Job 14:17

You would seal up my transgression in a bag,

   You would cover over my iniquity.

 

I was talking with my accountability group about making plans for the future. The trick, so to speak, is to plan items while holding yourself up to being called from them to do something specific for God. Generically speaking, we are planning to maintain the status quo until our youngest graduates high school. We both want to focus on our kids until they are off to college and then be ready to go off on adventure for God. But we do not want to miss the call between now and then and we want to be content if the call is to stay put.

‘Bag’ was also ‘pack’, ‘pouch’, and ‘bundle’. After some time, I think bag is a little too today. The other three seem truer to the times, but no direction on what to go with. ‘Transgression’ was also ‘offense’, ‘sin, and ‘crime’. I am partial to transgression from the version of the Lord’s prayer I grew up with.

‘Cover over’ was also ‘plaster over’, ‘attach the seal’, ‘coat over’, and something I can’t read due to my handwriting but is probably ‘sewest up’. ‘Iniquity’ was also ‘guilt’ and ‘sin’.

My brain tells me the right answer is something along the lines of wrapping up something in a envelope and then sealing it up with wax. The background is a seal that lets someone know who sent the letter enclosed, but here the seal is something like ‘Never to be opened by the command of God.’

I have a lot of things that I could do. Many are good, some are outright wasteful, and a few are somewhat less definitive. One phrase pushing me is ‘Do it even if you do not feel like it.’ The other is ‘Do only the best.’ I probably picked wrong last night when I watched the Astros lose. But at least I didn’t just sit on the couch doing nothing in the process. I have similar plans for tonight. Mainly because I do not want to miss them celebrate making the playoffs. Of course, if I watch the next five games and they do not make the playoffs, I will be really not happy.

When I was younger, I wanted every baseball card there ever was. I did not think it was really feasible due to costs and effort. But forty-six years later, I have probably spent that much effort on hobbies, yet even if I could have been happy with crappy condition cards, I would still be well short of what was available to that day in 1978, much less all that has come later.

Trying to wrap this one up, my mind goes back to the paradigm of rich people having a library with every book they ever read with each a first edition in perfect condition signed by the author. I have seen this depicted in movies and read about it in books, and it was an ideal the growing up poor reading books from the city library that I never really wanted to give up on. But in the frugal reality I pursue, I buy books just good enough to read thinking that it’s better to pass books along to others rather than leave them up on the shelf. (Of course, I was really upset when we loaned out a John Grisham book and it took forever to get it back.) I know that God has forgiven my sins, and everyone else’s, but one of my problems is that I sometimes hold onto my sin, and I often hold onto the sins of others. The Lord’s prayer tells me to forgive others just as Christ has forgiven mine. Maybe I can do better about forgiving myself and forgiving others if I adopt this sealed up bag as a mental method to follow. These words at least make sense to me and that is the goal of all this study.

Written 9/24/24, Posted 11/20/24, Job 334