The Princess

Hello and welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m your host, Bryan Broome, and I’m joined today by Greg Uttinger.

You know, the great Julie Andrews once said, “Behaving like a princess is work. It’s not just about looking beautiful or wearing a crown. It’s more about how you are inside.” So Greg, let’s move on to a biblical example of a princess.

Well, you know, the Bible does have a few princesses here and there. There’s Pharaoh’s daughter, who goes unnamed in scripture. One scholar suggests the name may have been Sobekneferu because she was a female Pharoah whose line dead-ended, and that’s what happened to this young lady. Having rescued Moses from the Nile, she herself went on to be queen of Egypt, and yet Moses, who was her adopted son and should have been the next Pharoah, refused the throne, refused to be called the son of Pharoah’s daughter, the writer of Hebrews tells us.

So she rescued him, she funded his education, preserved his family alive, and those are commendable things. How much of that was conscious we don’t know, and how much was mere sentiment we don’t know.

Then we come to Michal, the daughter of King Saul. She and David fell in love and got married when he was still captain of the king’s army. When Saul tried to kill David, she helped him escape. But when David ran, she ended up being given to another man in marriage, and when he came back, he took her rather by force away from her new husband, so that was not so cool on David’s part.

And in the end, she and David did not see eye-to-eye, particularly on the matter of worship. When David danced in celebration before the Lord as an act of worship, Michal looked out the window and despised him for showing off his body in front of the young ladies, and that didn’t go well. It cost her David’s love and marriage bed, apparently.

Then David had a daughter named Tamar, who’s a very sad story. She becomes the target of her stepbrother’s lust, and though she proves kind and quick-witted and tries to talk herself basically out of incestual rape, she nevertheless falls victim to her stepbrother and leaves the stage a very tragic character, apparently a woman of faith, but a hard miserable life.

Her brother Absalom avenges her, and that doesn’t go well for all of Israel by the time it’s done, and David doesn’t really do anything about it.

Then we can think of Solomon’s 300 wives, who were all princesses. We don’t really know any of their names or anything about them. Probably Solomon didn’t either. They were mostly political pawns and sex objects.

In the New Testament, Salome – she’s not named in the Bible but we know her from secular history – is the one who did the seductive dance before King Herod that eventually cost John the Baptist his head.

The Bible doesn’t put a lot of special emphasis upon princesses as such. They’re human beings. They’re children of Adam. They may or may not come to faith in Christ. They may or may not be used by God to do great things. There is one princess though in the line of scripture that we should talk about. She’s a lady that most people have never even heard of. Her name is Jehosheba. She’s the daughter of King Jehoram.

We can remember last time that King Jehoshaphat, the king of Judah, the southern nation, had made an alliance with Ahab, king of Israel, and his wife Jezebel, and they had a daughter named Athaliah. So this affinity, this marriage, this covenant involved Jehoshaphat’s son Jehoram marrying this Athaliah, but Athaliah was wicked like her mom.

She was a Baal worshiper. She was aggressive. She was power-hungry, full of ambition. She hated the God of Israel. She hated the promise of Messiah. She wanted power, and when her husband was alive she pulled his strings. When he died she pulled her son’s strings. But then God let loose a whirlwind in the north. He raised up Jehu, the captain of the host, to come and slaughter Ahab’s house.

When Athaliah heard that her son was dead, and half of her relatives were dead, and her mom was dead, she calmly and coolly went into the nursery, where her son’s children were, and began to kill them all, systematically destroying anyone who had a claim to the Davidic throne, because it was her intent to take the throne for herself, establish Baal worship, and rule the way her mom kind of did, or certainly would have wanted to. She was going to out-mom her mom, and that’s where this Jehosheba comes in.

