Tag Archives: Saul

Damascus

Damascus: (n) the capital of Syria

I used to know this fellow who had a heart to do what’s right but no mind to sustain it.

He passed on the impression he desired to see things done well, and if necessary, to change some of his own ways to accomplish it.

When we began a project together, he always said, “Let me know if I’m doing something wrong so I don’t end up being the weak link.”

Sounded good.

And when we first labored together, I took him at his word. So if he occasionally missed a spot or failed to follow up on what we decided to do, I quietly pointed it out to him.

Then began the three-step process:

  1. He frowned at me, while wrinkling his brow.
  2. He walked over and looked carefully at the alleged mistake.
  3. And he always—and I mean always—concluded with the same verbiage: “I think it’s alright.”

Of course, you fine readers know there is no legitimate, kindly comeback to this conclusion unless you want to begin a huge fight.

So even though he pretended he favored improvement—because he thought that sounded open-minded and one of the attributes of a good leader—when “shove” knocked “push” to the ground, he stuck to his guns.

You and I have two choices:

  • We can make natural mistakes and naturally correct them.
  • Or we can make natural mistakes, fail to correct them and wait for supernatural intervention.

There was a man from Tarsus named Saul.

He thought killing Christians was a good idea because they were going against his religion. (It didn’t seem to bother him that killing was also against the tenets of his faith.) He was so invested in murdering Christians that no intervention worked—except to have his ass blown off a horse with him sprawled on the ground, blinded, waiting to be finished off by the rod of God.

Yet even at that point, the voice from heaven told him to go someplace—and just wait.

In other words, “Think long and hard about how close you came to being incinerated.”

After several days, a visitor arrived, who continued Saul’s reclamation by telling him what he needed to do:

Repent.

This happened in Damascus.

That’s why, in the old-time days of “speak,” we often referred to a “road to Damascus experience.”

It’s one of those occasions when sense, friends, failure and nature, itself, has spoken to you so many times that all that remains to deter your futility is a flash course in mortality, and a brush with elimination.

Acts (Book of)

Words from Dic(tionary)

by J. R. Practix

dictionary with letter A

 

Acts:  a New Testament book immediately following the Gospels and relating the history of the early Church.

During the several times in my life when I have read the Bible from cover to cover—and let me candidly admit that even though there IS a blessing in the perusing, I would also have to deem it a chore—I discovered that the Bible has so much arcane language which does not fall into my purview and ideas which can be interpreted so many different ways, that it certainly demands a gentle spirit for consumption.

This is definitely true of the Book of Acts. While some people critique the Gospels which have the accounts of the life of Jesus, in being abbreviated in detail, focused on a particular audience of the day, the Book of Acts is really like a corporate press release.

First of all, you have to consider that the time span covered in the entire work is between sixty and seventy years. Once it’s condensed and crushed together into its twenty-eight chapters, you feel like it’s a description of a couple of weekends’ vacationing in Jerusalem. The huge transitions in plot, miraculous achievements and even the struggles seem monumental rather than the typical day-to-day inch-worm progress which is actually accomplished by human beings.

But there IS one thing we certainly learn from the Book of Acts: when Christians and Jews tried to combine their theologies, it fails miserably.

I’m not saying that Christians and Jews can’t get along as folks and friends, but the faith that was established by Jesus of Nazareth was not exactly complementary to the Law of Moses.

When these early Jewish boys who were followers of Jesus tried to incorporate their Mom and Dad’s religion into the new movement, it just didn’t work out very well.

So because of that, a Pharisee named Saul took the journey to become Paul the Apostle, and translated the message to a whole world of non-circumcised individuals. So faith in God went from being an issue of whether your penis was trimmed or not to whether your heart was open.

It was an arduous task, which as I previously stated, took many decades. With the Book of Acts, we basically get the Reader’s Digest version, written by a physician named Luke.

Even though I appreciate te account and the inclusion of the struggle, I do think we miss the magnitude of human folly in the pursuit of better understanding.

Christianity wouldn’t have moved out of the Upper Room in Jerusalem had it not been for a guy named Paul.

And mankind would never have departed from the superstitions of Mesopotamia had it not been for the teachings … of Jesus.