Job 14:4
Who can distinguish the pure from the impure?
No one else.
I am apparently still on vacation. I have nothing urgent and the one thing I have that I can work on, I have not had the mental focus to even start on. Good thing I do not have a real job. I will be praying for productivity for the rest of the week.
‘Distinguish’ was also ‘bring from’, ‘make’, and ‘produce’. ‘Pure’ was also ‘clean’.
‘No one’ was the response seven times and the other was ‘No one can.’ I strove to be different. However, one added a third stitch ‘But you God can and should.’ I do not remember the reasoning, but that was a stretch beyond me.
I liked the idea that only God could make the impure pure, but it seems the right words for that would be unclean and clean. Again, I do not remember the details, but I think the idea of ‘distinguish’ is even broader and leans more towards the purity side in my opinion. Not only can we not make something clean or pure, but we cannot even tell the difference.
A relative of a relative had some baseball cards from the 50’s and wanted to turn them into a truck. He did not get an offer close to a truck and eventually was directed to me for help. I am convinced he can get a little bit more than the original offer, but still not enough for much of a truck. I have decided to try and sell them for him when I set up to sell at a card show for the first time. I am not sure how it will go for him, but it should be fun for me.
I did make the decision to sell my partial 1967 set. I ran out of steam once I got to the expensive cards and after not seeing them for a while, the cards were not in as good of condition as I had hoped. The ‘target’ condition value for the ones I am selling is $6,584.10. I will probably have to pull the worst cards out separately and maybe I can get a reasonable percentage of that.
The tie here is that most of the effort involved in all of this has been my attempt to distinguish between a good card condition and a very good card condition for the ones in the 50’s and between a near mint card condition and an excellent to mint card condition for the ones in the 60’s. One Hank Aaron card can range from $750 to $25 raw or up beyond $4,000 if graded. I may yet pull the best 1967’s to grade if I get some confidence.
Anyway, I struggle to distinguish, and this is something I have done since 1978. Of course I have a vested interest, so that makes it harder. God has a vested interest in us, and yet He made it easy for us to actually change from unclean and impure to clean and pure. Or at least possible, as I guess it is not easy for everyone. We can never really know about someone else, but we can know about ourselves.
Written 8/6/24, Posted 9/1/24, Job 315