Jehosheba was the daughter of King Jehoram, Athaliah’s husband, but probably not by Athaliah. There’s no sense that this was a mom-daughter thing. Most of the kings had multiple wives, and this was probably by some secondary wife. The further evidence of that is that Jehosheba married the high priest, who was actually a godly man. His name is Jehoiada, and he does great good for the kingdom of God, as we’ll see.

Apparently Jehoram figured, “Well, you know, fine. At least he’s important. Maybe there will be a political card I can play later. Let’s just get her out of the house,” so Jehosheba and Jehoiada apparently were a very happy couple.

Jehosheba as a princess in the royal family was able to come and go. The temple complex and the palace were right next to each other, so she could come and go as she will. The servants would know her. She wouldn’t need a special password or special ID or anything.

When word came that Athaliah was on the rampage, Jehosheba knew she had very little time to act. Scripture doesn’t give us a blow-by-blow account. It would make a great movie, as I’m sure it made fantastic and frightening history.

Somehow, Jehosheba got to the nursery one step ahead of Athaliah, whether the slaughter had begun or whether Jehosheba only had time to grab one baby we’re not told, but she grabbed one little baby boy, whose name is Joash. She grabbed him and grabbed his nurse and they hid, it sounds like first of all in a bedroom closet, then as soon as the furor died down and all the other little boys were dead, she managed to sneak Joash out, take him to the temple and to the side storage rooms.

It was probably a second or third floor where nobody ever came without a really good reason, and Baal worshipers would have no interest in going there unless they actually suspected the boy was still alive. So she and her husband together, with probably minimal help in order to secure secrecy, raised the little boy for seven years.

Things we can say about this woman, Jehosheba, this princess – she was brave. She was a quick thinker. She did not hesitate to risk her own life. If she had been caught, she would have been dead. Athaliah would not have hesitated for a second to kill this woman.

She and her husband had such a marriage that she would know that her husband would absolutely support her in this, would want her to do this, and would be there for her on the other side, if she could just get back to the temple in one piece, and she believed that this was worth it.

It’s not just the life of one child, as important as that is, but the promise of Messiah, of the kingly line descended from David, the salvation of the world was worth this kind of – well, it could have easily resulted in martyrdom. She took these chances. No prophet came to her. No special revelation. No dream. No angel saying, “Go and rescue a baby.” She was a very bold young woman, and what she did changed the course of earth’s history dramatically. So there’s a princess for you.

We can set her over against all the Disney princesses. I don’t know how much time we want to spend with that, but you can probably come up with some examples better than I can of, first, how wonderful Disney princesses are, and now how abominable they were and how they’re not a fit role model for any young woman.

Yeah, probably.

It was in 2000 that Disney executive Andy Mooney made the somewhat obvious business decision to consolidate all the most popular Disney princesses into a single franchise and spin out through it licenses to some 250,000 varieties of princess merchandise – princess lip balm, princess alarm clocks, princess bedspreads, princess nighties.

Disney’s excuse was, “Well, there was just this demand, and all kinds of people wanted to satisfy it. Is it our fault that it made us billions?”

Maybe not precisely.

There’s been a turning of the tide. Since then, the princesses are drawn in biologically impossible ways. Their clothing is suggestive. They depend upon a man to rescue them. Their authority comes only from the fact that they are the daughters of kings and not because of anything they’ve done in their own right. You get the idea.

One writer, Andy Hinds, writing in The Atlantic said –

“The princess trope represented passivity, entitlement, materialism, and submissiveness, and no daughter of mine would wear a onesie that celebrated such loathsome values.”

I don’t think we bought much in the way of princess merchandise for our kids, if any, when our girls were little. They watched the princess movies, as they watched other movies, not to ad nauseum. They didn’t watch anything that much.

I’ve mentioned before that when my Emily was very young we were on our way to church, and I guess the rest of the family was sick because it was just the two of us in the car. Out of the blue she asked, “Daddy, why does everyone want to kill princesses?” which I thought was a profound question from a 3- or 4-year-old.

