Keeping Watch

Do you feel stuck? What's in your way? What's keeping you from progressing towards your dream, your preferred future?   In 2 Kings 4, there is a story about a woman who inherited a large debt at the death of her husband and appeals to Elisha for help.  To assist her Elisha asks the woman, "What shall I do for you? Tell me, what do you have in the house?" (2 Ki. 4:2 NKJ) To which she replies that all she has is “a jar of oil." (2 Ki. 4:2 NKJ) Elisha then tells her to, "Go, borrow vessels from everywhere, from all your neighbors-- empty vessels; do not gather just a few.  4 "And when you have come in, you shall shut the door behind you and your sons; then pour it into all those vessels and set aside the full ones."  (2 Ki. 4:3-4 NKJ) She follows this instruction and then returns to the prophet to inform him.  Elisha then instructs her to "Go, sell the oil and pay [her] debt; and … live on the rest." (2 Ki. 4:7 NKJ)   I love this story beca...

We are overly dependent on electricity.  When we moved here, we were assured that power doesn’t go as often on this part of the Island because the power company upgraded the line to the University of the West Indies Five Islands campus.  We’re on that same line.  But low and behold, today, a loud popping sound pierced the stillness of the morning, and I immediately knew that power had gone.  I deliberated on whether to turn the generator on or not in the hopes that the outage was temporary, but that was not the case.  This would not have been an option had we not made the plan and sacrificed to buy a generator a few years ago.  We couldn’t afford one of those quiet, sleek, LPG-powered generators. We could only afford a loud, 5Kva diesel bargain branded one.  I can’t complain since it gets the job done.  Now that we have the generator, we aren’t as concerned about the power outages as we might have been.  Louis Pasteur is credited with the not...

Have you ever tried sitting on a broken table, desk, or three-legged stool?  I used to teach, and I recall something I dreaded while teaching.  In some classrooms, as depicted on TV and probably resembling real life, students play pranks on teachers like removing or loosening a leg of a stool or chair so that when the teacher sits on it, they fall.  As violent and insensitive as this sounds, an experience like this, though intended as a prank, can be used to teach young people a valuable lesson about the choices they encounter and their decision-making.  Let’s, for the moment, imagine that in this classroom, there is a student who cares about the teacher and desires to warn the teacher about the prank but is fearful of reprisal from her fellow classmates.  What should that student do?  Let’s imagine that the student decides to warn the teacher but only chooses to do so when the teacher is about to sit on the broken stool.  Imagine that the teacher he...