Yesterday we officially celebrated Seth's birthday. We (i.e. June and I from Alexandria, and Nick and Meghan from Upland) gathered at Seth and Amber's place and spent the type of day that has become typical for our get- togethers. We talk, play Wii®, eat (Nick made a scrumptious chicken stir fry), play with the "puppies," and there's no pressure on anyone to participate in everything. In other words, after a futile hour or so of racing various characters in their contraptions on Mariokart® and spending most of my time in the wall or the water, I took a nap.

On a sidenote, when Thera-wii is recommended for Parkinson's, I don't think they have Mariokart® in mind. It's Wii-sports® and Wii-fit® that are the beneficial programs.

Seth and Amber have a rather large group of temporary residents in their kennel at the moment: seventy-four pitbull terriers that were confiscated from dogfighting rings. Amber gave us a tour of them; each one is in its own cage.   Amber knows each one individually, their temperaments, needs, personalities, and habits. Some of them will eventually be adoptable, but a number of them have been bred and raised to a point of aggressiveness that will make it impossible for them to survive outside of a cage. As you can see in the picture, Amber is pretty fearless, but there is a certain amount of danger, even in taking care of them, but I won't mention any accidents that happened to Seth last week.

I have started to bring to conclusion (if that makes any sense) something that I started to start a while back. I'm compiling a collection of everything I have written (i.e. on paper, not e-mails or blog entries): an exemplar of each article, book review, devotional article, conference presentation, hand-written manuscripts from the early days, etc., to present to the Taylor University archives on Tuesday evening. I was curious about how I would feel going back those thirty years and looking at my early efforts to become a half-decent scholar. There are a lot of memories connected to numerous articles or pages in books. It turns out that I'm having fun with it. God has blessed, and I'm thankful.

KINGS AND KINGDOMS
	Bible Reading: 1 Kings 16:23-28
Vv. 23-24: 23 In the thirty-first year of Judah's King Asa, Omri became king over Israel; [he reigned] 12 years. He reigned six years in Tirzah, then he bought the hill of Samaria from Shemer for 150 pounds of silver, and he built up the hill. He named the city he built Samaria based on the name Shemer, the owner of the hill. (HCSB)

There are two things that interest me in this particular passage. The first one is that, while the northern kingdom of Israel was playing "king of the year," King Asa's long reign in Judah was continuing with stability and prosperity. I wonder if anyone in the North was making an inference concerning Judah and its overall devotion to Yahweh in contrast to Israel, which continued in its idolatry and suffered chaos and continuous instability. Omri made not a bit of difference in that respect. There must have been plenty of Israelites who did not go along with the false beliefs of the kings, but who, for various reasons, had no influence on the undulating monarchy.

The other item that intrigues me is the journey that the word "Samaria" has undertaken over the millennia. Who in the Western world has not heard of or used the term "Good Samaritan"? Of those, I presume, a far smaller number would be able to recount correctly Jesus' parable from which the term is derived, and the further we push the background facts--the identity of the Samaritans, the city of Samaria, the derivation of the city's name--one would expect the number who have knowledge thereof to decline geometrically.

It started with a person named Shemer, of whom we know nothing other than that he sold to Omri the property on which he built his new quarters, which was subsequently surrounded by a growing town. One cannot even really evaluate whether what Shemer did was either good or bad. Strictly speaking, it was contrary to the Law (Lev. 25:23; Num. 36:7) to sell the land you have inherited, as we shall see shortly in chapter 21, but those might not have been Shemer's circumstances at all. So, we have this simple gesture on the part of an otherwise unknown man eventually become a common designation for a person who does a good deed out of purely altruistic motives. The contribution is mostly verbal, but it is an interesting illustration of how small actions can have long-term consequences.