/ health
On the birthday of Victoria, the cantus firmus of the Ellsworth family, the fun theory. It’s there in Holy Writ, the most recent public example being the appointed lectionary reading of a couple Sundays ago, the howler from the eleventh chapter of the Book of Numbers of all things. It was all I could do not to fall off my prayer desk.
The rabble among them had a strong craving; and the Israelites also wept again, and said, “If only we had meat to eat! We remember the fish we used to eat in Egypt for nothing, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic; but now our strength is dried up, and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.”
Moses heard the people weeping throughout their families, all at the entrances of their tents. Then the LORD became very angry, and Moses was displeased. So Moses said to the LORD, “Why have you treated your servant so badly? Why have I not found favor in your sight, that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child,’ to the land that you promised on oath to their ancestors? Where am I to get meat to give to all this people? For they come weeping to me and say, ‘Give us meat to eat!’ I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is the way you are going to treat me, put me to death at once—if I have found favor in your sight—and do not let me see my misery.”
So the LORD said to Moses, “Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel, whom you know to be the elders of the people and officers over them; bring them to the tent of meeting, and have them take their place there with you.”
So Moses went out and told the people the words of the LORD; and he gathered seventy elders of the people, and placed them all around the tent. Then the LORD came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was on him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But they did not do so again.
What money can't buy
My friend Rodney Clapp’s gentle entry into the health care reform debate begins thus. Read the whole thing at The Christian Century.
The intense debates over health-care reform have brought to mind some poignant memories. When my father was in his early 40s he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Our entire family was shaken, but perhaps no one more than Granddad and Grandma Clapp. Moving into their elderly years, they had to watch a son die.
To eke out a living, Granddad Clapp had left his family when he was 15 or 16. Coming of age during the Great Depression, he cowboyed and hired out as a farmhand. Over time he scratched together enough money to buy cropland in the Oklahoma Panhandle. He stuck with it through the monstrous dust storms of the 1930s, plowing down sand dunes on an iron-wheeled tractor. After decades of sweat and the good luck of finding oil beneath their land, Granddad and Grandma finally learned what it was like to live with plenty rather than scarcity.
So you can see why, before those terrible days of my father’s illness, Granddad Clapp in my eyes had always been a tough, stoic man of the soil. And you can understand why I was surprised that, one day when we got a few minutes alone, Granddad cried. I had never seen him weep. He put a labor-weathered hand on my knee and said, “Now I’ve got all this money. And there’s nothing I can do with it to make your dad well.” I wouldn’t have put it this way then, but Granddad had come eye to eye with the truth that many human goods—and health is one of them—cannot be comprehended or determined by money. There are limits to the reach of the market.
