Mental Musings

It wasn’t until 5th grade that I understood the importance of style. Prior to that I wore whatever my mom bought, which was generally Sears Toughskins jeans and a matching shirt that were the norm back in the 60s. But in 5th grade, I had a teacher that had been a Broadway dancer. He taught us how to dance for a school show and he thought I was very talented. The only thing negative that he ever said was that he felt I needed to learn how to dress more stylishly. That was when I started noticing that none of my friends in our Rockville neighborhood wore clothes like me. We had moved to this middle class neighborhood from the inner city of Norfolk. I was still dressing like an inner city kid which did not match the style of the burbs. I was out-of-style. So it wasn’t long before I started wearing all of those wonderful styles of the 70s: oversized collars, patterned shirts, and bell-bottomed jeans. Then the 80s came and brought in the Preppy look with IZOD button-up shirts, M...

Dr. Bronson Ray, a noted brain surgeon, was walking around his neighborhood when he saw a boy on a scooter smash headfirst into a tree. Realizing that the boy was seriously injured, the doctor told a bystander to call 911. As he proceeded to administer first aid, a boy not much older than the injured one nudged through the crowd that had gathered and said loudly, “I’d better take over now, sir. I’m a Boy Scout and I know first aid.” This Boy Scout was confident that he could help. I wonder if he would have been just as confident if he had known that he was talking to a skilled doctor?  In 2 Chronicles 18 we see how all of the fortune tellers and seers in Israel and Judah were telling Jehoshaphat that he would easily defeat the nation of Ramoth-gilead, but one lone prophet of God warned him that the battle would end in defeat. Jehoshaphat thought he was acting out of confidence when he ordered his army to war, but we can see from the defeat that he was actually acting ou...