His final word is
not of anger, but of love
rests His case in love

Adapted from the Oxford NIV Schofield Bible Notes for the verse, Zephaniah 3:17.

The verse reads:

The Lord your God is with you,
the Mighty Warrior who saves.
He will take great delight in you;
in his love he will no longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you with singing.”

The New Schofield Note reads: (3:17) For the Lord’s own, His final word is not of anger, as with the unbelieving nations, but of love, as expressed in this beautiful verse.

When it comes to His people, chastised and forgiven, the LORD rests His case in love and rejoicing.

I was early in embracing the online Bible.

I was part of the team that put the NIV Bible online.

I was the web guy for Zondervan Publishing and we were working with an early Web Group that was set to help churches get online.

They named their company Gospelcom.

But they came up with their name a little early in the game so their website ended up being gospelcom.com.

Once we got the NIV text online, the President of Zondervan came to my office in the Corporate Library where I worked and asked just how much of the NIV was available online.

He had been assured that users could see only one chapter of text at a time.

I introduced him to the “*” wildcard search that returned the complete text of the entire Bible.

Then I clicked SELECT ALL and COPY and pasted the text into a Word Document and said, “It’s mine now.”

He ran out yelling something about having to stop this and I didn’t have the heart to tell him, it was too late, internet wise.

Of late I have gone back to bringing a printed Bible to church.

I have a hardcover Oxford NIV Schofield Bible that I picked up when I worked in a bookstore back in the 1980’s.

There was something about using an NIV Bible that wasn’t printed by Zondervan.

My Dad always liked the Schofield notes and he asked me to get him copy as well.

I brought one home and he took it and sat at the dining room table and opened the front cover and on the inside cover, with a strong hand, he signed it Robert P. Hoffman and he used that Bible the rest of his life.

Using a printed Bible, I noticed that I noticed a lot more of the Bible when I read it.

The apps and the NIV Bible Gateway that replaced Gosepelcom shows you the requested text but with a printed Bible open on your lap you get to see two pages worth of verses.

I found I miss that a lot.

This morning, the sermon was out of Haggai.

I was listening to the sermon on Verse 1:5 Now this is what the Lord Almighty says: “Give careful thought to your ways. You have planted much, but harvested little. You eat, but never have enough. You drink, but never have your fill. You put on clothes, but are not warm. You earn wages, only to put them in a purse with holes in it.”

And my eyes wandered over to the notes at the bottom on the page that read: “His final word is not of anger, as with the unbelieving nations, but of love, as expressed in this beautiful verse.”

Then I read the last words of the book of Zephaniah:

… I will bring you home.
I will give you honor and praise
    among all the peoples of the earth
when I restore your fortunes
    before your very eyes,”
says the Lord.

… when I restore your fortunes before your very eyes.

As the note says, beautiful verses.

making people doubt
accurate perception
of reality

From the passage:

Behavior like this has a name: gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that involves making people doubt their own, accurate perception of reality. If the term has gotten a workout in recent years, that’s because a lot of people are engaging in it. The right-wing justices have become masters of the form, telling the American people again and again not to believe what they see with their own eyes.

In the Opinion Piece, “The Supreme Court Is Gaslighting Us All” By Jesse Wegman in the New York Times, July 12, 2024.

When I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, my siblings and I would often badger our Dad into taking us downtown to the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

The Museum had a whale skeleton, a hall of mammals filled with stuffed moose and elk and The Gaslight Village.

The Gaslight Village was a recreated main street of Grand Rapids as it might have appeared in the 1880’s and it was lit by gaslight.

It wasn’t much looking back, maybe 200 yards of street but it was cool.

The roadbed was of sawed off round pieces of logs and there was a horse drawn tram car with tracks and both sides of the street were lined with store fronts from the 1880s.

And it was dark!

Gaslight when you got right down to it, didn’t give much light.

Gaslight Village was contained in one big building so the street started and ended at wall.

As I remember it, one entrance was designed to make it feel that even though you walked through double doors, you entered the street from a covered bridge over the river.

The other end was a painted perspective of the town with the sides of a few buildings and the road way disappearing into the middle distance.

The painting was pretty good and it didn’t take much imagination to pretend you were going to continue walking down the main street.

That is until, despite what you perceived as the road continuing on, you walked smack into a wall.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

astounding result
stunning act of collective
responsibility

Yes I know I went to six syllables in responsibility.

From the Guest Opinion essay, What Just Happened in France Is Astounding by David Broder, in the New York Times where Mr. Broder writes:

This is a truly astounding result. Through a stunning act of collective responsibility, the far right has been stopped. But France is not suddenly fixed. With no group taking more than one-third of the National Assembly’s 577 seats, there is trouble ahead. The far right, though chastened, is in a stronger position than ever before, commanding a growing electoral coalition and decently placed for the presidential election in 2027. But France, on the back of pragmatic collaboration between parties and enthusiastic resistance from voters, has won a brilliant reprieve.

A stunning act of collective responsibility?

Yes, a stunning act of collective responsibility!

Could it happened that those words could be used to describe some action within the borders of the United States of America?

Stunning act of collective responsibility.

A consummation devoutly to be wished indeed.

What must it be like to be a political writer with the name David Broder and not be David Broder?

doesn’t read stories
make her blue – world’s all bitched up
it always was, will

Adapted from the passage, “She doesn’t read political or war stories because she can’t understand them and because they make her blue. “The world is all bitched up,” she once said. “Always was, always will be.” “Do you really believe that?” she was asked. “No,” she said, after a moment of deliberation, “I guess I don’t.” She spends half an hour in the diner. Then, practically every night, before going home to bed, she makes a Samaritan tour of the Bowery and its environs. She carries an umbrella and a large handbag, which contains a flashlight, a number of cakes of soap of the size found in hotel bathrooms, and a supply of nickels, dimes, and quarters.”

From the short essay, Mazie by Joseph Mitchell in his collection of essays, McSorley’s wonderful saloon originally published in 1943.

In the forward to this edition of Mr. Michell’s essays, Mr. Calvin Trillin writes, “What struck me as astonishing was that he was able to get the marks of writing off his pieces. The words seem to have just appeared on the page by some process that was the reverse of those magic slate pages that children lift to make what they’ve written or drawn vanish. … Like Joe DiMaggio, Joe Mitchell made it look perfectly natural, even though nobody else could exactly do it.”

Wikipedia writes of this essay, “Mitchell was open to taking on the challenge of profiling the female central character of Mazie. The writing process was challenging until his central character would give him “the revealing remark.” The 1938 World Telegram description of Mazie P. Gordon reveals she was known as “Miss Mazie” to the men she interacted with around the Venice Theatre. She is blonde, kind, and has exaggerated hair and makeup. Two years later, when Mitchell profiled Mazie in The New Yorker, some critics called Mitchell an anthropologist in his description. Mazie becomes more than just a blonde and kind woman, and instead is shown to be complex and strong-willed. Mitchell’s close observation of Mazie set a new standard for writers and reporters. Mitchell’s curiosity without judgement inspired writers to continue Mazie’s legacy.”

Faboulous.

Word painting.

Painting with words.

If I knew how it did it I would do it.

Like any ball player could do what Dimaggio did.

As a final word, as Mazie is quoted:

“The world is all bitched up,” she once said. “Always was, always will be.”

“Do you really believe that?” she was asked.

“No,” she said, after a moment of deliberation, “I guess I don’t.”

And have fun this summer and find a copy of , McSorley’s wonderful saloon (which I understand is still open in New York City and longest continuously in operation pub in town.)