The Lord said to Moses, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘These are my appointed festivals, the appointed festivals of the Lord, which you are to proclaim as sacred assemblies.
“‘There are six days when you may work, but the seventh day is a day of sabbath rest, a day of sacred assembly. You are not to do any work; wherever you live, it is a sabbath to the Lord.
“‘These are the Lord’s appointed festivals, the sacred assemblies you are to proclaim at their appointed times: The Lord’s Passover begins at twilight on the fourteenth day of the first month.
- Leviticus 23:1-5
“‘On the first day of the seventh month hold a sacred assembly and do no regular work. It is a day for you to sound the trumpets. As an aroma pleasing to the Lord, offer a burnt offering of one young bull, one ram and seven male lambs a year old, all without defect. With the bull offer a grain offering of three-tenths of an ephah of the finest flour mixed with olive oil; with the ram, two-tenths; and with each of the seven lambs, one-tenth. Include one male goat as a sin offering to make atonement for you. These are in addition to the monthly and daily burnt offerings with their grain offerings and drink offerings as specified. They are food offerings presented to the Lord, a pleasing aroma.
“‘On the tenth day of this seventh month hold a sacred assembly. You must deny yourselves and do no work. Present as an aroma pleasing to the Lord a burnt offering of one young bull, one ram and seven male lambs a year old, all without defect. With the bull offer a grain offering of three-tenths of an ephah of the finest flour mixed with oil; with the ram, two-tenths; and with each of the seven lambs, one-tenth. Include one male goat as a sin offering, in addition to the sin offering for atonement and the regular burnt offering with its grain offering, and their drink offerings.
- Numbers 29:1-11
“‘In addition to what you vow and your freewill offerings, offer these to the Lord at your appointed festivals: your burnt offerings, grain offerings, drink offerings and fellowship offerings.’”
- Numbers 29:39
So the Jews agreed to continue the celebration they had begun, doing what Mordecai had written to them. For Haman son of Hammedatha, the Agagite, the enemy of all the Jews, had plotted against the Jews to destroy them and had cast the pur (that is, the lot) for their ruin and destruction. But when the plot came to the king’s attention, he issued written orders that the evil scheme Haman had devised against the Jews should come back onto his own head, and that he and his sons should be impaled on poles. (Therefore these days were called Purim, from the word pur.) Because of everything written in this letter and because of what they had seen and what had happened to them, the Jews took it on themselves to establish the custom that they and their descendants and all who join them should without fail observe these two days every year, in the way prescribed and at the time appointed. These days should be remembered and observed in every generation by every family, and in every province and in every city. And these days of Purim should never fail to be celebrated by the Jews—nor should the memory of these days die out among their descendants.
So Queen Esther, daughter of Abihail, along with Mordecai the Jew, wrote with full authority to confirm this second letter concerning Purim.
- Esther 9:23-29
Boilerplate
I’m Harold Dykstra. I’m retired, but I go to food bank distributions all over Tracy and talk to people that need someone who will listen to their story. My time is well spent. A police lieutenant suggested that I write down the conversations that I had with an angel. I did not know she was an angel at the time. The angel, for a little over a year, indwelled a life-sized posable action figure my children bought me, so that I would not be perceived as travelling alone. And in a way, she was training me for what I do while talking to the needy. She probed my heart to find out what I believed and how I express love for others. She changed my life. Since she was a doll that had come to life, we came up with the term ‘other living.’ She was not human, an animal, or even a plant, but she was definitely living, and very vibrant. Oh, excuse me, angels have no gender, but the angel indwelled a doll named Bountiful Babs. After seeing the angel in that form for over a year, I cannot see her in my mind in any other form.
This Week’s Question
In the last episode, Babs studied the bulletin and decided to go to every Christmas Eve worship service. But now, I was starting to pack our suitcase. Odd, I am thinking of it as our suitcase, but she does not have too much clothing, a lot more since she opened her Christmas presents.
Babs walked into my bedroom and fell backwards onto the bed. She had never placed her body on my bed before. “Harold, can we have a vacation from our holidays and vacation days? I’m exhausted.”
I asked, “I did not think that ‘other living’ got tired. You can read the entire Bible in one night while I am sleeping. You packed up all the craft stuff and junk in this house, sorted it, and stored it in Morrie’s room, all in one night. How can having time off to do nothing but rest be tiring?”
She raised up on her elbows. “It has been all this holiday cheer, if cheer is the right word. I looked up Leviticus 23, and I found no reference to Christmas anywhere. You would think that a virgin birth, the birth of the child who would die for people’s sins and save them from the second death… You would think all that was worthy of an appointed feast or festival. I came up with nothing. Then the New Year’s Day thing. Drinking, partying, making noise! Nothing!”
I raised a hand. “Wait a minute. The Festival of Trumpets, what they call Rosh Hashanah, is an appointed festival. The details are in Numbers 29, along with the following day of atonement.”
Babs looked at me like I had grown a horn or something. “Yeah!! But that is nothing like what we had a few days ago! With the Festival of Trumpets, the day is announced by trumpet blasts, but that is followed by fasting, being solemn, dedication and repentance. And that lasts for ten days. Then on the Day of Atonement we celebrate. I saw people making resolutions to keep for the New Year during the New Year’s Eve party we attended, and those same people had broken their resolution before they left the party! Where is the dedication and repentance in that?”
