Whispers of Truth

Humans tend to worry, especially my particular variety, female. I fully know that my lack of trust in God in all things at all times is sin (unbelief), but when I am caught up in a moment of worry, it can be difficult to be objective and see I am accomplishing nothing, but rather steeping myself in fear and doubt. The older I get and the more I read the Bible and let it truly seep into me, the more I become aware of the necessity of completely trusting God at all times, and the more I recognize when I have failed to do so. The writer of Hebrews 3:12-13 warns me:  Take care, brethren, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day as long as it is called today that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. Sin is deceitful. The heart is deceitful. Apart from Christ and His Spirit in me, I cannot even recognize that I am petting the unbelief in my heart. The thing is, more th...

Solomon was equally the wisest and most foolish man who ever lived. In asking in humility for the wisdom and knowledge he needed to guide the people God had made him king over, he was granted that plus riches and wealth and honor unlike any other king before or after him. This wisdom is easy to see, but the foolishness might seem hidden at first glance. He ruled with much wisdom for 40 years, saw peace rest on his kingdom, and built a temple gloriously unparalleled, yet he started following other gods, and his heart eventually strayed from the one true God. He had everything, yet it wasn’t enough, and that is foolishness. It is from Solomon’s foolish actions after he received God’s gifts that we can learn what to avoid, and it is from God’s words to Solomon when he asked for wisdom that we can learn things we shouldn’t seek after.  The first and second thing that God mentions Solomon not asking for are riches and wealth (2 Chron. 1:10). It has always seemed strange to me that bot...

Exclamation points as punctuation marks (formerly called ecphonemes , a now-defunct word) did not exist in print until well into the 1400s. Before then writing tended to run together and made text difficult to understand and interpret, although different methods of separation of words had been in use by then. There is some confusion over where the exclamation point originated, but there is one theory that says Latin monks invented it by writing expressions of joy, essentially a hurray as  lo . The way in which they did so eventually became a line over a dot instead of a line next to an o, and voila! our now much-debated punctuation mark was invented. Another claim comes from a 14th-century Italian poet, Iacopo Alpoleio da Urbisaglia, who wrote Ars punctuandi (The Art of Punctuating), only he called his version of the mark an “admiration point.” Regardless of what it is called and when it originated and who gets credit for it, the mark seems here to stay. The mark has been around...

Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, books full of wisdom, offer a challenge to me every single time I read them. I read and find my own foolishness, and if I am in a judgmental mindset, which I admit I fight (less now than I used to), I find others’ foolishness, too. Often it is easier to see someone else’s foolishness than my own, and there’s the rub. Seeing my own foolishness and taking action against it instead of seeing it and being content to leave it be or seeing it and having a hopeless attitude.   God did not give me wisdom in his word for me to squander. Lately I have been thinking about two things that are foolishness in my life: talking too much and dwelling unduly on the days of my life. (Yup, you guessed it. I’ve been reading in Ecclesiastes). I DO like to talk, but at the same time, my alter ego is very quiet. I can ride three hours rattling off words or ride three hours speaking absolutely none. My flesh wants to talk when it wants to talk, i.e., when I am not reading o...