So we spent the next 20 minutes on our ride to church talking about the Christian young lady as a princess, a daughter of the Lord, and the war of Satan to try to destroy the bride and her children, of which this is an obvious instance. It was a wonderful discussion with a 3- or 4-year-old. I wish I could remember everything I said at the time.

Do you have any comments on this whole thing? Have you experienced any princess-ness yet?

Princess-ness? Not personally. What do you mean?

I mean have you run into any criticisms of it or tirades against it?

Oh, every week it seems, at least once. There was probably a good stretch of two or three years where it was like every day I would see something about this just in my travels along the internet, from criticizing Snow White for having four lines and having a man come and rescue her, and even worse was Aurora from Sleeping Beauty.

I think it has in general gone down, if my own personal anecdotal experience is anything to judge sweeping societal trends by, but that may also have to do with the fact that in the past probably 10 or 15 years there has been a stronger shift towards making the female protagonists who are princesses more – I guess dynamic is a good enough word – which is a good thing.

Having a dynamic character, having them grow over the course of the movie, is a very good thing, and I think that is something that potentially was missing in older versions of such stories. But it does also I think fail to recognize that, at least classically speaking and literarily speaking, the princess is not so much of a character as she is a plot point.

I think there are good and bad things about that. There’s bad things where it’s like, “Oh, this is a person made in God’s image and she doesn’t matter that much. Just put her off to the side. She’s just the thing that the hero has to get.” But I think there’s good things in recognizing that because if you look at stories as a reflection or mirror of the divine story of salvation, then it’s pretty true to form that the bride that Christ comes to rescue is asleep unto the point of death, as it would be with Sleeping Beauty, and even with Snow White as she’s drawn by an apple into a death sleep.

Yeah, she takes a bite from an apple and is, for all practical purposes, dead to the world, a living death.

Yes. Again, there’s a reason, typologically speaking and by imagery why that is the case and why the princess, who is in death’s sleep, is also guarded by a dragon, and it takes a prince, more than likely a king’s only son prince, to come and slay the dragon. And that’s because it’s a mirror and an image of the true story.

Of course, we can find mirrors and reflections of the true story in other non-princess-related narrative arcs, but this is classic for a reason, and it’s not just because we had a patriarchal society that was repressive towards women and didn’t want them to achieve their full potential. It’s because of this. It’s because of the fact that we’re the bride of Christ and we all together – men and women – are helplessly dead corpses in need of rescue by a divine king.

It’s a message the world doesn’t like. The true bride is absolutely helpless. There’s nothing she can do to save herself. She needs to be rescued, and insofar as we are looking at that particular image – sorry, but that’s a valid storyline.

Now, having said that, we can see the other side of the story. We’re talking about princesses, but we can talk about other points where the enemy comes into the bride’s territory. The bride herself has been rescued, but now she is the mother of children and the bride protects her children – either actual children or potential children or children in general from the oppressor, the abuser, the rapist. One can think here easily of Jael.

I was going to say that exactly, because there’s also an aspect in which the bride images the divine work of her husband, speaking metaphorically of Christ and the church, that is. Of course we’re going to see that in reality as well. So Jael isn’t just a metaphor. She’s not just a literary figure. She’s a historical figure. She actually existed. She was part of Christ’s bride, and she took up a tent peg and crushed the head of a serpent, metaphorically speaking.

So we can absolutely acknowledge that narratively speaking the princess is normally dead and in need of rescue, but in the terms of that story’s development she is able to image and mimic and copy the work of her savior, her rescuer, when additional trials and additional dangers come.

Yes. Her calling is to be like her husband, to grow up into the image of Christ, her head. So having been saved because her bridegroom has trampled Satan under foot, Paul turns to the church of Rome and says, “And may God trample Satan under your feet shortly.”

