Friday I came home early from work - about 1 and 1/2 hours. I was doing work that I love but my hips were screaming at me that enough is enough. The ache from my hips was permeating into my bones and they were all unhappy. Knowing that I have zero plans this weekend, other than wanting to come in and finish up this presentation, I decided to let my boss know about my plans to leave. I came home and slept for a couple of hours and then got up and cleared out the courtyard of weeds and vines by mowing and my utilizing my handy clippers.
This morning I woke up to gray skies and rain dripping and dripping and dripping. Coffee was made and instead of turning on the television I picked up my little pink and orange Bible and started to read where it opened at Nehemiah. At this point I need to talk about how tiny that print is. My eyes are blurry from the dryness and for the first time in my life I'm having a bit of trouble with the tiny tiny print. Not bad for a 57 year old. A lot of people start having trouble in their forties. So I put down the little pink and orange Bible and reached for the Bible Lindsay gave me for Christmas in 2012. Guess what, the print isn't that much larger. (Insert laughter here)
This John MacArthur study Bible is so nice. Each chapter has an introduction so I read the intro to Nehemiah and learned so much. Did you know that Ezra and Nehemiah used to be joined as one chapter? Makes a difference in how we read and comprehend I do believe. As I was reading the intro my attention was grabbed on page 657: "When the marriage reforms were carried out" In this day our culture is carrying out huge marriage reforms. So you can see why this jumped out at me. You see before Nehemiah carried out his work of rebuilding the wall he had the Book of Moses read aloud to all the people. This is when the people discovered that they had been in error and had strayed from the word of God.
This happens to me all the time! For instance, heading to Vegas with my sister, and I'm reading my Bible on the plane. I had decided that I wanted to see what Jesus actually said about things. So I was just going to read the words in red. (Now you Christians all know that the entire Bible is what Jesus said but I wanted to focus on what He said while He was walking our earth.) I get to this part where He says that if someone asks you for money that you are to give it to him. I live in a neighborhood where they ask all the time. If I stop at the gas station on the corner and I am getting gas invariably someone will come over and ask if I will buy them gas too. I tried for the rest of that trip to discover a way around what Jesus said. Who wants to give away their money?!? Certainly not me. Finally it dawned on me that there was no way around this verse. Jesus said it very clearly.
Nehemiah is about obedience and about God's hand - "good hand of God' is the theme of this book. The intro to the book also mentioned how God's word was read on a yearly schedule. I immediately thought of what we do in the church I attend. Using the Book of Common Prayer 1928 we read a Psalm, something from the Old Testament, and something from the New. We read on a schedule and get through the Bible in a year. We also have prayers that we say that touch on just about everything. We pray for each other, for Priests, for the leaders of the world, for our nation . . . when I stop and think about all the prayers going up to heaven, and all the praise . . . I get that wonderful feeling of warmth spreading out my from heart and a big grin forms on my face. There are so many of us praising God (of course there needs to be so many more of us)
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