I know largely I use this space for ministry-related postings, and so an entry about my weight loss or fat burner struggles can seem out of place; but I do believe that sharing some of the things I struggle with has a purpose, just as much as my insights on the LORD.

After all, our bodies are temples to the LORD, and any efforts we make to keep our temples clean and presentable are laudable, I believe. Whether those efforts involve casting aside defiling objects like sinful habits, or working to get into better shape and physical health, it’s all part of attempting to keep our temples clean.

Can one go overboard by focusing too much on the physical body and not enough on the spirit? Certainly.

I’m not there yet, though.

I’m slowly adding more exercise into my weight loss efforts. Whether it’s walking a couple times a week with my wife or going swimming at our apartment’s pool, it certainly seems to boost my metabolism for a day or two and help in moving the scale in the right direction for me.

I’m not one to use artificial weight loss solutions like apidexin; I prefer to lose my weight the honest way, by smarter eating habits and exercise.

Fortunately right now, it’s summer and it’s easier to exercise. The challenge will come after the temps drop and the snow falls.

Well, I finally delivered my sermon on repentance this past Shabbat, and the response was humbling. At least a half-dozen people came forward after the message for prayer… something that does not happen regularly, so when it does, you know it’s genuine.

While many people thanked me for the message, I must say that anything that happened for people at that level did not come from me; it was clearly a move of God’s Ruach through the words God gave me.

This is no “false humility” on my part; it’s genuinely a response that I did not see coming or anticipate.

I’m not sure what people were repenting of since I’m not in a prayer-consoling position at this point; it could have been anything. Yet whether someone is struggling with substance issues that involve frequenting a bar or a smoke shop, or whether they’re merely holding on to anger or bitterness, it is certainly good to see people willing to submit to the prompting of the Spirit and cast off whatever’s defiling them, so they can be restored to unity with God and see his power made real in their lives once more.

Isn’t that what we all want?

Sometimes we need the spiritual version of natural colon cleansers; something to detoxify our spirit, cleanse us of all the garbage, and help restore us to unity with God. That’s what my sermon on repentance was like, I think. I wasn’t sure how it would be received when I wrote it, but the response was very encouraging; at least a half-dozen people came forward for prayer during the worship set that followed. Nice to see God move in people’s lives. Enjoy the sermon below. Or listen to it! Or, maybe watch it! Or watch it smaller!

Shabbat Shalom.

Today, I’d like to talk about something that is hard to talk about. It’s hard because, whenever to teach about something, you had better be sure you’re living up to what you teach. And this is a hard one to live up to for any of us: repentance. The word repentance comes to us from the Hebrew word:

STRONG’S H8666 תְּשׁוּבַת TESHUBAH
1. Answer, be expired, return.
2. From shuwb; a recurrence (of time or place); a reply (as returned) — answer, be expired, return.

So repentance is an answer to something, and a return to something. It is also an expiration of something. What is repentance a return to? What is repentance an answer to? And what is repentance the expiration of? We’ll get to the answers before we’re done today. Yet before we get there, I believe it’s valuable to take a look at what repentance has come to mean to believers today.

The reason I want to explore our modern context for repentance first, rather than explore this concept’s original context, is because repentance today is primarily considered a “church word.” What is a “church word?” Well, it’s a word that’s largely used in church and not often used outside of it. Therefore, I think it’s useful to look at how this word is understood today, so we can examine if our understanding of repentance matches up with the Biblical understanding of it.

Lately, I’ve come across some rather … unique views on repentance held by various believers. These views concern me.

I recently had a conversation with a person who attends a mainstream Christian church and this is what she told me: She said, “You know, my understanding is that Jesus lives inside us and He does all our repenting for us. He does it better than we ever could, so we don’t have to worry about it.”

Here’s another take someone recently shared with me: He said, “Repentance is valuable when it comes to accepting Yeshua (Jesus) as LORD. But once you’re saved, you don’t need to keep repenting because then it becomes YOUR work, not God’s, and you make repentance something that replaces God’s grace. Jesus forgave us once, for everything, so we only have to repent once when we first come to him.”

Do either of these mindsets sound familiar? Unfortunately, they’re not as uncommon as one might hope. Each of these statements, it seems to me, sprout from the same core mentality. This mentality grows from an extreme emphasis on the concept of grace; one that lacks a balanced view of God. And of course, here at Sar Shalom, we know exactly where to look when we want a balanced view of God. We go to where He defined himself for Moses in:

EXODUS 34:6-7
And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.”

