Good Saturday morning! For those who take off on the weekend and skip the Saturday reading, no artisan hand-crafted devotional for you today. I watched a news article on the use and misuse of the term 'artisan' today. As you might think, artisan made items are supposed to be hand crafted in small batches, or one at a time, by a local craftsman (applicable to male or female crafters), and denotes an item of unusual quality. However, as happens with many terms we love, such as, well, 'love', the term has been taken over by corporate marketing and now is diluted.
Today, you are privileged to get one artisanal devotional: hand-crafted one at a time, by me the so-called artisan, working in the inspiration of God my Father to give you something special. This is not a 14-cent pencil sharpened by hand and marked up to $35. This is a bunch of words that I get at no cost, put together lovingly with attention to my craft, and send out at no charge. Wait, no wonder I'm poor. I seem to have missed out on that markup thing! No, I think of this devotional as my first fruits of writing given back to God as an offering or tithe. I dare not charge for that lest I fall into Balaam's sin and find jackasses giving me travel advice. Wait, there's an e-mail for a trip to Hawaii...um, forget that.
The world is going to seize upon terms and abuse them, but that does not mean that we must quit using them in their proper context. The name of our Lord and our God has been abused for, oh, probably since about the time the Lord wrote down in stone, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord Thy God in vain." As soon as the law became the Law, someone probably felt a very strong urge to violate it.
Moses was up on the mountain watching God hand craft the original stone tablets of the Law when down in the camp of the Israelites, one man pokes his head out of his tent and calls over to his neighbor, "Did y'all just feel an overwhelming urge to use the Lord's name as an expletive? Me too. What's up with that do ya think?"
The urge to use or abuse our words in advertising probably dates back at least that far as well. We can rail over every supposed violation of the terms we use in our daily language, or we can go to the store and realize that stuff churned out in a big food factory probably is about as artisanal as the 450,000,000th toothpick to come off the artisanal, hand-crafted, highly-polished, extremely-dedicated to machine production, carving and assembly line #7 at the Jolly Good Times Toothpick and Mintpick Factory.
Bucky
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