Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Then the city wall was broken through, and the whole army fled at night through the gate between the two walls near the king’s garden, though the Babylonians were surrounding the city. They fled toward the Arabah, but the Babylonian army pursued the king and overtook him in the plains of Jericho. All his soldiers were separated from him and scattered, and he was captured.

• 2 Kings 25:4-6

If a Levite moves from one of your towns anywhere in Israel where he is living, and comes in all earnestness to the place the Lord will choose, he may minister in the name of the Lord his God like all his fellow Levites who serve there in the presence of the Lord. He is to share equally in their benefits, even though he has received money from the sale of family possessions.

• Deuteronomy 18:6-8

To explain the two odd Scripture references.  I searched for verses that contained two words: broken and whole.  The verse from 2 Kings was one of about four.  Then I did another search to find a verse that had both share and equally.  The verse from Deuteronomy 18 was the only one.

What do those things have in common?

My wife and I ate very healthy food.  She was good at preparing fantastic meals, not just one dish here or there.  But we were infamous with our snacks.  She might make something, especially sweet things, but we loved the salty things also.

But to make it sharing equally, I loved the sweet stuff.  She would eat one piece and then I had to finish it off.  But we would equally share the salty.  She commandeered the bag of freshly popped popcorn, and she would shake some into the bowl for me.  She liked licking the salty butter from the inside of the bag. I always suspected that she ate more popcorn than I did, but I never complained.

Then when it came to things like the pretzel crisps in the photo, she saw me munching one day and she said, “You are doing your craziness again.  You count how many you eat.  You need to be more spontaneous, but I notice that you only eat the whole ones.  I like the broken ones.”

So, if the salty snack was something that had clearly defined whole ones and broken ones, we had an equitable means of dividing them between us.  And since she sat watching television at night and I went to and from the kitchen getting snacks, I was very careful not to break any of the things we divided by broken and whole.  The box or bag always came with a lot of it broken. And I would only eat my number’s worth. If the whole ones that were left was less than my number, I would break them and let her have the rest of the bag.

This made our broken-whole equally shared, or so I thought.

One day, I got home a little early and my wife was trying to put away the afternoon evidence.  She had a bag of one of the broken-whole snacks and it would not fit in the cabinet.  The reason was that she was putting it in the wrong place.  But to make it fit she wedged it into the cabinet and then pressed the door down until there was a great deal of crunching noises.

I said that I wanted some, but as I reached into the bag, everything was broken.

She was such a loving and sharing person.  I am sure this was just a coincidence.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.