HADEDAS, BATS AND OTHER RANDOM THOUGHTS

The life of a new blogger is fraught with perils! Allow me to describe my evening. (You can’t actually stop me, can you? All you CAN do is stop reading, but please don’t, or it will make the trauma of losing a blog and having to write a new one, a good deal worse.) I’ve just given away my punch line, haven’t I? I had positioned myself comfortably on my bed, laptop stowed on special new portable table thingy, (note the techno advancement enabling me to correctly name computer accessories), and had settled down to blog. One of my duck retrievers a.k.a. poodles was stretched out on the bed, while the other lay snoring in his basket. (Whoever used the analogy of a dog’s life to be a hard life never met my dogs. And yes, Liz, they DO swim. In fact Coco balances on a body board while I, her faithful person/servant, drag her around the pool! THEN I send her out to retrieve any intrusive ducks.) ...But I digress!


I was comfortably esconsed and suitably inspired to write. It was past dusk, a full moon was filling the view from my bed, and right on cue a hadeda flew by, hysterically calling to whoever had left it to fly home alone in the dark. As hadedas were part of the title of my blog, this augured well, or so I thought. HA! I duly blogged away, happy with the brand new neural pathways in my brain which caused me to type several degrees faster than before, when I pushed something that highlighted the page, and then made the massive mistake of pressing delete. At that moment my screech was serious competition to the lost hadeda, and all I could do was call the BLOGBUSTER, a.k.a. Cheslyn!!! She had got me into this, and my word, she was going to get me out! Bless her heart, she arrived, not allowing morning sickness in the evening to stop her, but alas! Not even Blogbuster could retrieve it. Instead I got a lesson on what not to do should I ever again inadvertently highlight a section again. Repeat after me, “NEVER PRESS DELETE!”


I can’t recapture what I had written, but here’s the gist of it. From the moment I was born again I have passionately loved the word of God. When I discovered who Jesus is, and that he was not what I had imagined him to be in my deceived, alcohol and drug-induced state, I became addicted to the word of God. When you have never known TRUTH and then you find it, it is like drinking ice cold water on a hot and sticky February day in Durban – deliciously refreshing and gloriously restorative. The bible is filled with fascination for me. I love the great themes and doctrines that frame our faith. I am inspired by the heroic deeds of the men and women, just like us, who changed the world. I am captivated by the Personhood of God and the way he relates to people. But I am also entranced by obscure individuals who pop up for no apparent reason, by details which seem totally irrelevant but obviously aren’t or they wouldn’t be there, and by random bits of information hidden among the treasure. When I was a child we always ate traditional Christmas dinners. Traditional, that is, for the northern hemisphere, regardless of the facts that, a) we lived in Zululand and nearly expired from the heat as we consumed our hot lunch, and, b) we didn’t give Jesus any acknowledgement other than to overeat unsuitable food once a year. My grandmother always made the Christmas pudding, and my brother and I helped. It was a tradition to stir into the pudding mix little treasures to be discovered when your portion was served. A thimble, various charms, and most exciting of all.....MONEY. Who even knows what a “tickey” was? I’ll bet not even google knows! You can post a comment if you know. The point is that the pudding itself was delicious, but I can’t describe the excitement of finding MONEY in your pudding!!!!! For me, finding odd bits of unexpected information in the bible carries a similar enjoyment, a guess-what-I-just- found gasp.



I read the bible with the appetite of an addict from the first day I was given The Living Bible as a gift, just hours after praying to give my life unconditionally and unreservedly to Jesus. I was, and am, hooked, and no day feels complete if I haven’t been able to read the word. I was truly overwhelmed the first time I read it. To someone raised on esoteric concepts, the factual content of real people’s lives was revolutionary. I will NEVER be bored reading the geneaologies. These were real people with real lives, who married and had children and built real houses in real towns and lived real lives. They aren’t figments of someone’s imagination. Who would EVER dream up a family whose children were called Huppim, Muppin, and Ard? (This is driving my spell check mad!)


SO......one of my first discoveries was when I was eagerly perusing Leviticus. Yes, really. With great interest I was studying the animals, reptiles, and insects that were listed as verboten to Israel, when I found this startling statement. You may not, if you are kosher, eat owls, kites, vultures, IBIS or BATS. These are unclean birds!!!! SO, dear reader, should you fling your shoe at a passing hadeda and hit it, and it falls dead, with a final, plaintive squawk, at your feet, refrain from eating it, for it is a member of the ibis family, and is therefore an unclean bird. And if, by some misfortune, a bat flies in and you are tempted to swat it down and devour it, remember that it too, is an unclean bird, and release it to fly off unscathed. Ah, you say, what about Peter’s vision of all the hitherto unclean creatures which God now told him he could eat? Well done, and you have just made my point. You KNOW that you are welcome to bat and hadeda stew should that whet your appetite, because you know the whole word.



To be serious for one moment, I do so wish that Christians would read the word, and not just in a perfunctory way, because EVERYTHING we need to know is in it. Besides the fact that it is riveting reading, God speaks to us through the word. He instructs us, encourages us, comforts us, corrects us, and we engage with HIM when we read. I see so many people living on an emotional roller coaster, totally at the mercy of their feelings, when stability and joy is within their grasp.....WHY? Please, please, please, make the word your daily bread and see how things will change for the better.


Hadeda sandwich anyone?


God bless. Fiona