Today's Scripture Reading (September 30, 2020): Nehemiah 2
American Author
Courtney Stevens, in “The June Boys,” reminds us that if “you meet Noah after the flood, you think, That brave,
faith-filled, visionary man. You meet him before and you're
like, What a nut job. Perspective and timing matter. Sometimes
you have to accept that you might not be able to see the truth from here.” It
is one of the realities of life, and timing is everything. Noah’s position was
not unique. Visionaries are often thought to be nut-jobs in the before because
they see something that we just don’t see.
Of course, the other side of the
coin is that the visionary often has to choose their moment. In the aftermath
of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, it is notable that she saw her losses as
opportunities to change the future. In the writing of her Supreme Court dissents,
her messages were not just that the majority court opinion was, in her opinion,
wrong. Her legal dissents were meant to encourage some unknown jurists in the
future to reconsider the decision and change the law. She had proven to be a
visionary who saw something different, and better, in our future. I am not arguing
that RBG was infallible; I do not agree with all of her opinions, but, sometimes,
her thought-provoking writings have proven that she saw something different in
the future that the rest of us missed.
God gave Nehemiah a vision for the
future. Nehemiah leaves the comfort of his life, lived in the palace of the King
in Persia, and goes to the broken city of Jerusalem. Interestingly, he does not
ride into town announcing that God had given him a message and that this was
the course of action that the city needed to achieve. Nehemiah takes the time
to get to know the leaders in Jerusalem, realizing that the city did not need a
savior from Persia ready to solve the city’s problems. It was likely that the
plan of action he had received from God would be the dissenting opinion in the
city. And to succeed, Nehemiah was going to need allies.
Nehemiah arrives in Jerusalem. He comes
to the city with a military escort and lumber that came from the personal forests
of the King of Persia. No one missed the entrance of this man as the cupbearer to
the King arrives at the city. But Nehemiah allows them to get to know him while
assessing the situation present in the city before he gets down to the vision
that he has received from God and presents the plan of action that the city would
need to follow. In the waiting, he allows the people to get to know him before
they can respond that the visionary from Persia is really just a nut job because
it might have been entirely possible that the people of the city could not see God’s
future from for Judah from the place that they stood.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Nehemiah
3
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