Archive for the ‘Ponder’ Category

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Fall Thoughts

Oct

17

2024

Here are a couple thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

  • Here in Michigan, it is well info the fall season. We notice it mostly with the leaves changing, but also migrations. Specifically, I notice the migration of boxes of clothes. My wife has boxes that make their way from the basement up to our room, where they shed their winter clothes and gain their summer clothes instead. It’s backwards from how animals work, but such is the nature of the boxes of winter/summer clothes.
    And animals migrate themselves, but the boxes are immobile so I have to carry them for their migration.
  • Here in Michigan, the weather has turned cool. It is the weather I like, in that I get to wear long-sleeve shirts but keep wearing shorts. Our one teenage son wears that style all year long – a hoodie and shorts. And now that it is appropriate for the weather, that reminds me of the old saying that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. In the same way, a teenage boy’s outfit is right twice a year: a hoodie and shorts are good to wear in the fall and the spring.

Even the stork in the sky Knows her seasons; And the turtledove, the swallow, and the crane Keep to the time of their migration; But My people do not know The judgment of the Lord.

Jeremiah 8:7

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Sunday Best

Sep

19

2024

My son had a school award night thingy and the email that went out beforehand with instructions and expectations said something along the lines of wear your Sunday clothes.

My guess is the people who worded that email either haven’t been to church in a while, or maybe only go on special occasions, or maybe they’ve only seen it in movies. Because my son wore a polo shirt and nice shorts, like he usually does for church. Maybe that wasn’t his Sunday best, but it was his church clothes.

Anyway, he was the only one wearing shorts.

I felt out of place for him, but he didn’t seem to be socially uncomfortable with it, so the award ceremony went well.

I just found it interesting the various gaps between the older generation and the younger, and between the formal church crowd and informal church crowd and the non-church crowd.

Then Pharaoh took off his signet ring from his hand and put it on Joseph’s hand, and clothed him in garments of fine linen, and put the gold necklace around his neck.

Genesis 41:42

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The Age of Jesus, Part 2

Aug

8

2024

Some longtime readers of this blog may remember I wrote something about why Jesus lived for only 33 years and what was significant about the number 33.

I still like my answer, but I did find another meaning to the number 33, and I think it fits in quite nicely.

One of the many Old Testament laws had to do with impurity and cleanness after childbirth. If a woman gave birth to a male child she was unclean for 33 days and if she gave birth to a female child she was unclean for 66 days.

What does Mary giving birth to Jesus have to do with this?

Nothing.

But if we consider that Jesus was born of this world, then the earth would be unclean for 33 units of time. I haven’t worked out how to make the jump from days to years, I’m just concentrating on the number 33.

I also don’t want to take the comparison too far lest anyone think that the earth was Jesus’ mother.

Back to the numbers now. So the earth would be unclean for 33 years after Jesus’ birth. Hmm… It was also unclean for the 3756 years before Jesus was born. We’re just going to ignore that part for now too.

Anway, the earth would be unclean for 33 years after the birth of Jesus. Then how did the mother become clean after 33 days? She had to sacrifice a lamb, of course.

Jesus is both the child and the lamb in this analogy. He was sacrificed 33 years after his birth and that purified the earth. Hmm… Maybe that’s not the best way of phrasing it either, because that hints at universal salvation. Maybe “allowed inhabitants of earth to be purified” would be better.

Maybe I’m stretching it a bit, but I thought there was a decent connection between the 33 years that Jesus lived and the 33 days of uncleanness.

Now I realize that it could also imply the earth was only unclean while Jesus was on the earth. I’ll leave that topic alone also.

That’s all – just something to think about.

And she shall stay at home in her condition of blood purification for thirty-three days; she shall not touch any consecrated thing, nor enter the sanctuary until the days of her purification are completed.

Leviticus 12:4

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Naming Medicines

Jul

24

2024

One of the more fascinating things about today’s modern world is the naming of medicines. There are a lot of medicines, and there are a lot of new names needed for new medicines, and I’m always impressed on how someone can invent a new word that’s not like another existing word.

