Job 14:12

So, they lie down, never to rise,

   Until the heavens are no more,

      They will not awake,

         Nor be roused from their sleep.

 

Without much billable work right now, I have started to organize my attempts to narrow my baseball card collecting. As much as I dislike Meta’s apparent lack of values, I do admit that Facebook can help friends and family connect and that Instagram can do the same in a different manner. So, I am starting to use Instagram to help me get rid of cards I do not need. Maybe someday Facebook, but I am not nearly that risk tolerant. Somehow Twitter came out of all this even worse than Meta and now that it has morphed into even worse, I continue to avoid even the best of it.

‘They’ was ‘mortals’ once, and ‘man’ the other seven times. Still dislike the source of the push for worrying about this. ‘Never to rise’ was also ‘do not rise again’ or some close variation.

‘Heavens’ was twice ‘sky’.

The alignment of stitches looks different from what I used in most sources, but I tried to make it look poetic.

The last stitch had little variation.

I spoke with a guy starting out on a simple two-hour bike ride. I can’t ride that fast anymore, and I could almost never stand to ride that long. I did my 20 minutes and called it a good piece of the puzzle that is my improving health. I pray for my health every day; mostly because I was lazy and got out of shape. No one is making me do it, but no one was before when I could ride or play for hours on end.

When I read verses like this that touch on the gap between death and eternal life, I generally ignore it. If that gap is a second or thousands of years, the dead (or sleeping) will have no awareness of it. And the eternity of life in heaven afterwards, or in hell for those who do not believe, overwhelms even the largest gap. I have rarely spent time with people who wanted to die, but I know that sometimes we lose our eternal perspective in the face of pain, even if only briefly.

There was a point earlier in the year when I did not want to care so much about the Astros winning and losing. I wanted to enjoy watching them anyway. Last night at 12-1, I watched for a minute, saw a strikeout, turned it off, and missed the same guy hitting a homer later. I would have liked to have seen the homer. My daily Bible study mentioned that stewardship cannot be a stumbling block to generosity. I am learning to maintain my eternal focus of life in heaven and it’s importance, to pick the best of opportunities to serve God, and to figure out where taking care of my needs and following my preferences align with them.

Written 9/5/24, Posted 10/23/24, Job 329