Job 13:2

Everything you know, I know also,

   I am no less than you.

In my memory, I find not so much arrogance in these words of Job, but a reference to fact and a counter to the unfounded arrogance of his friends. The breadth and depth of my lack brings me humor when people expect more of me. I have spent a lot of my ‘want to’ towards accepting that the Bible is the word of God and that my opinion means nothing compared to His. I realized today while doing my stretches, that I need to put a little more of that ‘want to’ into taking care of my health and not my ‘want to not to’ on exercise.

‘Everything’ was substituted for ‘what’ and ‘nothing’ (in the negative). One source had ‘As you know, I too know’, but while I like it, I felt it was one step too difficult for my purposes. ‘Also’ was ‘too’ in a couple of critical sources, but I again went with my gut.

‘I am no less than you’ was also ‘I am not inferior to you’. My mind makes this more of a cut down of his friends than arrogance, but it is very, very close.

I had read where people were at their peak productivity in their mid-fifties. Something about how the brain is using all the knowledge it has better than ever before due to its accumulation and has not started to deteriorate. Now that I am here, I can understand it as I seem to know how to contribute at work more than ever before. The problem of course is that other thing that I heard that you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be really good at it. I haven’t done anything outside work except maybe bible study that much my whole life, and I seem to be bad at a whole lot of non-work stuff that would really help.

My all-time favorite stock is up about five times from where I once recommended it to others. It also seems to be the most popular stock in the world right now. I have trimmed my position down so far that its impact is no more than the least favorite stock I own. Now if I had just spent 10,000 hours on that in my early life, it might have made a difference by now.

I keep reading about how our school systems are defunct and that no one is learning very well. But I remember that most of history was crafted by people who could not do calculus, read, write, or speak English, or had electricity or gas-powered engines. People have been the same either since Adam or since whatever species beat out whatever other species it was fighting with based on one’s belief in creation or evolution. The truth is that we are all created at the same low level as compared to God and that any attitude beyond humility is inappropriate. Job is telling his friends that they are indeed no netter than him and their pride is causing them to miss the proper attitude before God. Job doesn’t really do a great job of seeing himself in this light, but it is coming.

Written 2/21/24, Posted 4/20/24, Job 284