An Answer, a Bus, and a Play

It wasn't difficult to find information which answered my question about the second commandment. The early Church leader Augustine felt that Exodus 20:4-5 (Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image........thou shalt not bow down thyself to them....) was a commentary on the preceeding verse (Thou shalt have no other gods before Me), so that's why the Catholics, Lutherans, and Anglicans omit Exodus 20:4-5 as a separate commandment. Martin Luther would have learned the commandments that way, and that's how he lists them in his catechism. Some authors point out that God didn't actually ever announce ahead of time that there were going to be TEN commandments-----that is simply the way His words in Exodus 20 were organized by men. "Versification is a human invention" is a related quote I ran across in my search.

We've had a couple days of clouds and intermittent rain. We need the rain to settle down the frost boils in the roads and driveways, which are such a sloppy mess right now. Husband was able to get quite a bit of manure hauled before the rain started----he was happy about that.

During my afternoon walk on Thursday, I managed to almost get run over by a school bus. I was on our gravel road, walking into a strong wind, which prevented me from hearing what was coming from behind. I wasn't paying attention to that fact at all, as my thoughts were very far away. For some random reason I started to cross the road......I happened to look back and right there was a school bus coming at me. I ran out of the way and the alert driver slowed way down. Her window was open and I hollered out an apology for my carelessness. She smiled and waved, and wide-eyed students in the windows waved, also. I felt like an idiot.

My two high-school-aged children are involved in the school play performing this week. They have been faithfully rehearsing for several weeks. It is a very serious production about the Holocaust. Usually they do comedies, so this was a major shift. Last evening's performance was very well done. The director is meticulous about details, and he is able to coax excellent performances out of our local teenagers. The show was a good history lesson for the cast and the audience; I was glad to see that many high-schoolers were in attendance. And, by the way, they all behaved very respectfully through the whole show----you could have heard a pin drop whenever there was a pause.

When I was growing up, I read and heard much about World War II and the Holocaust. My mom still mentions how, as a girl, she remembers the many cartoon pictures of Hitler and Mussolini that would be in the newspaper. She always says, "I wish I would have saved some of them." And she remembers all the sirens blowing the day the war ended-----she was walking home from school and was frightened by all the noise. We would watch movies like "The Hiding Place", about Corrie ten Boom, whose family hid Jews in Holland and were eventually caught and sent to concentration camps. Also, on TV, I remember watching several mini-series, "The Winds of War", "War and Remembrance", and one about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. My family would sit just glued to the TV during those shows. When I was younger, I remember seeing some of the Nuremburg trials on TV-----I don't know if it was a movie or actual news reports. In high school, I read novels like QB7 and Mila 18 by Leon Uris, and later the War and Remembrance series by Herman Wouk. I wonder if many young people nowadays read stuff like that, or even do much reading, period. Of course, we didn't have computers, video games, or movies on tape and DVD back then, so reading was popular. I still believe you benefit so much more from reading a book than watching a movie.

Speaking of books, I need to get back to organizing my bookshelf, which kept me busy yesterday. That's a peaceful, enjoyable way to make use of a rainy day.