I groaned, “Just wait until the Lenten season and the preparation for Ash Wednesday is the wildest parties you’ll ever see. And we will not be in New Orleans, Louisiana to see it. There is no way any of my customers in that area would schedule an appointment during that festival.”
Then Babs asked, “What about what Numbers 29:39 says? I did not see you putting in extra and you are getting the largest bonus you have ever gotten.”
I smiled, “But, Babs, we went over that before. I will not get that bonus check until later this month. The church allows me to mail in my donation. I have a checkbook ready, just for that.”
Babs scrunched her nose. “Thank you for folding my clothes and putting them in your suitcase. Why do you fold them that way?”
I sighed, “Babs, I have been travelling for a long time, but I learned my packing skills from my father. I think he learned his skills from the military. You hold out the shirt or blouse as you would see it when worn. You fold it in thirds, letting the long sleeves fall neatly within those folds. Then you lay the garment front tail down and then a single fold in the middle. It kind of looks like the shirt just came out of the package. The old military way was to always have a carefully starched and ironed crease, perfectly vertical through the middle of the pocket. This way of folding comes close to that, in that no matter how you fold, you will have some wrinkles. But this way, the wrinkle looks like it was meant to be there in the first place. Then, when you get to the hotel, you hang out the clothes so that with these modern fabrics, some of those wrinkles will relax out of the clothing anyway. Why did you ask?”
Babs said, with her nose still scrunched, “It just seems weird.”
I laughed, “My wife said the same thing when we went on our first trip. But then, decades later, she saw me packing my suitcase. She came up to me and hugged me. She said, ‘I thought your way of folding was stupid and definitely too much trouble, but it really works. You are a smart man, Harold Dykstra. I have learned a lot from you.’”
Babs sat up and even bounced on the bed. “But when I looked on the internet, I found Purim. The appointed feasts and festivals are in Leviticus 23, but where does Purim come from?”
I chuckled, “Babs, you are thorough. Purim is the celebration of the Jews being saved from their enemies. You know the story of Esther. Well, in Esther 9, Mordecai and Queen Esther establish a festival to celebrate their escape from annihilation, and they named it Purim. And why do they call it Purim?”
Babs thought for a few seconds. “Haman plotted to destroy the Jews. He cast the pur for their destruction, and pur means lot, like tossing the dice.”
I smiled, “You did so well. I am proud of you.”
She smiled, “Harold, you are a good teacher. Ummm. And Harold, where are we going?”
I smiled, “In the winter, go South. We’ll go straight south of here and catch a couple of customers until we get to a major east-west interstate. We’ll head east and then south down the coast. We’ll then take the southern-most east-west interstate back west, along the Gulf Coast. If I do not have any reason to come home for the Spring, we can continue west to California and up the Pacific coast in the Spring until the weather is a little better in the mountains. Then we’ll come home. Do you want to come home when we get back near Tracy on our way west?”
Babs smiled and nodded excitedly.
I laughed and said that was reason enough. I thought about it for a second. “Do you want to fast for the next ten days? You know, like with Rosh Hashanah?”
She giggled, “Nope. You have customers to see, but we can cut way down on the carbohydrates. I am still feeling that fruitcake. Do those things ever digest?!”
I looked at her to see if she was joking. After we made eye contact for about ten seconds, we both burst out laughing.
Credits
All these conversations remind me of my conversations with my wife. We would talk about anything and everything. And most of the time, it sounded like a discussion in a Sunday school class.
It took my wife quite a while to get tired of the holiday season. When we were in Europe, the Post Exchange (PX) would open their toy store in October. They would usually close it down due to lack of stock in early November. That started our holiday shopping tradition, everything purchased very early. The only problem with that is that the toy that is the hot item usually does not get advertised until Thanksgiving. Then, we’d fight the crowds to get that toy before it sold out in early December. We tried to not even go to the grocery store for the week before Christmas. So, other than hunkering down while the procrastinators fought over the last of this or the next to last of that, we had family time. And my wife was always on the phone in November telling our son that we needed sizes and what they wanted. We gave money or gift cards for the games. Since we never played that stuff, we had no way of keeping up with what they wanted or needed.
But the last couple of Christmases had no tree. The photo above is the totality of my Christmas this year. A can of nuts from one of my sister-in-law (and a box of petit fours from another). They talk about putting your presents under the tree. I went even better. I put my little tree atop my present. But back in the years just before my wife died, my wife and I celebrated in our own way. When you have just one or two presents to open, you can focus on the real reason for the season, and you can realize the promise the angels sang about that first Christmas morning: peace, blessed peace.
And as for the packing style, I learned it from my father and my wife told me just a year or two ago what Harold tells Babs, except she used my name instead of “Harold Dykstra.”
And in spite of the joke about fruitcake, I love fruitcake. And none of the stores around here have any! I found it online, but I did not order any. One more year without fruitcake and I think that fruitcake I had five years ago might really be fully digested!
Soli Deo Gloria. Only to God be the Glory.
Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley 
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