Job 11:16

You will not remember your misery,

   Recalling as water vanished from a wadi.

 

In the last twenty years or so, I have matured a little bit. I have been noticing it a little bit more lately. Mostly it’s when someone passes me and I check my speedometer and realize they are not idiots, I am just not going as fast as normal. It happens in other ways too, but most of them are pretty subtle.

“Not remember” was also “forget” or “put out of your mind”. I like the concept of putting negative things out of your mind, but letting your mind do the work seems easier. “Misery” was also “trouble” with one source deleting the “your” part and using “wretchedness”. I do not get the forgetting wretchedness with everyone else using your, but it’s not totally wrong.

“Recalling” was “remember” and “consider”. “Vanished from a wadi” was also “that have passed away”, ”gone off”, and “flowed past”. I, of course, went with the favorite term of wadi. It lends a certain uncertainty to the passage that I like.

One of the most miserable topics for an almost new dad is changing diapers, or it least it was for me. I had never changed one and correctly assumed it was one of the grossest things possible. Once my kids were around, I forgot the wretchedness of it all and did what needed to be done. I haven’t done one since and I am not sure I will do anyone else’s not in my immediate family ever.

God has often showed me how things that seemed insurmountable were merely illusions of bumps in the road. I had a burger Sunday, and it was really good, but afterwards I realized I no longer carried the affinity I did for bacon cheeseburgers, now that I know how bad the bread is for me. I have actually even looked forward to having only a salad for a meal.

This new computer has Windows 11 and Word no longer looks like it has ever since I started using it. I have resisted going away from Microsoft Office products because I am so used to using them after all this time. They were never the best products, but they were always good enough and worked well together. As it turns out, I still remember with affinity the program I used in college that would tell me if I was writing at too high a level. I expected my professors to be able to follow me as they were experts in their fields, but I did (and probably still do) have a tendency to create complex sentences that are hard to follow. I look back at this as my failure to communicate and realize I sometimes forget my audience is a ninth-grade boy or a 13-year-old girl, or at least at that reading level.

God knew that people who could barely read would read the Bible, those who could barely understand English would hear it, and sometimes those of us who barely knew what it meant would be called to live it out. Most of the concepts in the Bible are very easy to hear: Love God, Love others. Many are hard to understand; the Trinity, not being able to see God. But the hardest things are the easiest to let go of as we mature and understand that loving is easy.

(Written 3/6/23, Posted 3/8, Job 247)