Canaanites

The kids and I studied the article "Why Did God Wage War Against the Canaanites" in the January public WT. We got out the See the Good Land brochure and looked at the map on page 11 which is the nations to be displaced from the Promised Land. If you back up and look at page 7, you will see that the very area that the Canaanites were going to be removed from was originally the land of the Patriarchs. In other words, Abraham, Issac and Jacob lived there first. It was legally their's to begin with. We have to remember that the reason they ended up in Egypt was because of famine (along with the rest of the world back then), and unfortunately, their descendents were enslaved. The land still belonged to them rightly.

At any rate, in the article in the WT it covers five common questions about God warring against the Canaanites. One point covers the child sacrifice that occurred. There have been excavations done that show the whole area was one huge cemetary for murdered newborns, sacrifices to their god. I tried to put it into terms the kids could understand. I said, "Say that the President and the local churches together now told us in order for the government to work and good things to happen, your children had to be sacrificed. They were going to send the police to your door. You are to give them your firstborn child, and the police will take them to your church, throw gasoline on them and burn them. That is basically what the Canaanites did." And then we listed a number of people we knew who were firstborn children that we would not have known if it had happened to them like it did in Canaan.

Also, the article points out that of course Jehovah did not want the Caananites practices to spread to the Israelites. Can you imagine? Can you imagine if the Israelites started practicing the sacrifice of their firstborn? Think about the birth order of Jesus!! The firstborn!!! They really had to be stopped. The article also points out that God gave them 400 years - gave the Canaanites 400 years to "reform". Rahab was one example of one of them who did. At any rate, we paused to think about how long 400 years actually is. If we went back 400 years from today, we are talking about in the time of the Renaissance, Leonardo DaVinci times! Really helped put into perspective how long 400 years is and how long Jehovah gave the Canaanites.

Of All People, Suze Orman

I never thought I would ever contemplate Suze Orman. I mean, I have called her the "Money Nazi". However, I picked up her book Women and Money, and was surprised by many of her insights about women - and very surprised by her background. She grew up with a speech impediment and because of it struggled scholastically. With difficulty she did finally graduate from college - and then worked as a waitress at the Buttercup Bakery for 6 years. Yes, Suze Orman.

When she was 29 (and working at the Buttercup) she was given a loan of $50,000 from some customers in order to open her own restaurant. One the customers involved told her to put it into a money market account at Merrill Lynch and keep it there until she made enough to open the restaurant. She asked him, "What is Merrill Lynch and what is a money market account?" Yes, Suze Orman.

Well, her broker, Randy, invested her money in a highly risky, speculative strategy and she lost all her money. However, she had been watching what Randy was doing and learning and thought she could be a broker too. She applied for a job at Merrill Lynch and to this day is convinced that she got the job because they had a women's quota to fill. (She ended up suing Merrill Lynch too because of the money Randy lost - because of the lawsuit Merrill Lynch couldn't fire her while it was going on - she won btw and got her money back.) That is how Suze Orman got her start with money.

In her book she says you cannot possibly be a "wealthy" woman without cleanliness - it made me sit up straight in my chair and get a little smirk. Never thought she'd have something to say about cleanliness. I love how she says this:

"Cleanliness is about respecting the importance of order and organization. When you don't know where your money is, when you have no filing system for your important documents, when you dive into your pocketbook and pull out crumpled bills, when your car looks like a garbage can, when your closets are filled with junk and clutter - I'm sorry but you cannot possibly be a wealthy woman. You need to clean up your act, literally . . . Remember, when you keep things around you that are worthless to you, they end up making you worthless. . . I am here to tell you that if this quality is not up front and center adn if you do not adhere to it, there is no way you will ever own the power to control your destiny."

I cleaned my bathrooms this morning.

What the Forgiving Did

Because you know me, you know that probably following my God and my family, books are my great love, and I am always telling you about some nugget in something I have read. Today is the nugget from Alexander McCall Smith's new book, La's Orchestra Saves the World. La is a woman, a nickname for Lavender. She attends Cambridge and meets her husband, Richard. They marry, and it becomes apparent that La cannot have children but Richard assures her that they can just build a life together, the two of them. But then it turns out he is having an affair and leaves her. While they are separated and in the process of a divorce, La gets word that Richard has had an accident, and he is actually in a coma, dying. La goes to see him - and as she stands before him, she speaks to him, and I quote from the book now:

"I have come to tell you something," she continued. "Darling. My darling. I have come to tell you that I forgive you. I do." She waited for a response, but what did she expect? Some sign, perhaps, that he had heard, that he understood. But there was nothing . . . She stood up. She thought that she would feel herself transformed . . . There had been no rush of the Holy Spirit, no roaring as of a waterfall, nothing . . . Her words were unheard. But she had bestowed her forgiveness upon him, and as she turned and left the room, she thought: you can be forgiven without knowing it, and for the forgiver it does not matter that the recipient is unaware of what just happened; just as one may be loved by another without ever knowing it."

The forgiving made La free.