This morning, Wendy caught site of one of our neighborhood squirrels who’d managed to carry a cake doughnut up into the top of our neighbor’s tree and was enjoying a morning feast.
Would You Like Coffee With Your Doughnut?
Tag Archives: True
Chapter-a-Day Hosea 8
Even though I gave them all my laws,
they act as if those laws don’t apply to them.
Hosea 8:12 (NLT)
In my daily vocation, I spend a lot of time helping companies monitor and assess the quality of service delivered in phone calls between their employees and customers (e.g. “Your call may be monitored for training purposes.”). The never ending effort in Quality Assessment (QA) is to to objectively measure the service level in a given call or set of calls.
One of the threats to objective measurement is how you handle the applicability of certain behavioral elements in a given quality scale. If you have 20 elements in your scale and 10 of them were “not applicable” to a given phone call, then those 10 should not be factored into your results. By crediting someone for things that did not apply you introduce “noise” into the resulting data and the corresponding results are skewed. Likewise, if you choose to say that a number of behaviors are not applicable when they really are, you will once again end up with an inaccurate result.
In Hosea’s day, the people of Israel were doing something similar with God’s laws. They shrugged off God’s quality criteria as “not applicable,” ran their own personal assessment, and came up with a false positive. It’s easy to do the same thing today. We want to be judged on a sliding scale or on the curve (i.e. “Well I’m not as bad as THAT guy!”) instead of being honest about what God considers truly applicable.
It’s National Cowboy Poetry Week!
Strange, but true. In honor of National Cowboy Poetry week, here’s one of my favorites from www.cowboypoetry.com.
When Bob Got Throwed
That time when Bob got throwed
I thought I sure would bust.
I like to died a-laffin’
To see him chewin’ dust.He crawled on that Andy bronc
And hit him with a quirt.
The next thing that he knew
He was wallowin’ in the dirt.Yes, it might a-killed him,
I heard the old ground pop;
But to see if he was injured
You bet I didn’t stop.I just rolled on the ground
And began to kick and yell;
It like to tickled me to death
To see how hard he fell.‘Twarn’t more than a week ago
That I myself got throwed,
(But ’twas from a meaner horse
Than old Bob ever rode).D’you reckon Bob looked sad and said,
“I hope that you ain’t hurt!”
Naw! He just laffed and laffed and laffed
To see me chewin’ dirt.I’ve been prayin’ ever since
For his horse to turn his pack;
And when he done it, I’d a laffed
If it had broke his back.So I was still a-howlin’
When Bob, he got up lame;
He seen his horse had run clean off
And so for me he came.He first chucked sand into my eyes,
With a rock he rubbed my head,
Then he twisted both my arms,—
“Now go fetch that horse,” he said.So I went and fetched him back,
But I was feelin’ good all day;
For I sure enough do love to see
A feller get throwed that way.
Chapter-a-Day Judges 16
She said, "How can you say 'I love you' when you won't even trust me? Three times now you've toyed with me, like a cat with a mouse, refusing to tell me the secret of your great strength." She kept at it day after day, nagging and tormenting him. Finally, he was fed up—he couldn't take another minute of it. He spilled it. Judges 16:15-16 (MSG)
The use of 'love' as a means to selfish ends is as old as mankind. Looking back, I can recall being on both ends of this manipulative tactic. I can't point my finger without three fingers pointing back at me. Still, I like to think I've learned my lesson.
I am always wary of phrases that begin: "If you love me, you will…?" or "How can you say you love me when you…?" For the true object of the question is usually the person asking, and the motivation is typically self-centered.
As I read the account of Samson and Delilah it struck me that, while they spoke of 'loving' each other, I found nothing in the text that illustrated love as God's message describes it:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. I Cor 13:4-7
Red flags always go up whenever I hear a person using love as a bargaining chip.