and the Latin ‘motare’, meaning ‘to move’, hence: self-propelled. Nothing is further from the truth. One tankful of gasoline has more horsepower than 100 able bodies. Our ‘self-propelled vehicles – now world-wide numbering One Billion – will self-propel us into perdition.

The word ‘church’ comes from the Greek ‘kurios domo’, the house of the Lord. Today one of the most thriving businesses is to decommission church buildings. The nearby Actinolite United Church is now ‘the Marble Art Centre’, the word ‘marble’ pointing to its marble stone structure, and the marble mined there a century ago. Our Anglican Church is sold and the Salvation Army’s building is for sale. My church can seat 250 people, far more than the total gathered in the 3 remaining churches on a typical Sunday.

The only time young people are possibly exposed to prayer and Bible reading is when people are buried. Does this cause them to associate the church with death?

Obesity is an ailment caused by the lack of functioning family life which, at one time, thrived on stated sit-down meals, prepared from scratch, where conversation was as important as nutrition.

The wrong choice of spouse often leads to premature death. Male spouses suffer more and die sooner when they marry an incompatible marriage partner.

The reason why marriage is becoming less and less popular is intimately connected to the decline of churches.

My wife, a master handwriting analyst, taught me that there are four different human personalities: Elephant, butterfly, turtle and frog. The Clinton couple, Hilary and Bill, is an excellent example of Elephant- she – with Butterfly – he. A stable combination. Turtle and frog, too, jell well. The former are extraverts, the latter introverts. You might want to see where you fit in, and your spouse.

More aphorisms next week.