Happy Shauvot!

Looking at my day planner, I was pleasantly surprised to find out today was Shauvot! The Festival of First Fruits or the Festival of Weeks. It was a celebration right after wheat harvest in Israel... which seems somewhat of a coincidence considering if it hadn't rained these last couple of days my dad would be harvesting his wheat currently.

According to tradition, this holiday celebrates God giving the Torah to Moses. It occurs every year, 7 weeks after Passover... the traditional amount of time that the Israelite wandered in the wilderness before Moses went up Mt. Sinai.

In Christian tradition, the Pentecost is almost equivalent. Of course, this year, the two would have been celebrated on two totally different days... even months. However, I was kind of impressed with a parallel that I saw. Shauvot celebrates the anticipation of God giving the people of Israel is word in the Torah. Pentecost celebrates God giving his word in the Holy Spirit. I thought that was kinda cool.

Gloom, Despair, and Agony on me…

As Phillipa Gordan in the book “Anne of the Island” would say, “I am having a Jonah day.” Today, I feel unloved, ugly, unredeemable, and selfish. I might as well just jump overboard and get eaten by a whale. It’s my own fault anyways. I figure that three days of being masticated in whale saliva is similar to letting bad thoughts eat me up on the inside. And darn that vine that was shading me from the sun. Why did it have to just go and wilt on me? The day was bad enough already. I deserve that vine! (And to those readers who are scratching your heads, if you want to catch the Biblical reference, read Jonah. It’s only like 8 pages long. I even tried to read it in Hebrew once. It’s not going to kill you.)

Well, I got to remember. Jonah caused his own torture, and God was the one who was willing to save. It was Jonah with the bad attitude, not God.

And God is good.
All the time.

Now, if I can only can believe it…

p.s. I did get emails today. Two people now want to interview me soon. One who’s seen my resume (at the University of Illinois); one who hasn’t (the private school in Austin). Who’ld have thought?