Phobias

Arachnophobia: the fear of spiders.

Acrophobia: the fear of heights.

Astraphobia: the fear of thunder and lightning.

Trypanophobia: the fear of injections. 

Homophobia: um... the fear of homosexual people?

Why are we using the word homophobia? It is a new catch word that people are throwing about to mean "not accepting of homosexual folks". Doesn't really make much sense to me. I don't approve of their lifestyle choice. I'm not scared of them.

Psalm 119 - In Praise of the Law

Notice the title of this post is not Psalms 119.  It is only the one Psalm.

I am not going to type it all out here as it is much too long for that.  I just wanted to explain two interesting details of this Psalm that I did not know about before yesterday.

First, do you see those weird headings throughout the Psalm?  They are the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.  א - Aleph, ב - Beth, ג - Gimel, and so on.  There are 22 of them which is why there are 22 sections of 8 verses each in Psalm 119.  Here is the neat part, if you were to read Psalm 119 in Hebrew, each verse starts with the letter indicated.  Obviously this is lost in translation, but you can see that the author was looking to incorporate alliteration in his work.  He is using the entire alphabet to praise the word of God.

Second, every verse (literally, take a look, every single verse has it) points to the word of God.  Various different words are used throughout the Psalm.  Decrees, Precepts, Law, Word, Commands, Statutes, and so on.  I had never noticed this before although it is quite blatant.

Kind of cool to know these two little tidbits right?  Now read Psalm 119.  It becomes more of a poem or song instead of just a long chapter full of words.  It sure would be neat to be able to read the entire book of Psalms in the original languange.

Retirement Planning

Planning for my retirement has been getting more and more important to me the older I get. I've got a few things in place, but one of my primary retirement plans is to keep working as long as I can and not have to dip heavily into any savings until I absolutely have to.

I heard something interesting in Sunday School today. Jesus actually taught about retirement planning.

Luke 12:16-21. The parable of the rich fool:  "The ground of a certain rich man produced a good crop. He thought to himself, 'What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.' Then he said, 'This is what I'll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I'll say to myself, "You have plenty of good things laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry."'  "But God said to him, 'You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?' This is how it will be with anyone who stores up things for himself but is not rich toward God."

How many of us would respond like this: It is irresponsible to not plan properly for the future - we will just be a burden on others if we don't make sure we take care of ourselves. True. But, God wants us to be taking care of the old, the sick, the orphans and the widows. Maybe he asks this of us because he would rather we all pay more attention to giving our money away now instead of piling it up in our new larger barns for our retirement. But if we don't take care of ourselves we will be just like the birds of the air or the lillies of the field! (Matthew 6:25-34) Yup, that's right.

Makes us kind of scared to think that way right? That's because we're not taking care of the old people in our lives like we should be. Neither are any of our friends or family. That's why we also think we're going to be screwed once we retire unless we save as much as possible for ourselves.

God is likely calling us to do other things with the majority of our money that we are salting away for ourselves.

...But:

We need enough to be able to spend time in our condo in Palm Springs after we retire right?

We need enough to be able to go on our annual winter cruise with our friends right?

We need enough to maintain our standard of living right?

We need enough to...

I mean, we've earned these things!