Insightful Musings on the Scriptures

by

Raymond P. Sparre
Northwest University class of '67

Good morning on this good Molalla morning, dear ones.

We did a walk/jog excursion. We just finished our breakfast. We ate our lunch yesterday on the creek-side deck…and will probably do the same today.

Now it’s time to get to work on other essential stuff. At least I’m relieved of a task that consumed nearly my entire day yesterday—repairing the lawnmower. That’s pretty important with the grass growing about 6” per day. I guess that’s a little exaggeration.

Blessings on your adventure.

Love, Dad/Ray.

t’s Springtime now in our region, and leaves on the seasonal trees are just beginning to unfold. Consider looking around you in a typical tree-scape—how many leaves can you see? Count them. Now there’s a daunting task! In fact, I think it’s impossible. Consider how much more massive that astronomical number becomes when we consider how many leaves are on all the trees in Clackamas County—compounded with those in the rest of Oregon—then those in the rest of the nation—oh, oh, I’d better stop here—my cranial wiring is starting to overheat. To make the overload worse, consider zooming in on one little individual leaf and try to figure out how significant it really is amidst all that infinity. Consider that each is “born” at the beginning of their season, do their work during their prime, wither and die in the Fall, then return to the soil. The whole cycle is repeated the next season.

Processing the historical genealogies that are contained in these chapters impacts me with similar feelings of overwhelming wonder. One little string of names may cover a time period of hundreds of years. And for every name mentioned there are hundreds and thousands that are not. I don’t know about you, but this kind of thinking is a healthy exercise—it strips away any unhealthy notions in me of arrogance and self-importance. “Ray Sparre was born, he lived, he worked, he fathered four other little “leaves,” he withered, and then he died.” Big deal! So what?

The FOCUS VERSE above describing a few men within the lineage of the half-tribe of Manasseh speaks to me this way: Those who do not include worship of their Maker in their personal statement of purpose and self-worth actually destroy any hope they could have had for positive significance. “They were brave warriors, famous men, and heads of their families.” Big deal! So what? Here they had the “opportunity of a lifetime” to please God—and they blew it!

Understand that your puny existence really is significant, one way or another—positively or negatively. The same Sovereign God Who creates and monitors each leaf on every tree in all of time is the One who knows every word you say, every deed you do, every thought you think, and every hair on your head. There really is vital bottom-line meaning in that old axiom that expresses the entire overview of both historical and Biblical revelation, “Only one life will soon be past—only what’s done for Christ will last.”