So, as we read here, God is not all grace, nor is He all judgment and holiness. He is both, at the same time. God, by his very nature, is both completely forgiving and completely holy. And so this should guide us as we look at different views of God; any teaching that does not maintain this definition God gave of Himself is very likely a misleading teaching.

With these outlooks on repentance I’ve heard from various believers lately, the most basic question that comes to my mind is: where is the Scriptural basis for these ideas?

If indeed Yeshua living inside us does all our repenting for us, there ought to be at least a couple verses that describe Him as doing this, shouldn’t there? There ought to be some indication in the teachings of Yeshua, or the letters of the apostles, that we no longer need to repent because Yeshua will do it for us once he lives in us.

Yet there is no such verse to be found. Paul makes reference to Messiah living in us, but he never suggests that Yeshua does our repenting for us so we don’t have to. Can you see how this false teaching is built? It begins with a grain of truth: as believers, Yeshua now lives in us. But then someone comes along and adds human logic, human-invented ideas, to that truth, until it veers off to the right or to the left of exactly what Scripture tells us.

It’s the same with the second mindset on repentance that I described. Yes, it’s true; Yeshua died once for all our sins! But does that, by extension, mean we don’t have to repent from sins we commit after coming to salvation? Does it mean we’re forgiven even before we sin? Does it, therefore, mean that we now have a license to sin because, as Paul seems to indicate when you take him out of context, “wherever sin abounded, grace abounded much more?”

Paul had a response to this very mindset. We find it in:

ROMANS 6:1-2
What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer in it?

Yet the objection could be made: Craig, how can you be sure? How can you know that our understanding is more accurate than someone else’s? Well, let’s be like the Bereans today. Let’s take a closer look at what the whole of the Bible teaches us about repentance and its importance and role in the life of a believer. Let’s see for ourselves what Scripture supports and what it does not, and then let’s believe that.

Now that we know some of the mistaken impressions that are circulating among some believers today about the nature of repentance, let’s begin to see what the Bible itself teaches us about it, and cast aside anything that doesn’t fit with that Biblical understanding. One of the earliest occurrences of the concept of repentance comes to us from:

I KINGS 8:46-50
“When they sin against you—for there is no one who does not sin—and you become angry with them and give them over to the enemy, who takes them captive to his own land, far away or near; and if they have a change of heart in the land where they are held captive, and repent and plead with you in the land of their conquerors and say, ‘We have sinned, we have done wrong, we have acted wickedly’; and if they turn back to you with all their heart and soul in the land of their enemies who took them captive, and pray to you toward the land you gave their fathers, toward the city you have chosen and the temple I have built for your Name; then from heaven, your dwelling place, hear their prayer and their plea, and uphold their cause. And forgive your people, who have sinned against you; forgive all the offenses they have committed against you,

Now, how does that measure up to how we see repentance practiced by believers today? Not very well, right? Too often, our impression of repentance is limited to simply telling God, “Ooops. We messed up. Sorry about that. Thanks for forgiving me through Yeshua!”

But that’s not what we see here, is it? No, this sort of repentance is no simple, “Ooops.” It involves what? First of all, a change of heart. Also, pleading with God from a position of brokenness for His mercy and forgiveness. And importantly, as I think will become clearer by the time we’re done, it involves agreeing with God in detail that He is right, and we are wrong.

Now, this is no attempt to simplify the steps given in I Kings into some formula that we can satisfy in a quick, ninety-second prayer and then move on in our lives like nothing ever happened. Remember, we are called to be in relationship with God, and when we sin, that relationship is broken.

Think about it. How many of us accept half-hearted apologies that only go skin deep, that make it obvious that the same offense is likely to occur again … perhaps the same day… even the same hour? Yes, we’re called to forgive until we lose count, but even if we do accept a shallow apology, do we trust that person has undergone a change of heart? Not likely. If we can know this, limited as we are with our imperfect, human understanding, then how much more must the Creator of the universe not be fooled by shallow apologies?

So repentance is more than a simple, “I’m sorry,” right? But we have more to learn about it. I particularly like this insight found in the book of Job, where it is written in:

JOB 34:31-33
“Suppose a man says to God, ‘I am guilty but will offend no more. Teach me what I cannot see; if I have done wrong, I will not do so again.’ Should God then reward you on your terms, when you refuse to repent?

The reason I like this passage is that this is how many of us would prefer to relate to God. We want the blessings the LORD has to offer, but we want it on OUR terms, not His. We don’t want to have to repent, or even to be told we need to repent. We want simple, uplifting, inspirational messages that can be summed up in bumper-sticker phrases like, “I’m OK – You’re OK,” or “Don’t worry, be happy!”

