Threes

There’s an old saying that death always comes in threes. It’s just a superstition, but it does reflect the fact that sometimes in our lives there are times when it seems like everything is coming at us at once. This seems to be one of those moments for Jacob. Just as he’s finally finished his [...]

Two sides to every story

And sometimes, the Bible tells them both.  We saw this with the creation stories, and it happens again in Genesis. Today’s reading tells  us how when Laban mistreated Jacob and kept changing his wages, God made it all ok because God made the flock only produce the kind of sheep that would be Jacob’s.  It [...]

Can’t buy me love

Every so often, as I flip through channels, I stop and watch a few minutes of The Bachelor. I do not recommend it. The show brings in a dozen or so women who are all trying to do whatever they can to earn the bachelor’s love, so that at the end he will marry them. [...]

The Trickster Tricked

That’s the title my old children’s Bible gives to this section.  After playing all those tricks on others, Jacob gets tricked himself. It’s a story that (in some form) gets told in every culture I can think of.  In Native American myth, there is usually a character specifically known as the Trickster (often a coyote, [...]