Job 16:13
His archers surround me,
He pierces my gut without mercy,
He pours out my gall upon the ground,
I spent time outside at a fabrication site six days over the last two weeks, and it apparently overwhelmed my sinuses as I am still coughing and sneezing constantly. The good thing is that I now know not to use Benadryl as it messes with my brain. The bad thing is that I used Benadryl so much when I was younger, I probably can’t make it any worse now. If I lived in the hunter gather stage, I would have been left behind long before now.
‘Archers’ was also ‘bowmen’ and ‘arrow men’ both of which just seem poor English. ‘Surround’ was also ‘gather around’ and ‘compass me round about’.
‘Pierces’ was also ‘ slashed open’, ‘cleaveth’, and ‘split’. ‘Gut’ was also ‘kidney’, ‘heart’, and oddly ‘reins’. ‘Without mercy’ was also ‘ shows no mercy’, ‘without pity’, ‘does not spare’, and ‘without qualm’.
‘Pour’ was also ‘spills’ and ‘Gall’ was also ‘bile’, and ‘life juices’.
One of the characteristics of Job’s problems that I latched onto was that he did not lose everything. He could still see, hear, speak, feel, maybe even smell and taste (which I probably can’t really do right now), and he had his wife to give him a hard time. The benefit for me to believing that Job had not lost everything makes his story more relatable to my everyday problems. I have absolutely no desire to clean the hot tub filters right now while I can’t hardly breathe, but the need to do so is still sitting right there.
Two of the things I have complained about in the past are 1) finding a news source that actually tells me the things I need to know and the things I ought to act upon, and 2) looking for baseball cards I want outside ebay. I know that AI or artificial intelligence has methods to do so, but I do not want to learn enough about it to actually do so myself. Ebay has the resources to use AI and Google has the resources to use AI, so why don’t they just do it for me? I am either just not really wanting to know how bad the world around me is or I just want to limit my success to work I have done the old fashioned way.
Three paragraphs is my normal set up for one of these and I just saw that my first two paragraphs started with one and two, so I threw this in to complete the pattern. I read an article about how what we think of as free will is just picking predetermined choices. I like cherry coke zero and caffeine free coke zero, but if they were not choices, they would not be part of my life, and I wouldn’t even know. In my deepest self, I know that I do not have to have technology in my life to have life and have it more abundantly. Having technology is supposed to make it easier, not harder. I want to practice living it more abundantly even while Satan uses the tools of the world to make that harder. I pray that as I mature, I continue to strengthen my use of free will to do the will of God.
Written 7/14/25, Posted 8/28/25, Job 387