Does God reward us on our own terms? Does God reward us when we refuse to repent?

To answer this, we have to know exactly how important the concept of repentance was to Yeshua Himself, don’t we? We get a clue to how Yeshua valued repentance in:

MATTHEW 4:17
From that time on Jesus began to preach, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.”

Now this passage comes from early in Yeshua’s public ministry. He began to preach “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near,” we are told. And is this a one-time message? Not at all, because the passage tells us he did this, “from that time on.” This indicates repentance is a theme that became a hallmark of Yeshua’s ministry, a message he’d return to over and over again. We also learn this from:

MARK 6:12-13
They [the disciples] went out and preached that people should repent. They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

So repentance wasn’t just a theme of Yeshua’s ministry, but it was the central theme he taught those who followed him to teach as well.

So, was Yeshua unique in his emphasis on repentance? Not really. Jewish tradition tells us that Maimonides the Rambam taught that, “All the prophets preach repentance.” This saying came to be known as Maimonides’ dictum.

Furthermore, Yochanan the Immerser – better known as John the Baptist – also preached repentance as a central theme, and he taught it fearlessly, as we read in:

MATTHEW 3:7-9
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.

Now, this passage is rich with significance. We see here that, unlike our current Western mentality, repentance is not merely agreeing with God for a moment in prayer that He is right and we are wrong. It goes deeper than that, because he tells these Pharisees, “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” So repentance can’t be just a one-time action; it is something that will continue to manifest itself throughout your life, if you continue to walk in it. This passage also indicates to us that our identity – be it as a child of Abraham, or by extension, as a follower of Yeshua – does not make us immune to the need for repentance.

Now, up to this point, what I’ve shared is something most believers would agree with. Most people get this. But the objection that begins to be raised at this point is, “Craig, what you’re saying is fine. But as far as I can see, repentance only applies to sinners, not those of us who are believers, who are already in Messiah.”

John’s words start to break down that concept. Let’s see what else we can find. Here’s what we read in:

ROMANS 2:3-5
So when you, a mere man, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment? Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance? But because of your stubbornness and your unrepentant heart, you are storing up wrath against yourself for the day of God’s wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed.

Is Paul’s letter to the Romans addressed to believers, here, or those who are still lost, still outside of life in Messiah? Traditionally, it is believed that Paul was writing Romans to the first-century Messianic community he’d help establish in Rome, and addressing issues that had popped up in his absence. But if that’s not clear enough, let’s take a look at perhaps the clearest example of repentance being a topic addressed to believers. The author of Hebrews writes this in:

HEBREWS 6:4-6
It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace.

After reading this passage, can there be any doubt that repentance is a topic that does apply to all of us as believers and not merely those who are still lost in their sin? You see, when someone falls away from Yeshua, or slips back into sin, what’s the first thing most believers say?

“Oh, well, they must never have been saved! They didn’t really know Yeshua anyway, because no one who REALLY knows him could act like that.”

Let me be clear that this idea that believers can never fall away is simply not supported in Scripture. Can you name anyone of whom it can be said that they have been enlightened, tasted the heavenly gift, shared in the Ruach haKodesh, tasted the goodness of the word of God and the powers of the coming age – and yet still be considered an unbeliever who “was never really saved anyway?”

If so, then was Moses “never really saved” when he struck the rock, rather than speaking to it as commanded? Moses is called God’s friend … was he never really saved? Let me answer that one: No! He was in a relationship with the creator of the universe, and Moses – the friend of God – was still susceptible to sin! So what makes the difference for Moses?

Repentance.

Moses was continually willing to acknowledge when he was wrong and God was right. He never fought with God over it for any length of time. He didn’t let pride get in the way of admitting his sins. And if any man has ever had a reason to let pride get in the way of his humility before the LORD, it was Moses!

I mean, Moses was the person God used to lead the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt! He had a following of over a million people who followed him into a desert for forty years – not even the most popular mega-church leaders today have that kind of following. And yet Moses was willing to repent when he fell into error.

How can any of us, who have accomplished so much less, be any less willing to humble ourselves, set aside our foolish pride, and begin to admit at the core of our being that God is right and we are wrong? It’s essential. It’s so essential that if we’re not willing to do so, we could even miss out on Messiah. We read this in:

ISAIAH 59:20
“The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins,” declares the LORD.