I mean, some of the names do sound ridiculous, but they are unique and memorable. It seems I would mispronounce half of them if I didn’t hear it pronounced in the ad.

I did look it up, and there are agencies that the drug manufacturers use to come up with the names. It sounds like a lot of work, and a lot of regulations for drug names. It would be a lot easier to name a product without legal constraints. But on the other hand I think that is how you get these uniquely memorable names.

I just know if I tried to come up with a name for a new medicine I’d probably do best by typing a bunch of clumps of random letters and picking one of those that sounded right. It’s hard to think of a new name that doesn’t sound like anything else, because trying to think of things brings to mind the words that already do exist.

Perhaps those million monkeys are actually at the naming agencies, having not gotten close to writing Shakespeare.

The one who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who overcomes, I will give some of the hidden manna, and I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows except the one who receives it.

Revelation 2:17

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Various and Sundry Thoughts

Jun

19

2024

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

  • Mom has a couple of dictionaries she won back in school for being first place in the spelling bee. I think that’s backwards – the spelling bee loser should get the dictionary.
  • Someone asked me “If Cinderella’s glass slipper was a perfect fit, how did it fall off?” And the answer is that it was a slipper not a sticker.
  • The person who coined the phrase “when one door closes, another door opens” must have had a refrigerator like our old one. The top freezer door kept popping open when the main fridge door is shut vigorously. This one was compliments of Delta – I don’t know if he made it up or heard it somewhere.
  • The mosquitoes here are pretty bad, but the other day no matter how many I swatted I kept seeing more. It turns out I just had a bunch of eye floaters, no wonder I couldn’t hit them.
  • What if I want further ado?

How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye.

Luke 6:42

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Tie Fighter Controls

Jun

6

2024

Having recently watched the Star Wars series with Delta, I was reminded of how odd the flight controls are for the Tie Fighters. Or maybe just Darth Vader’s Tie Fighter. Or maybe it’s just the targeting control.

Either way, it always struck me as awkward how he does the little twisting movement with his fingers, like he’s unscrewing a bottle cap. It would be pretty easy to mess up when you’re in the middle of a dogfight, I would think.

Here is what it looks like normally:

image of Darth Vader in his Tie Fighter

And this is what it reminds me of:

image of Darth Vader in his Tie Fighter, putting chalk on a cue stick

It never was really clear to me what he is supposed to be doing, but to me, he’s practicing chalking up his cue stick.

Therefore through this Jacob’s wrongdoing will be forgiven; And this will be the full price of the pardoning of his sin: When he makes all the altar stones like pulverized chalk stones; When Asherim and incense altars will not stand.

Isaiah 27:9

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Three Kinds of Birds

May

15

2024

We have a variety of wildlife in our yard, mainly squirrels and chipmunks and a lot of birds. My favorite are the wild turkeys, then cranes and herons (can’t tell them apart), ducks, then cardinals and woodpeckers, then robins and others. Not so favorite are bluejays (I like their coloring but they are not friendly to the other birds) and Canada geese (messy and noisy and mean, no redeeming qualities).

I’ve noticed that birds have 3 main ways of walking. They either waddle or hop or strut. And by strut I mean they can’t walk without moving their head fore and aft.

Good examples of these categories of bird walking are these:
Waddle – duck
Strut – chicken
Hop – any of those little birds that hang around the food court at the amusement park

I pointed this out to my son, that birds have 3 ways of walking. And as we paid attention to birds walking for the next day or two, oddly enough we found one bird that seemed to walk like any other biped. Except he didn’t swing his arms when walking. But his gait was just one step in front of the other.

We didn’t figure out what kind of bird it was – it was a smallish bird, which I was expecting to hop everywhere, but it just walked. Since then, I looked up other birds, and a good example of a bird that walks normally is a flamingo.

I haven’t figured out what goes into making a bird need to walk one way versus the others. If a biology major needs a research topic, feel free to use this.

The strutting rooster or the male goat, And a king when his army is with him.

Proverbs 30:31

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