In this week of even more stuff happening around us, rule 13 comes along and tells us to be bold, to take actions, to risk, and to be smart about it. One of the trends running around the country is good people doing nothing because everything seems to offend some one, and they do not want to risk offending the wrong group. We want to do the right thing, but we are not sure what the right thing to do is. We want to reach out to our friends, we want to help our neighbor, we want to be a part of the solution. We are just ignorant.

One of my toys growing up was Evel Knievel and his motorcycle. Until today, I thought it was spelled Evil. I never liked the name as it evoked a negative response, but it was fun to pretend to do what he did and jump things on his bike. I tried to jump my bicycle over a curb once. I ended up landing with the end of a handlebar being my first point of contact as I slammed into the ground and it ended my stunt performing career before it started. Memory serves it damaged my ego more than my chest, but maybe all that pain in my chest during football began there.

I was not being smart. I knew nothing about jumping curbs, nothing about the dangers I was making possible, nothing about how to do it right, and not even smart enough to be bold. I was just taking action.

Back when I bought my 911, I wanted to go fast. My Thunderbird only had a speedometer that went to 85. My first Civic could barely reach 100 on a long downhill straight away. My second Civic could do 100, but it was so smooth, it never seemed fast. My first Infiniti could go fast, but it was a boat and going fast was not reassuring. So naturally, on the first day I got the 911, I went a 100, and went a little faster every time I could. But I tried to be smart about it. I had a car that was designed to go fast. I took lessons on how to drive it safely at speed. I only drove it a little bit faster than I had before, and I never drove fast in a situation where I was uncomfortable with the risks.

I was being smart, I was understanding the risks, and I was taking action, but I was not being bold.  Being bold in a car is by definition not smart.

In an early Calvin and Hobbes strip, the two are talking about Fate, being Predestined, and the Inevitable. These of course are heady topics for a six-year-old and a stuffed animal, but they are concepts we all must deal with as we mature and wrestle with life and death. One of the negative outcomes of thinking on fate is the tendency to sit around and let life happen to you. Calvin was scared of the proposition of living life in some kind of mechanical “what will happen, will happen” frame of mind.

In preparing to start my study of Job this week, I ran across a fundamental concept that I feel we lose sight of living moment to moment. We want to control our lives, our destinies. We do not want to be servants slogging through chores. There are parts of the Bible that show a “do good, receive good” pattern. This was consistent with other “Wisdom Literature” of the day. There are parts of Job that have very simple statements, and parts that are very obscure. Some align with the “do good, receive good” pattern, and others do not. People have argued for generations that pieces were deleted or added or mistranslated or miscopied, or any other excuse for something not making sense.

In reality, Job is not traditional wisdom literature included because it fit in with the rest of the Bible. It brings more to the table. Not only does it add to the body of everyday knowledge that is good for us, it helps us understand one of the great mysteries of life. Job is the God breathed Word. Job wasn’t just written by a great poet of extraordinary skill. It was written by a person following the direction of God to let us know that God is bigger than we can know, and that we are not in control, and cannot know His ways.

So maybe our lives are known by God, but that does not mean we are to sit back and watch it happen. We are to be bold, to live a full life being obedient to the commands and Call of God and having faith that there is oh so much more to life and oh so much more to God.