You see, what is true is that God’s spirit, his Ruach, his spirit of truth, is in us; but He is the spirit of truth, so he cannot and will not continue to abide in us if we continue to abide in rebellion and deception, if we continue to embrace pride over truth. He comes for those who repent, not those who justify themselves!

There’s a Jewish tradition I really appreciate that paints a solid picture of this struggle we can go through when it comes to humbling ourselves to the point of real repentance. It comes to us in:

TA’AN 16A
“He that confesses his sin and still clings to it is likened to a man that holds in his hand a defiling object; though he bathes in all the waters of the world he is not cleansed; but the moment he casts the defiling object from him a single bath will cleanse him, as it is said (Prov. 28:13): He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”

You see, to truly be walking in repentance, we can’t hold on to the sins making us unclean. We can’t claim holiness, but continue to walk in rebellion. We have to cast the source of our sinful behaviors from us, in order to truly experience the forgiveness, mercy and grace of God. We have to let go.

You see, God doesn’t play games when it comes to repentance. He’s not fooled by them. This is a concept even the rabbis understood, as we find in another Jewish tradition from:

MISHNAH, YOMA 85B:
If one says: I shall sin and repent, sin and repent, no opportunity will be given to him to repent. [If one says]: I shall sin and the Day of Atonement will procure atonement for me, the Day of Atonement procures for him no atonement.

You know, a lack of repentance can be the cause behind a lot of things that hold us back from truly experiencing and knowing God face-to-face, from truly knowing his joy and seeing that joy manifest itself in our lives.

How many believers do you know, who claim to know and love God, but as you see them interact more and more, it becomes apparent that they are people who are bitter, angry, scared, easily offended, short-tempered, untrusting … the list goes on. Does that sound like the gifts of the Ruach haKodesh to you? Of course not.

So, what’s holding these people back? Well, it can vary from believer to believer. But there are some very common themes.

Sometimes, it can be a wounded spirit from what we perceive to be unanswered prayer.

For example, how many of us have gone through this: There’s something really, sincerely important to us, so we pray God will respond in a certain way. But what we’re praying for isn’t what comes about. Maybe what we prayed about was asking God for something outside of his nature, like bringing a person to salvation who has no interest in God, or making someone love us who doesn’t, or making someone who is leaving us stay, or allowing someone to survive and be healed, but that doesn’t happen.

We tend to treat God like a genie in a bottle sometimes, thinking that anything we pray for, He’ll grant us. But that’s not how Yeshua modeled prayer for us, is it? No, He showed us to pray for His perfect will over our own. But when God’s will doesn’t match ours, do we accept that He knows more than us, or do we begin to blame him? Down that path lies bitterness, anger, rebellion, sin and death.

Here’s another thing that can get in the way, one I know well from my own walk with God: the victim mentality. How often do we refuse to repent of our own actions because we feel we have been wronged and our actions are only in response to that?

How often do we justify what we know deep down to be sin because, “Hey, this other person did it to me first,” or “I’m only doing to them what they did to me.” This attitude builds walls between God and us, because it is literally arguing with God about whether we’ve sinned or not! Does God reward us on our terms when refuse to repent? I wouldn’t count on it.

Sometimes, the barrier can even be justifying current actions because of past actions. This week, as I was preparing this message, I got a call from someone looking for advice. He told me, “I’m Messianic and I want to get a tattoo with the name of God – Y H W H. That’s not going to endanger my salvation, is it?”

I told him, “No, it’s not a salvation issue, but it is an obedience issue.”

He responded, “Leviticus, right? OK, so here’s my other option. I could get a tattoo with my son’s name. Would that be OK?”
I said, “I think maybe you misunderstood me. It’s not the name of God or the name of your son that’s an issue. The Torah forbids getting a tattoo.”

He said, “What if I got the name of God put on me in Hebrew? Yod-hey-vav-hey?”

By this point, the conversation reminded me of Balaam’s experience with Balak… “Well, OK, maybe we’ll get a different response if we go over here and try it from this angle.”

So I told him, “Look, Leviticus 19:28 says, ‘Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.’ You can either obey, or disobey. The choice is yours.”

So finally he told me, “Well, it’s too late for that. I already have a ton of tattoos. And in fact, I’ve used them to start conversations and seen people come to the LORD through them.”

I told him it was never too late to start obeying by not adding more tattoos to the ones he already had, but the conversation was soon over after that.