There is a place where we pick up what Christ began. He did it definitively. He did what we could not do. But now that we’re in him we can continue the warfare, but we always do it in dependence upon him. It’s not like Jesus released this potential power that was somehow held back by a thin hair or something, and now our own potential power is realized and we can go out and slay dragons and take over the world. No, we’re absolutely dependent upon Jesus the whole way.

It is our honor, our pleasure, our joy to imitate him and crush serpents as we go along the way. But most of the time when those images are invoked, the literary images shift. We’re called no longer the bride, we’re called an army, because both are true, depending upon where scripture is placing the emphasis. But scripture is not afraid at times to give to women a particularly important key role in redemptive history.

Now, it is sometimes a uniquely female role. The most important woman in history, aside perhaps from Eve, is Mary. When the angel came and said, “God’s got something special for you to do,” Mary didn’t say, “You mean I get to be a princess! A queen! Rule the world! Pass legislation! No, wait, an authoress and write a book! A movie star! Yeah, that’s got to be it!”

No, what was it? “Mary, you get to have a baby,” something no man could ever do. It was in a sense passive, and yet Mary embraced it willingly with her heart to become a tool that God would use. Again, that’s something that no man could ever do.

In the original prophecy at the garden gate, God spoke of the seed of a woman, and Adam gets completely dropped out of that prophecy and conversation because Adam screwed it up. Humanity has nothing to create. Man is dead in trespasses and sins.

Which is also something interesting. A lot of time you hear people say, “Oh, the Bible is misogynist. It blames women for everything.” No, it very clearly saw Eve bring the apple to Adam, and then Adam is the one who’s on the hook. He’s the one who bears the responsibility.

Absolutely, and all women can say, “Whew, good.”

It’s funny, as a schoolteacher – not so much lately, but I used to hear some of the younger guys and girls dispute this, as to who was really at fault and who was to blame. I’m like, “Guys, Adam and Eve both sinned, but let’s get this straight. The race fell with Adam.” The Bible is absolutely clear about this.

Yes, it came from the fall of our first parents, Adam and Eve in Paradise, the catechism says, but it does not say that Eve was equally responsible in terms of the covenantal consequences. That was Adam. When we get to 1 Corinthians 15 and to Romans 5, the fall of the human race is laid squarely on Adam, “one man,” not “one man and his wife” or “one woman and her stupid husband” or “the seductress who lured her husband into doing…”

The old interpretations like, “Well, Adam ate of the fruit because he realized that Eve was lost to him, and the only thing he could do out of true love was to follow her in her sins, and it just didn’t work out very well” – oh, come on! That is not the nature of sin. Adam sat there and watched to see what was going to happen.

“How you feeling, Eve? Feeling any premonitions of sudden death or anything? No? Okay. Yeah, I’ll eat it, sure, because obviously God lied because you’re not dead yet.” Adam was the first male chauvinist pig, using his wife as a guinea pig to figure out what was going on here. The woman was deceived, Paul says. The man was not deceived. He knew what he was doing.

So we as males have to recognize that, and yet the woman was deceived and there are consequences historically for all of that, but not consequences that make the woman any less human, any less godly by nature, or any less potentially useful in God’s plan. But it does mean that sometimes what the world thinks is useful is not what God thinks is useful. God did not put a sword in Mary’s hand or a lightsaber. He gave her a baby, and the whole world calls her blessed among women for that.

There’s one other mention of princesses that we haven’t talked about yet. This is Psalm 45. It’s called A Song of Loves and it goes like this –

My heart is inditing a good matter. I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer. Thou art fairer than the children of men.

This is directed toward the bridegroom, not toward the princess.

Thou art fairer than the children of men. Grace is poured into thy lips; therefore God hath blessed thee forever. Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most mighty, with thy glory and thy majesty. And in thy majesty ride prosperously because of truth and meekness and righteousness; and thy right hand shall teach thee terrible things.

Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of the king's enemies; whereby the people fall under thee. Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever: the sceptre of thy kingdom is a right sceptre. Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness; therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows. All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cassia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.

