...betwixt drove and drove.

  Ah, thee name, thee name, eet is back. After a Bible study, when most of the family was there, I brought up the blog name. I was surprised at the feedback. The worst I got was "I don't really care, so long as I'm not personally involved". On the other hand, one daughter said that the old name was better because the new name would make people think that all I wanted to talk about was the collapse of the country. 

  As for me, the 'weird' name is more fun; but "Coup of the surreal" more accurately describes the takeover of strangeness around me. Maybe it's just the deterioration of order. At any rate, in spite of the last post, I do care about some things; but I have to continually turn myself back toward them. Maybe it will be easier with one of them from now on. I came to a clearer realization of how important it is for me to regularly do my Bible study. It's not just a personal development thing, through learning and the joy of seeing God bless me with insight into His word. It's a responsibility to those around me. It helps me to think right, to make important decisions in a world where the masses are deciding wrongly.

  I've been lacking-slacking in the study department, hence, I'm still in Genesis; but here's what I saw tonight: As usual, I read my list of things to look for in the text, this helps me to find more. Often though, a verse stands out not because it fits one of the other categories, but because it fits in #12, "interesting". That is, I'm reading along, looking for things like #2 "evil of mediocrity", and a verse just has this unspecific draw, if that's the word. Maybe "rise" is better, it catches my attention. Maybe because they did things different back then than we do now. 

  So it was tonight, I was reading in Genesis chapter 32. The end of verse 16, Jacob sent the gifts to his brother in separate groups, a little at a time. Is this a lesson about human nature? That one large presentation isn't as good as a series of smaller ones? Jacob instructs his servants to give a verbal message with each gift, this might be more effective than the wow factor of one huge gift. That would start to wear off, plus there would be a whole lot of busyness brought onto the scene. 

  So...maybe Esau's huge company of armed men was a similar thing; in that he didn't intend to attack his brother, but this show of force would turn into a show of mercy. Now to contemplate this some, one could say that when it comes to force and violence, the only effective way to make the presentation is to show it all together; whereas the presentation of good things has more flexibility in how it's presented. There is plenty of room for contemplation of how this idea might be used for persuading people in the places that we present our viewpoints or pitches; but that's another discussion.

  Right now, I offer this related contemplation: I often wonder about beauty and art in our world. Sometimes I think it's just remnants of the time before sin entered the world, and now we just cobble together bits of beauty to make life better; but it's like using an alternator from a car that's not running any more to make a windmill generator. The car as a whole was made for something else; and the true nature of this world is in the horrific things people do to each other. We patch it up and try to feel better, but beauty is just leftover stuff from an entirely different world.

  I don't always see things that way, but my life isn't always easy, besides true empathy would be to relate to people in awful circumstances, regardless of how posh mine were. That's brutal honesty for me, to let my day to day contemplations go negative when it's time to. Maybe you can't appreciate the light until you know the dark? This is starting to sound trite, mushy, corny, something overused, but bear with me. Put these two methods of presentation into the context of Heaven and Hell. Jesus made an awful presentation of Hell; it was like all the 400 armed men coming at once. But think about Heaven; how much detail was given about that? So what if...every time you see a cute puppy, an awesome sunset, your wife dressed in striking attire (looking you in the eye), and every other neat beautiful thing; what if that's God's incremental presentation of Heaven?