Job 18:19
They have neither children nor grandchildren among their people,
No survivor where they lived.
I am not as healthy as I want to be, and it is all my fault. When I was a kid, I played all the time in some sport or physical activity. Once I started working, physical activity took a back seat to making money. I did ok every so often, but I’d go through long streaks of not enough exercise. It is now my number one goal, but I am still not where I need to be.
The ‘they’ vs. ‘he’ of the verse bothered me the whole way through this. I normally can coup, but not this time. ‘Children’ was also ‘offspring’, ‘seed or breed’, or some word I never heard of and ‘kin’. ‘Grandchild’ was also ‘descendant’, ‘posterity’, ‘nephew’, or ‘offspring’. ‘Their people’ was also ‘his people’, ‘his folk’ or ‘his kinfolk’.
‘Survivor’ was also ‘any remaining’, ‘trace’, or ‘remnant’. ‘Where they lived’ was also ‘where they used to live’, ‘where once he lived’, ‘in his dwellings’, and ‘where he once sojourned’.
One of my great motivators is what I can do to not exercise and still be productive. It is a terrible thing to overcome. I am pretty productive when I am mad, but I definitely do not exercise when mad. When I built my new routine around my habits book learnings, I put exercise down as one of my major daily activities. The book has lots of ways to make the important habits more likely, but I have not quite gotten that part down yet. It is on my unwritten to do list. Probably need to get it on the ‘I am actually going to do these things soon’ To Do list soon.
I did force myself to ride my bike Sunday. I went almost my maximum time and it made my day so to speak. Hopefully, I can make something like that happen before too late today. The thing about the book that I know but can’t incorporate is the idea that we need to be a person who exercises and not just a person who tries to exercise. I never really have to try to be a good person or try to not lash out at people because that is not who I am. But somewhere I lost the internal drive to exercise and left it as a choice to not pick.
I still think this chapter from Bildad is a lot of hogwash and evil people are not punished in this way anymore than other people are not blessed in the opposite of this. Whether we have children (gifts from God) or grandchildren (opportunities to pay our kids back) is out of our hands to a large degree. I do not like that so many people are tied up into having kids as a definition of their worthiness. Many Godly people have kids, and many Godly people do not. It does not make them less, only different. One of my new favorite songs talks about spending more time talking to God than worrying about the problems in our lives. I like the sentiment, but I want to make exercise a part of my life and not a problem.
Written 10/25/25, Posted 11/1/25, Job 429/~1070