And now the mention of the princess or the queen.

Kings' daughters were among thy honourable women. Upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir.

This is a marriage ceremony. The king, the prince, is coming for his bride and he is a victorious king. He has his sword upon his thigh. He has bow and arrow. He has waged successful war. He has been terrible to his enemies and he’s identified very plainly – and the writer of Hebrews picks up on this – “thy throne, O God.” This is Jesus. This is the divine Messiah. But now the camera shifts to the woman.

Hearken, O daughter, and consider and incline thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father's house.

So this queen comes from outside the royal family, possibly from outside of Israel. We’re not told exactly, but she is to leave and cleave. She is to leave her father’s house and she is to give herself to her bridegroom.

So shall the king greatly desire thy beauty: for he is thy Lord; and worship thou him.

And then we hear about some other princesses.

And the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift; even the rich among the people shall intreat thy favour.

So there are other princesses standing around, Gentile princesses ready to contribute.

The king's daughter is all glorious within. Her clothing is of wrought gold.

The king’s daughter, so apparently meaning the king, i.e. prince’s father, so she’s been adopted perhaps? The language is a little strange.

She shall be brought unto the king in raiment of needlework. The virgins her companions that follow her shall be brought unto thee. With gladness and rejoicing shall they be brought: they shall enter into the king's palace. Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children…

So this princess now becomes a queen in her own right and is told, “Get your attention off your ancestors and your fathers and whatever influence they played on you. Focus on your children.

… whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.

Again the word is, “Start practicing your swordplay so you can go out with the king onto the battlefield and have his back all the time.” I am not opposed to writing heroines into adventure stories who raise swords and fight beside their true love, but that’s unusual.

What scripture lays out here is a general pattern for the church at the very least, and thus for human marriage in general.

Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom thou mayest make princes in all the earth.

Your eye needs to be on the next generation. You have the power to multiply your effectiveness, your influence, your faith, your godliness, your commitment to Christ through raising, training up, discipling, evangelizing your own sons, who can go out and make a world of difference, and that’s not a lesser role. Of course, I’m a teacher and I would say that, but that is what the scripture says, too.

Having that kind of effect on the next generation is something that is profound. It is something God blesses and uses. It is not something to be ashamed of or to apologize for, as God gives children. Of course, that’s something that’s within his sovereign control.

The chapter ends –

I will make thy name to be remembered in all generations; therefore shall the people praise thee for ever and ever.

Presumably that’s directed at the bride, because she was the last subject and has been for several verses now. This bride will be remembered till the end of time because she faithfully perpetuated faith, trust, godliness, and covenant commitment into the next generation and the next and the next and the next.

This is not a second-rate role for women. It may not be what every single woman is called to exactly, but it is a general pattern, and it’s most certainly what the church is supposed to do. The church in her utter dependence upon Christ is to disciple the next generation and adopt children, that is go out and evangelize them and bring them into the kingdom and instruct them, making disciples of all nations until the end of time, until Jesus blows the whistle and says, “Game over,” until as Lewis says, “The number that Maleldil read in the mind of his father before the world began is complete,” or Jesus said, “The people you gave me from the foundation of the world – I’m here to lay down my life for them and buy them back.” That’s the game. That’s what this is about and that’s what we’re about.

We cannot be God. We need to give up that attempt. We need to give up trying to put ourselves as humans, as individuals, as men or women, at the center of the story as if it’s all about us, and we need to exalt Christ. We need to exalt God’s salvation and recognize that God uses us and that’s a privilege for us. He does not need us, but he’s chosen to use us. He said, “Without me you can do nothing,” so that we embrace, and when we embrace that we’re going to be a lot happier about everything.

Thank you so much for that discussion. Let’s move on to recommendations.

That discussion triggered in me a thought, something that’s come up in other contexts as well. My recommendation is reading the Bible every day. It doesn’t have to be lots and lots of chapters, but it needs to be a habit of every day submitting your mind to God’s Word, finding out what God has actually said.

