1) Two legs I have, and this will confound:
2) Pronounced as one letter,
And written with three,
Two letters there are,
And two only in me.
I'm double, I'm single,
I'm black blue and grey,
I'm read from both ends,
And the same either way.
only at rest do they touch the ground!
What am I?
What am I?
2) Pronounced as one letter,
And written with three,
Two letters there are,
And two only in me.
I'm double, I'm single,
I'm black blue and grey,
I'm read from both ends,
And the same either way.
3) Something very extraordinary happened
on the 6th of May, 1978 at 12:34 a.m. (Was
not Howdy's birthdayO:) What was it?
*Answers are located in "comments"
for your convenience & felicity.
*Answers are located in "comments"
for your convenience & felicity.
We're 'T&H':
EXPLORE!!!
ANSWERS TO RIDDLES:
ReplyDelete1) Wheelbarrow
2) Eye
3) At that moment, the time and day could be written as:
12:34, 5/6/78
In 1744 commissioners of the territory of Virginia were settling the terms
ReplyDeleteof a treaty with the American Indians of the Six Nations. As part of the
proposed treaty, the commissioners presented the tribes with the offer of
education for six of its men at the college in Williamsburg. The elders
of the tribes took an evening to consider the offer, politely declined the
gift, and then proposed a counteroffer.
Though grateful for the proposal, the tribal leaders had already
experienced the kind of learning valued by these commissioners. When some
of their own young men had returned after being educated in white colleges,
they brought back new knowledge, but they also returned having lost
knowledge vital to their communities. "They were instructed in all your
sciences, but when they came back to us, they were bad runners, ignorant
of every means of living in the woods, neither fit for hunters nor
counselors, they were totally good for nothing."(1) The tribal leaders
then proposed a counteroffer: "To show our grateful sense of it, if the
gentlemen of Virginia will send us a dozen of their sons, we will take
care of their education, instruct them in all we know, and make men of
them."(2)
It is easy to read a story like this one from early American history and
fail to see the dynamics of power. We might see an interplay between
interesting characters or an exchange between cultures--two groups of men
both convinced they have the best way, or maybe even a comical moment
between two vastly different worlds. Many of the parables Jesus told in
ancient Israel can be read similarly. We can be readily occupied with the
interchange of the prodigal son and the loving father, the master of the
great banquet and the guests that cruelly shunned him, or the owner of a
vineyard and a group of disgruntled laborers.
But in each of these stories, we are remiss not to consider the dynamic of
power at work amidst the characters. That is to ask, who is in a position
of superiority and who holds the status of inferiority? Which is the
in-group and which is the out-group? In other words, who holds the power
and who is considered more or less expendable? The tribal leaders had
already experienced education in white colleges and were now offering a
similar encounter for the sons of the Englishmen. Their counteroffer
exuded a spirit of both hospitality and reciprocity. Yet sadly, there is
no indication that the Virginian commissioners considered the offer of the
tribes with any degree of sincerity. The offer was disregarded, indicating
that the men of the northern territory had very little to learn from the
tribes of the American Indians. This story, among many others, depicts
the sad dynamic of power and superiority in our unfortunate relations with
the American Indian.
But this is also just one people-group in a world of stories of inclusion
and exclusion, all of which call out for our attention to the storyteller
who reforms our ideas of belonging. Jesus fashions many of his parables
with dynamics that challenge our very notions of power, social order,
status, and expendability. The parable of the landowner and the vineyard,
for instance, sets before us the highest of the social classes of Israel
and the very lowest. With a few bold strokes, Jesus sketches a wealthy
landowner with a harvest so large that he must return repeatedly for more
day-laborers--men who are in turn understood as the most expendable of
society, the desperate and unemployed workforce of the surrounding
villages. While this parable no doubt yields countless lessons with its
intricate storyline, one dynamic of the story in particular plunges us
further into a well of meaning and sets us up to drink deeply of what it
might mean that this is what the "kingdom of heaven is like"
(Matthew 20:1).
In the society who first heard this story, it would have been altogether
strange to hear of such a wealthy landowner going out among the
day-laborers. There were stewards who typically did the visible work
within the marketplace, hired by the elites so that they could avoid the
type of hostility and resentment the parable describes over wages. Yet in
Jesus's parable, it is the landowner himself who converses all day long
with the laborers. "Why are you standing here idle all day?" asks the
owner of the vineyard. "Because no one has hired us," they reply. So he
says to them, "You also go into the vineyard" (20:6-7). As such, Jesus
creates a confrontation between social extremes, the elites and the
expendables, the first and the last, two groups who might never have
encountered each other in real life. What might it mean that this
describes the kingdom of God?
The Greek word for parable literally means "a placing beside." It is a
comparison of one thing beside another, an association of pictures that
teaches, a story full of extremes and reversals of these extremes. In
this parable, the dynamics of power and social status bid us to reexamine
the ways in which we find ourselves superior, the arguments we use to
justify our status over one group or another, and the very groups in which
we place ourselves and subsequently displace others. The kingdom of God
and the one who reigns within it are indeed at work among us reversing
social hierarchies and turning status symbols upside down. The concluding
remarks of Jesus remind us what will one day be so: "The last will be
first, and the first will be last" (20:16). The question is whether we
will fight it or fight for it.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi
Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Unnamed Indian chief in Peter Nabokov, ed., Native American
Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to the
Present, 1492-1992 (New York: Viking, 1991), 214.
(2) Ibid.
-------------------------------------
Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM)
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