None of us are all that different when it comes right down to it, are we? We know what God commands, what He asks us to obey … and rather than bring our obedience in line to His word, we would rather justify our rebellion, claiming that what we do now doesn’t matter because we’ve made the same bad choices in the past, or we’ve used our mistakes to share the Gospel with people so they’re not really mistakes and it’s OK to continue making the same mistakes. It’s all deception.

No matter what our roadblocks are, though, we – even and maybe especially we believers – are called to repent. When I began this message we looked at the definition for the Hebrew word repentance comes from – teshubah – and learned that, Biblically, it indicates an answer to something, a return to something, and an expiration of something. In light of our study, I think we can now fill in the blanks here.

Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is the expiration of what? Of our fighting with God over whether something is sin or not; it is the expiration of our rebellion against God’s righteous rulings.

Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is our answer to what? To the conviction that comes from the Holy Spirit – the Ruach haKodesh – the Spirit of Truth letting us know we’ve fallen short of God’s standard.

Repentance – real, Biblical repentance – is a return to what? To being in unity with God, placing Him back to His rightful position as the ruler of our lives.

Only when we cast aside that which defiles us can we be made clean once again in God’s sight. If we’re capable and culpable of sin, repentance is required. Only then can it be said of us that we have not treated the grace Yeshua won for us through His death and resurrection like a cheap, dime-store ring made of cubic zirconia and fool’s gold, but have treated it like a ring of great value, made from the finest, purest gold, and the rarest, best-cut diamonds.

Repentance is our reasonable response to the spirit of God when we stray from the truth. Only a fool would refuse that reasonable response. I’ll close with this:

HEBREWS 6:9-12
Even though we speak like this, dear friends, we are confident of better things in your case—things that accompany salvation. God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. We want each of you to show this same diligence to the very end, in order to make your hope sure. We do not want you to become lazy, but to imitate those who through faith and patience inherit what has been promised.

That is our prayer for everyone here today, for everyone who hears or reads this message.

Shabbat Shalom.

I’m starting my work on my big upcoming sermon on repentance.

Filling the time up has never been a problem for me; keeping the scope focused enough to stay within the time limit is more frequently a challenge, as I’m a bit wordy… something I’m sure anyone who has read my teachings has noticed.

Another challenge for me is procrastination; as much as I love research and teaching and writing, when the time comes to start writing, just about everything seems more appealing than sitting down and typing it out, whether it’s browsing movie titles on Netflix or skimming a new site like www.redenvelope.com.

Either way, though, I almost always get the message written and handed in on time. Hopefully this time will be no exception. My desktop PC is finally back up and running; OnlineBible.net software is installed and loaded with all the tools I need.

All I really need to do now is pray and write and pray and write until it’s done.

Some people like to waste time on the Internet. Some people like to spend time doing productive things like browsing cheapestautoinsurance.net for the best deal. And some people are on the Internet for all the wrong reasons.

Here are MessianicMusings.com, I like to spend my Internet time researching and writing sermons and commentaries. It’s not a glitzy pursuit. I can’t measure it in concrete terms like a World of Warcraft gamer who can say, “Gee, I’m a level 40 orc fighter” or something.

Spiritual growth is harder to define; sometimes it even sneaks up on you without realizing it. Certainly I’ve been told my many people that I’m “ready” to take the next step and become a Messianic rabbi in my own right.

I’m not yet convinced, because I’m waiting on God for his call, his confirmation, his specific sending.

Until then, I know that the stuff I’m doing to support the call of others is exactly where God wants me. That’s something not everyone can be sure of, so I count myself blessed.

A sermon on repentance doesn’t have to be so formal that even the kids have to wear kids ties. It just needs to focus on the truth.

For my upcoming sermon on repentance, there three main points I hope to focus on.

First, I want to address some of the bad, false teachings on repentance that are out there and have been encountering of late.

Next, I want to spend some time talking about how not repenting (through either refusing to repent, or not knowing how to fully repent) damages the lives and walks of many believers.

And finally, I’ll wrap up with explaining a proper, Biblical understanding of repentance and its role in the life of believers.

It’s an ambitious outline, but I hope I’ll be able to cover all three points enough in the time I have to get some truth out there. L-RD willing, that will happen.

I have a sermon coming up.

After brainstorming, prayer and running things by Stan, I finally settled on a theme: repentance.

Now some people might prefer to listen to a sermon about allergy relief than listen to a message about repentance. But that’s kind of the point.

The reason the topic occurred to me is that it seems like lately I’m running into more and more bad teachings about repentance. I mean, some people actually claim repentance isn’t necessary for believers.

Oh, really?