The American church is horribly ignorant of the Bible. I see this, for instance, in my wife’s class. She was teaching New Testament this year. I guess she was referring back to the previous year when she was teaching Old Testament. She came to the book of Judges and started telling some of the stories in Judges, and her kids – and these are kids who grew up in the church – were like, “That’s not in the Bible. I’ve never heard that story before. Wait, what happened? He did what? She did what with the hammer? Why have I never heard this before?” Well, that’s a good question. Why have you never heard this before?

I have an answer for that. We’re very squeamish about telling Bible stories to young children, which is funny because they love them.

“Well see, there’s the problem. They shouldn’t love them. Don’t they know better?” We could ring the Gnostic bell here.

<ding!>

But not only in terms of that, and that’s one of my normal tirades, but I’ve become acutely aware of people who have been in the church a long time who are not stupid, but who seem to forget rather obvious texts of scripture like they were never there and like they’ve never seen them. I think we’re all prone to this. We easily forget.

This is something that Lewis addresses a number of times. I’m thinking particularly of The Silver Chair when Puddleglum and the children are tempted to forget Narnia and Aslan altogether, and believe it was all a dream and it’s all reasoning from our finite experience to some great archetype, but there never was a sun, there never was an Aslan, there never was Narnia.

Then also Jill, and I’ve quoted this a number of times lately. Aslan dispatches her to catch up with Eustace and gives her a number of signs. “Watch for these specific things. This is the path you will follow. When these things happen, know that you’re on the right path,” but he warns her, “You’re up here in my land where everything seems crystal clear. You want to see the signs, you want to follow the signs. When you get down there, they will not look like you think they’re going to look, and therefore you must repeat the signs when you rise up and when you lie down and when you walk by the way.”

Lewis is basically borrowing from Deuteronomy 6 at that point, and true enough, Jill and Eustace muff all of the signs down to the very last one. On the last one they are able to finally say, “Look, we screwed everything else up, but this is what Aslan wants us to do. It will probably get us killed.” That was Puddleglum. “Yeah, it will get us killed, but we’ve got to do what Aslan says in any case.”

There’s much to be said for reading the text, repeating the text, memorizing the text, having the very words of God in your heart, not just the Word generically. “Yes, I know that the Bible commands love.”

“Okay, give me five verses word-for-word where God commands love and describe this love he commands. And if you can’t, then you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It’s the same thing with justice. Of course, justice has been a big theme over the last couple years, particularly when preceded by the word social. What does the Bible say about justice and judgment and law and things like that? Can we quote it? Can we say, “Yeah, yeah, I was just reading about that yesterday”? Or again are we just thrown back on vague generalities because we’ve let our mind flip-flop all over the place and we haven’t submitted it to what the words of the text actually say?

I don’t know about you, but I find it very easy to read an entire page – not only of scripture, but of anything, even of scripture – and at the end of the time would come out of a daze and say, “Wait. My eyes are at the bottom of the page. They were at the top of the page. I obviously have just read a page, but I don’t remember a thing I read.” Then I go back to the top and read it all over again. Knowing how distracted I am, it may take me two or three times to get through that. I hope that’s not too terribly unspiritual of me.

It's easy to just kind of go over it because it’s so familiar and say that you’ve read it, when you haven’t wrestled with what the Word said, so read the Word.

I remember reading a book in high school, or potentially in college. It was sometime in my late adolescence, and if I remember correctly it was a book about overcoming lust, temptation to lust, and things like that.

The ironic thing is that now looking back I can’t remember which book it was or what the actual statement was, but the thing that was in the statement that he followed it up with is what stuck with me for some reason. He said something about how essentially the Lord has given us the Spirit in order to help us overcome our infirmities, and that includes the normal everyday kind of things like overcoming lust.

