Listening to the Bible in the Car

I am SUPER visual. Super visual.

I think one of the reasons I did so well in school is that I can learn information from books extremely well. 

My auditory skills haven't been the greatest, and they've gotten worse as our house got more and more full of noisy people. (I can be noisy too -- I'm not saying it is everyone else!)

In the first years of motherhood, I liked to listen to the Christian radio show Focus on the Family.  It is a great show and I learned from it and was encouraged by it. But then it got too noisy.  I'd be listening and screams would emanate from somewhere and I'd miss part of what was going on. So I gave up on the radio.

Fast forward many years, to like, now.  We have had the Bible on CD for many years and I used to play it for the kids OCCASIONALLY. But the same issues held -- it was noisy and people would miss what was going on in a passage.

I decided recently that even though I'm visual, and even though I get a lot from reading the Bible, it would be pleasant to listen to the Bible in the car when I am alone.  So I ripped the Bible CD's and put them on the thumb drive that I use for my music in the car.

And it has been really neat and to my surprise, I'm actually noticing things I have never noticed when reading. Or if I did notice them previously, but had forgotten.

I listened to the entire book of Esther in the last couple of days. Haman the Agagite plotted to destroy the Jews in the first month of the year in question, but when he cast the lots, the day to destroy the Jews fell in the 12th month.  Esther intervened, and the King had Haman exectued in the 3rd month, leaving 9 months for the Jews to organize to protect themselves.

So I found  that interesting. It wasn't an 11th hour salvation, so to speak. 

Also, Haman was executed and Mordecai was raised to the position of King Xerxes's right hand man, and yet some people still tried to kill the Jews in the 12th month. That seems...stupid. I don't know much about Persian culture, but people have been greedy, and violent, and racist for a very long time.

And why didn't Haman's sons get out of Susa?  Their father had been executed and yet 9 months after his death, they were still raring to go in attacking the Jews of the capital city. Again, that just seems stupid. But people are sometimes.  For sure.

Going off in another direction, we had a dinner discussion about Napoleon Bonaparte this week.  This dude was smart smart smart as a military commander, but his vaulting ambition resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen and soldiers of other countries as well.  So smart guy, very dubious morals. 

And Henry VIII?  REALLY?  Your wife doesn't bear you a son, and a mistress pressures you, so you divorce your loyal wife in favor of the mistress, marry the mistress, then have her executed a few years later on trumped up charges?

Some people are evil jerks.