No, not really. But I won’t go into detail on why just yet. Gotta save something for the sermon, right?

Well, here we are a few months after Stan finished up his prayer study and, fortunately, I am still bearing the fruit of the commitments I’ve made to more regular, longer and deeper times of prayer. Do I still have room to grow in prayer? Sure. I mean, do some people still suffer from adult acne? Naturally.

But is my prayer life a lot better than it’s ever been? Yes.

I’m grateful for what Stan taught in that study and for the benefits it has reaped; being able to more clearly hear directly from God. When you hear from God directly, it’s less common to “wonder” what God’s will for you is. He makes it clear for himself and seeking advice from others is far less necessary.

I would encourage anyone seeking to know God better to spend at least an hour a day in prayer, as close to every day as you can manage to achieve. And challenge yourself to achieve it. There’s no substitute for intimacy with the creator of the universe.

Well, I have played only a behind-the-scenes role, but it was quite a thrill today to fire up the DVR and watch the broadcast TV debut of Out Of Zion. We may not be a big client with a sell merchant account, but CW-23 has treated us well.

Of course, once you actually see a show you’ve worked on broadcast, the areas for improvement stand out more obviously. Inputting Stan’s Scripture references directly into the show, rather than relying on the the projector-on-the-wall version, will be an important upgrade to our production values, come July.

I’m also interested in seeing how we can improve the picture quality; I suspect brighter lighting on Stan would help a lot. Still, it’s nice to see that much of what Stan and I have worked on the past couple months is actually coming together.

Despite having a mostly-wonderful and long-worked-for vacation, we did have one scary episode up at Webb Lake. This is not unusual, by the way; when I was about ten and we went to Webb Lake and I had a scary episode then, too. But let’s get to that later.

What happened this time was this: it was our second-to-last day at the cabin and for the first time, all three of us went out on the lake in the boat. It was a relatively small boat and it was awkward for all three of us to be fishing. So when we came back to eat, Dad almost decided to stay home. However, I offered him the idea of coming with us but not fishing, so he’d be out in the water but not frustrated by the limited casting room. Dad agreed.

My wife had an instinct it was a bad idea, but uncharacteristically was not very direct about her misgivings. We headed out and went to a crappie hole. It was a weird day, as the wind had shifted and everything that had worked for us earlier in the week wasn’t really working anymore.

Dad, who’s 87 and battling Alzheimer’s with dementia, had a hard time sitting still in the boat and continually shifted around, making the boat unstable. Coming back from the crappie hole, I had my episode of misgivings as well; I thought about suggesting Dad, who was acting tired and restless, get dropped off at the dock. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I also kept silent and we went on a couple drifts across the lake, hoping to snag walleyes or northerns or something.

Andie came within a couple feet of landing a very large bass, but lost it at the last second on an unexpected flip. Finally we decided to head in early as there was very little action, despite that nice close call.

Two bad judgments nearly led to a tragedy. First, I misjudged the speed with which I was approaching the dock; I thought I had slowed sufficiently, but I ended up coming in a bit fast. Then, instead of Andie and I grabbing for the dock while Dad stayed in the middle to balance the boat, Dad leaned over with us to grab at the dock and with all three of us leaning to the left, the boat tipped, dipped and nearly capsized.

Andie got a bruised knee; I nearly got my shoulder pulled out of its socket trying to grab the dock; and Dad got a nice gulp of lake water, but was otherwise unharmed as he ended up sitting in the boat as it came to rest with a lot of water in it.

I had no other pants to wear; Andie and I both ruined relatively new pairs of shoes; and my PSP was so water-damaged, it fell victim to the accident. Fortunately, there were no serious injuries and no loss of life, so the minor property damage to our personal property was as good a result as anyone could expect.

If the boat had gone all the way over, or if I had had a close encounter with the motor after I slipped out of the boat, things could have ended a lot worse. If we hadn’t been in only knee-deep water, there could have been a loss of life.

Considering all factors, the boat should have capsized and come down on us; I had to believe there was a touch of divine intervention in that moment that the worst did not happen. Lake water may not be good for removing wrinkles, but that gulp did convince Dad that his boat-faring days are behind him.

It’s not the first time God has intervened on our behalf at Webb Lake. When I was around ten, I got a fish-hook stuck in my eyelid while trying to fasten a hook to too-low an eyelet on my fishing pole; it was a matter of millimeters that spared me from that fishhook blinding me in that eye for life. Only the L-RD’s mercy explains how both of these episodes didn’t end worse than they did.