Job 21:21

For what does he care about his family after him,

   When the number of his own months is determined?

 

I am back in the town of my birth. I decided a while back my home was wherever my wife was and stopped thinking of this as my hometown. I do keep looking for people I know, but this is definitely part of my past. Now that I have been presented with the paradigm of picking how to perceive your own past, I am no longer home here.

Trying to do this next part on my phone was harder than normal.

‘Care’ was also ‘have pleasure’ or ‘have concern’. ‘Family after him’ was also ‘household…’, ‘…leaves behind’, ‘house …’, ‘fate of his family’, ‘home…’, and ‘…afterwards’.

‘Number of months’ was also ‘allotted months’. ‘Determined’ was also ‘cutoff’, ‘come to pass’, ‘cut in half’, ‘cut off in the midst’, ‘runs out’, ‘is broken off’, and ‘cut off’.

I can see the idea that once he is dying, the wicked don’t care about anyone else, but it is harder for me to see that the timing matters in this regard. I care for my family and want the best for them when I am gone. But I don’t think being any closer to my death would change that. I wonder why the wicked would bother to care for their family even before they knew they were dying. Maybe I have a low expectation of a wicked person. 

I just had a email from linkedin about a guy I used to work with at BP. I got laid off in 2105, so I realize it has been over ten years now. I went back and deleted a lot of my contacts that I hadn’t heard from since then with the express intent of not hearing anything about BP anymore as I was tired of all the retirement speeches via linkedin. Now this. A few that I deleted have asked to connect again, but I haven’t gone back to see if maybe I over deleted yet. The likelihood of me doing any more than the jobs I have already been awarded are pretty low. On one of those I will probably farm out the hard stuff, and the other I might just turn tell them my price has gone up beyond what they can afford.

So, I can identify with this concept of not caring about others I used to care about after a change in my circumstances. But at the same time, it is not like I am abandoning people I am still involved with. One of my new co-workers spoke about how he actually felt responsibility for the people under him. Now that we will have five engineers under met next week, I can see that I want this to go well for them as well as me. Of course, I think my goal as a Christian is to wish for everyone to find salvation in Christ also, so maybe I’m not far from the ideal.

Written 5/18/26, Posted 7/14/26, Job 507/~1070