Doug Van Pelt

BEEP | BEEP | BEEP | BEEP

The first thing I do when I come in the door is turn off the alarm. I got burglarized in my old place/home/office many years ago and have been a customer of ADT ever since. It was a horrible feeling of getting stuff stolen, but the worst things taken were videos of my cat that were in the VCR. He had died two days earlier and those videos were irreplacable. I remember a producer and A&R guy came to my house that day, as my band was supposed to rehearse for them in an effort to show our progress towards being ready to record an album and whatnot. I told the guys (one of whom was our beloved columnist, Kemper Crabb) that I just didn't feel good about leaving my place alone for the three to four hours that rehearsal and driving to and from would take. So those guys, bless their hearts, got back in that black corvette and drove all the way back to Houston (3 hour trip). That was not a good month for me -- September of '91 (cat died, got burglarized, and had my gall bladder removed), but I learned a lot from it.

Anyway, I was reading an interesting chapter in Zechariah (chapter 11), where God told Zecharaiah to "pasture the flock marked for slaughter." Zech did this, only to have the flock detest him.

"'I grew weary of them,' he said, 'I will not be your shepherd. Let the dying die, and the perishing perish. Let those who are left eat one another's flesh.' Then I took my staff called Favor and broke it, revoking the covenant I had made with all the nations."

I would hate to live in a land where my Shepherd said that of me and my people. It's cool to live in a place where "my people" are from all over and have all different types of skin color and musical preference... To have God forsake us would be a horrible thing.

The chapter goes on to detail how this shepherd told his employers that, "If you think it best, give me my pay; but if not, keep it." How much was the payment? Thirty pieces of silver. Sound familiar? How about the next scene that comes. God told him to "Throw it to the potter," and he threw them into the house of the Lord to the potter. That is an incredibly close parallel to what happened with Judas after he betrayed Christ. Wow. The symmetry of the Old and New Testaments scream so loudly to me. I cannot help but believe.

P.S. I just saw a trailer for Spiderman 2 (which I did not see in the theaters), and dang if it doesn't look like a good movie.

Posted by Doug Van Pelt at February 8, 2005 09:06 AM