The Devotional - A Look at the Book #602

The Devotional - A Look at the Book #602

by Jesse Abel

What Papa “J” has to say! #23

I had this crazy dream that while driving I ran over a gecko and I became an auto insurance risk! So what I thought… that was one squish that felt good!

The Devotional

As a landscaper after retiring from the Navy, my crew was putting in a sidewalk. It was the last finishing touch to a very long project of completing the grounds to a newly built hotel. The sidewalk was several hundred feet whereas at the other end if someone were there you would not be able to recognize who they were other than being male or female. We were at one end waiting for the first cement truck to arrive when I noticed a woman carrying a small baby and she was walking within the reinforcement wire. I yelled… “get out of there; are you crazy?” “That’s dangerous you’ll trip and injure yourself and your child!” She did not hear me, but she did not fall either, thank you LORD! Finally within earshot, I said; please Diane, get on the outside of the work area, where you are is dangerous. She is a good friend and a sister to our pastor… she was bringing us coffee and donuts. Here is the rub! We walk about in a world of good and evil. What one person perceives as good, another observes as evil! What was done in the beginning is still being done today. So if you had been Adam or Eve; you would be as guilty as they, even if they were just friends. Genesis 3:1-8

ECCLESIASTES 4

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 – From the paragraph above, you may think that I have planned it for this section in Ecclesiastes and that would be wrong. This amazes me about God since He always knows beforehand what the daily devotional is going to be about and as such; I get as much enjoyment out writing it as I hope you get out of reading it.

What LORD? Is there any value in friendship? I know that many of us struggle with those who are potential friends. Either we overload them with non-essential things, or we clam up and make them believe that their friendship is non-essential; thus a potential friendship suffers. So friendships develop from essential things of interest to both and this is what Solomon is saying.

Working together will produce results, but reward in a friendship is not to be of material value. The world around us calls this “bonding” God places eternal value to bonding by identifying friendship as “reward”. So too reap a reward, one does not just stand still. Both must work together since both need help together. In other words… if both do not equally carry the load, one will be left alone with no one around to lift them up when they fall.