Humble P-a-a-h!
[By the way, How do you spell "pie" like a southern fan of cobblers and pastries would say it. The title is my linguistic attempt to wrap my fingers around the diphthongs, monophthongs, triphthongs, consonants, vowels, and mouth watering I heard as a little pie-eater growing up in East Texas.]
The Good Lord has often tried to keep me humble. He’s the only one who can. Unfortunately, I am of the frame of mind that nothing man can say can shake my confidence in myself , so somebody supernatural has to do it. Hey, don’t look superior!. You’re the same way, too. Don’t you really feel deep down inside that the world’s problems are really somebody else’s fault and even your own shortcomings are basically a matter of others misunderstanding the real you? T.S. Eliot knew about being misunderstood, in his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”:
“That is not it!” and “That is not it at all!”
Don’t you have the sneakin’ suspicion that, if the powers-that-be would surrender their knuckleheaded authority for a second, you could straighten out a lot of the world’s problems pretty quickly or at least slow down the world’s rush to self-erasure from the Blackboard of life?
Yeah, me, too. That’s one reason I need the Good Lord to thump my noggin every once in a while. And so He did recently.
I had been feeling lively about memorizing the books of the Bible. One day, I picked up my Bible to look up something in Matthew(You know, that’s the first book of the New Testament!) when I decided to play a game. I would just put my finger between the pages at the point I -- with my newly acquired expertise -- would estimate Matthew to be. Then I would flip it open to see how close I had come.
So I did. Result: I had the book upside down. I think I came out near Zephaniah or “hainahpeZ“. In my ear I heard a little “Hee Hee”, but there was no one else in the room.
Step 1 to reading the Bible[and you don‘t hear Bible writers saying a whole lot about this]: Arrange the book so that it is right side up.
p.s., unless you’re reading Hebrew, then right side up is upside down and backwards.
p.p.s., I’m glad I wrote this. I did not know that phthongs came in several flavors -- mono, di, and tri. Sort of like glycerides in my blood stream.mm
