Herding Cats

The heading of this blog gives me an excuse to post this photo of our lovely fierce Whites once again. The collar is because he had to have a rabies tag.  And that means I can also mention - again! - that he features in two of the stories in my recent collection The Umbrellas of Hamelin.  He is in fact the star of Talky Tin.

But the main point of this blog is that  one of our recent Scriptural thoughts for the day really underlined for me the strangeness of the intensive religious education I had in my faraway convent schooldays.

It said: 

I will put enmity between you and the woman.​—Gen. 3:15.

Soon after Adam and Eve sinned, Jehovah gave hope to their descendants by means of a remarkable prophecy. What he said is recorded at Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He will crush your head, and you will strike him in the heel.” The prophecy appears in the first book of the Bible. But in one way or another, all the other books of the Bible relate to it. Just as the spine of a printed book binds all the pages together, the words recorded at Genesis 3:15 bind the content of every book of the Bible into one united message, namely, that a Deliverer would be sent to destroy the Devil and all his wicked followers. What a blessing that will be for those who love Jehovah! A study of the Bible will help us see how the prophecy is fulfilled and how we can benefit from it.

So I had this intensive religious education within Christendom, Catholic wing, yet I was taught nothing at all about this vital prophecy in Genesis.  In fact, I knew nothing about the Bible prophecy in the Hebrew Scriptures, which we knew as the "Old Testament".  We knew about Noah and his Ark of course  - my sisters and I used to play Noah's Ark with those shoeboxes you used to get - maybe still do. (Its a long time since I bought a pair of shoes.) That was a great game, loading our collections of china and glass animals into our shoebox arcs.

I lost my whole collection when we moved back to Sheffield from London, including my lovely pink glass horse, when I was in my thirties. We picked the wrong movers, and quite a lot of stuff "disappeared". 

But - back to my religious education at school - we were given no defence against the powerful currents of "the world", which have been so tragically successful in persuading people that Genesis is just a "creation myth" and that the flood of Noah's day was simply a local affair, not a worldwide one as the Bible makes very clear it was.

That way people miss both the warning and the promise of the wonderful things to come.  They are not warned, and they are not comforted.

Sunday morning Col left early again, but not before he had cleared my windscreen of frost and also got me into my socks. Which is why I was able to drive to the Hall, and why I did not appear at the meeting with one sock on my head and the other on my arm.  They call old age a second childhood - and, well, yes, alas, so it is. Yet again I need help in dressing myself.

Monday afternoon it started to snow.  Lightly - but it was snow.  And I got together with a congregation sibling to practise our part in the School on Thursday. I feel nervous about it as (a) I am so tired from this wretched infection that I found it hard to write, and (b) we are now using a different format/approach. I have read all the instructions, but am not confident I have got it exactly right.  Anyway, it will all become clearer as the year and the Ministry School continues.

The young elder in charge of those of us who are answering the questions at the Assembly Watchtower managed to get us all together for our first rehearsal. There are two more to follow.

It must be rather like herding cats, trying to get us all in the same place at the same time, outside the usual meetings.