RUMINATIONS, Number One

February 2007 marks one year that I have been at this location in cyberspace. It has been a great experience and the feedback has been helpful but I honestly wish more would take the time to use the COMMENTS section. Its not that no comments come in but candidly those who pretend to want to comment are either purveyors of the philosophy that anything goes in life. Since my 17th birthday I have made it a point to believe God has a purpose for our lives and self-gratification is not one of those purposes or virtues. There is nothing wrong with sexuality within marriage, after all, it wasn’t God who was surprised to find that Adam & Eve were naked, it was Adam & Eve, and what they learned from flirting with temptation was just the beginning of becoming wise as the world.

THE WORDWRIGHT is not a pulpit for such purveyors nor is it our intention to sell anything from this website. It is those kinds of comments that come to us – trying to sell pills, propaganda or even get a loan or mortgage. Please, if you like what you read, let us know; if you want to sell something, try the old-fashioned way, pay someone for space and join the commercial world of sales & marketing.

A rumination is one of those words we borrowed from Latin that is used to define the cud that a cow chews. In fact any animal that “chews the cud” (buffalo, goat, deer, camel and antelope for example) has a stomach with four chambers: the rumen, reticulum, omasum and abomasum. It’s quite different from the way humans chew their food; when a cow chews its food and swallows it, in just a few minutes back up comes that food, you can see it come back as a lump sliding up her neck. So with that word picture in mind, the ruminations this web site will be sharing from time to time are just some thoughts that would be advantageous for you to “chew over”, hopefully again and again.

To assist in getting my 2nd year off in words from THE WORDWRIGHT, this entry has just a couple topics you can “chew on” for a while (long or short) and see if you can look at life from a different perspective.

WHERE’S THE FOREST?

No doubt you’ve heard the expression, “I can’t see the forest for the trees.” Why is it we have so much trouble seeing the forest because of the trees? Or maybe you’ve heard “It’s as plain as the nose on your face.” Either expression has to be read with a bit of humor. I have often “lost” something that I was using or looking at just moments before and somehow my concept of what it looks like or perhaps my mind became so occupied with other things that the former object might just as well vanished before my eyes. Usually here of late I have learned if I just quit thinking about it, it appears almost as quick as it disappeared. It was there all the time.

The very things God wants us to do we fail to see because we are so focused on the “spiritual” things of our lives. There are, however, some things that God actually wants us to do! Even a casual reading of the book of Exodus is so detailed you would think it was from a parts list an engineer wrote out. God specifically told men what to include in the tabernacle but it was their job to “go find” or “make” the objects God wanted used for building the tabernacle. Read through the list in Exodus 26th chapter; it took all kinds of people: weavers, rope makers, goldsmiths, silversmiths and foundry craftsmen, just to name a few. But those people had to work with their hands to make something. God didn’t wiggle his nose and the skins of sea cows floated down from the sky—hunters provided the sea cow (manatee or perhaps hippopotamus) and craftsmen who worked with hides dyed them to order.

Where man took the wrong fork in the road was when it comes to “salvation” he felt like it wasn’t right to be “free” so they came up with “things” they had to do, and penance was one such “works”. You can’t win back your favor with God – once He forgives you, forget it. Isn’t that what God does when he “throws it back over his shoulder into the sea”? It’s a forgotten or done deal – once God forgives us he does not bring it up again (like humans often do). (Read Isaiah 38:17b; Psalms 32:1-2)

“Chew it over” again and again. When our sins are forgiven, they’re forgiven – and God throws this plus in, He forgets them as well!

THE WORDWRIGHT

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EVER DO SOMETHING YOU REGRETTED?

C. W. Gusewelle, a columnist writer who used to write for The Columbus Dispatch, once told the story of how, as a youth, he shot a crow on impulse, for a lark, and when the crow only suffered a broken wing, C. W. took it home and tried to mend it but the bird died.

Gusewelle learned as a young man, his first lesson in “the certainty of consequences.” Even after thirty years he remembered the exact spot where he buried that crow. He wrote, “The past never can be entirely put behind. What we have done is part of what we are, and will be with us always – as this memory has stayed with me.” C. W. Gusewelle then asked his readers, “How much accumulated weight of deliberate or careless wrong is one prepared to carry? In the end, that calculation governs the decisions of a life.”
Credit: The Columbus Dispatch, August 27,1996.

THE WORDWRIGHT