Testing times

Suffering through exam time myself, any mention of testing makes me a little jumpy. Hence when I was reading through Exodus 15 and 16 in The Message, the following lines caught my attention:

That's the place where God set up rules and procedures; that's where he started testing them.

And again:

'I'm going to test them to see if they will live according to my Teaching or not.'

Do you think God really tests us? To me, the word test means that you start out not knowing the answer and finish knowing the answer. In God's case, He already knows the answer - of what value is the test then?

Egyptian Strike

Reading through the Exodus account in "The Message", what are traditionally referred to as the "plagues" are instead called "strikes". I wonder what type of strike Eugene had in mind - the offensive war-time strike, the baseball "three strikes and you're out" or the trade union stop-work type strike.

Perhaps all three?

Home is where I hang my hat

At a party tonight I was discussing the concept of "home" with some people, one of whom produced the phrase that is the title of this post. My immediate reaction was one of horror, for whilst I am not naturally a sentimental person I do form attachments to some places.

For instance I consider my parents place in Nowra to be "home" in many senses, despite the fact that I only really lived there for a combined time of about 4-5 months. (For some reason, my parents decided that since I was moving out of home, they needed to move to a bigger house - go figure!) Similarly I still consider the church I attended in Bomaderry to be my "home" church, again in spite of the fact that I have been away from that church almost as long as I was a part of the church.

As his story unfolded, he explained that he has moved 26 times during the course of his life, and that the house his parents live in now is not the house he grew up in. Thus he has very few memories associated with any of these places.

And so the question I am left to ponder is, "How do we define home?". Is it based on the memories associated with a place? Perhaps with the people who are there?