September 23, 2009

Schooling Time

Okay, Thanks to Mark (mvgh) Hoffman - and thank you, Lord! - I've been taken to school. It's funny what can get stuck in your head wrong without being corrected... until you finally start trying to use it (in real life!) and have to undo the wrong learning to replace it with good learning.

I'll keep wondering if there's some poetic or spiritual sense in which the Kingdom is also drawing [us] near, in Matthew 4:17. (Deleted post of yesterday, perhaps still in your feed.) Or maybe it is also implicitly drawing [Him] near. But wonderings aside, I definitely understand now why the most straightforward rendering is simply that the Kingdom draws [itself] near, or, "approaches". I like "approaches" much better than "is at hand" anyway! And for all this, and for David Ker who posted about it in the first place, I'm extremely grateful.

On a related note, Peter Kirk has me just about convinced that "pitiful" isn't worth as much consideration in Matthew 5:7 as I suspected it might be. Again, still I wonder. But, oh so so. So much learning. And I hate to say, I am beginning to HATE not knowing much more about Greek than I do. But there's only so much time for schooling, isn't there? Alas, alack. What to do?

I was told eight years ago in Greece that a wealthy American once asked an Italian tour guide how long they needed to spend before understanding the history and cultural heritage of Rome. Gently and graciously, the guide answered: Un'ora. Una vita. One hour. One life.

Time to press on, then...

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"If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been owing more to patient observation than to any other reason."

-- Isaac Newton