Lets Give Them Something to Talk About

I have made it my goal to start reading through the Minor Prophets in the Old Testament.   Books that I don’t think that I have ever read before.   I have said their names before and heard specific verses from them, but I have never sat down and read through them with the history going on in that time in my head.   Today, my lovely dogs barking asking to go outside woke me up before dawn.   Finally, after yelling at them, shushing them and lying in bed for 2 more hours, I got out of my soft, warm bed at 6:00.   I said goodbye to my husband who was going to play some basketball, made my pot of coffee, candied my personal cup and sat down ready to read the book of Amos (I am reading from the New Living Translation in all these).   Amos was a shepherd and a fig farmer.   He was not an educated priest, a servant, a born prophet…   He was just an ordinary guy doing what God told him to do.   He was sending a message.   The message...

Recently I was blessed with the opportunity to re-hash Genesis with a group of friends.   We each took a few chapters and summarized those chapters and went through the group.   We covered it all in about 45 minutes.   It was a lot of information to take in, but also fun to hear our friends breathlessly try to fit in everything that they could about the stories that we already knew, into the short few minutes they were given to do this in.   The book of Genesis has an awful lot of drama.   Hearing pieces of it, I thought a soap opera writer couldn’t have done better themselves.   God makes man perfect, but gives us free will – Man sins- Man is thrown out of the Garden of Eden- Man has two sons- One son kills the other son, the world goes down hill.   God sends a flood to kill everything and start over.   He then calls a man who is really really old to follow him.   Abraham has a wife Sarah- Sarah can’t have babies so tells him to ...