End-game

 End-game 

I took Uncle Albert to his Lectio Divina group tonight. There were no tracts in the library, where I wait for him; so I read under the letter E in a Bible dictionary. 

Full disclosure: I made this cover up.

     It said about encroachment (in the Old Testament) that it referred mostly to hidden crimes generally missed by men so punishable only by God, but He would normally take speedy action as He did when Uzzah touched the Ark. Then there was something about the Korahite rebellion, which I didn’t quite understand, maybe because I didn’t re-read Numbers 16 and 17 and all I remembered about them was that the ground swallowed up the rebels, then there was a plague on all the people. But the article quoted Numbers 18, concerning the gift given to Aaron and his sons, of “every thing of the altar and within the vail.” It was for them alone and “the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death.”

     The dictionary said about endogamy, how if Ezra had not insisted on it, that all strange women be put away, the people of Israel would not have survived and Christ could not have come.

The articles might have come from the same tract I found once before. (See here.)

I asked Uncle Albert afterwards, “When you pray for the nation and the world, the President and Congress and others that are violent” - because I’d heard them praying about those things -“and when you pray for the church that it might love the world; and you know that the prayers aren’t going to do a damn bit of good, what do you do?”

     “I say ‘Amen’ under my breath,” he said.

     “But that means ‘So be it,’ right?”

     “Yes. Right.”

     “I’m saying it won’t be so, none of it.”

     “I know,” he said.

     “So?”

     “We don’t pray that the church love the world,” he said.

     “Ever?” I said.

     He said, “That sounds like your agenda.”

01.15.19