Then he did a paragraph break and he goes, “Now stop. Read that again, because either you or Satan himself has tried to distract you from understanding that.” I always think of that. It’s true. He wants us to remain ignorant of the Word while we think that we’re not being ignorant of the Word. And also it’s just a human thing.

When we’re looking at something, for example with the sexual temptation thing, over successive uses your body becomes used to this, to the rush of chemicals. And essentially on a subconscious level your body is like, “Well, this is trying to keep that from happening more. I’m going to distract myself from it,” even though I’m reading it and even though I consciously want it to go away and to stop that. Subconsciously you’re still fighting against yourself.

Yeah, that constant war. We tend to make it between body and soul, but it’s body and soul versus what Christ is doing in body and soul. It’s all of us against all of us, and we need the Holy Spirit. We need the finished work of Christ through his Spirit in us to win these battles, and he’s chosen to use scripture, to use the preaching of the gospel. So it’s easy to fall asleep in church. It’s easy to not hear the words. It’s easy to read the words and not process them.

One of my jobs as a teacher is I have the student read the text and I ask “What does it say?” My job is to slow students down and say, “Wait. What did that actually say?”

I remember a pastor with whom I had a very passing acquaintance, but he was a good guy and he told the story of working with a young man and they were reading Romans 1:17, “The just shall live by faith.” He had the young man read the passage. He said, “Read the passage. Okay, what does it say?”

The young man looked at it and he said, “It says you’ve got to accept Jesus.”

“No, that’s not it. Read it again.”

“Uhh, it says you’ve got to live by faith.”

“No, but at least you have some of the words right, but that’s not what it says. Read it again.”

I’ve experienced similar things not just with teenagers but with older folks. “No, read the words. What are they actually saying?” because the odds of you getting it right are less than even, oftentimes.

Reading is a difficult thing because it means that you have to submit your mind to something outside of you, and sin does not like that. Our pride does not like that. We want to think our thoughts, and we don’t want to slow down and listen and submit to someone else and hear what they’re saying, particularly when it’s God.

So read the text. What does it say? And the text you should be reading a little bit every day is scripture. At the very least, meditate upon it, because that God commands.

My recommendation is less theologically focused, but it is a work of mercy. Something that I started doing when I moved out of state was donating plasma. Now, most places will pay you for your time, at the very least, but the merciful aspect of donating plasma is that pharmaceutical companies are able to take your plasma and do some kind of magical spell to it to create life-saving medical treatments for people with things like kidney diseases or autoimmune disorders and things like that.

You help by essentially giving about an hour and a half of your time twice a week. You can help these companies provide treatment for really nasty kind of disorders that are hard to live with, and they can’t make those things synthetically. Whatever aspect, I guess the hemoglobin in plasma – and I’m so sorry to any biologists listening, I probably just screwed that up – but it’s not something that they can do apart from the human body making it.

Last year, for instance, the United States reached an all-time record low in the plasma supply for the country, and every place was extremely desperate to get that back up.

Is the process like giving blood? They stick a needle in you? Or is it more complicated?

On the back end it’s more complicated. For you, you get stuck with a needle, just like normal, but you can do it more frequently because your body regenerates plasma quicker than it does red blood cells, so you can go twice a week and you give 800 ml each time, depending on body weight. The least you can give is about 700 ml.

Basically, it takes blood from the needle, feeds it through into a centrifuge, it spins out all the plasma and puts it into an off-hand thing, and then it returns your red blood cells to you, and then it does it a bunch more times.

For me for the 800 ml cycle, depending on how well hydrated I am that day, it takes between 6 and 7 cycles, so about 50 minutes total. That’s the longest part. But on a practical level you have to wait in line sometimes and you have to go through what’s called MH. I think it stands for Medical History or something like that. They take a prick of your blood. They test your blood pressure, your pulse, your temperature. They make sure that you’re healthy and your blood and your plasma is going to be in the right range for them to use it, and in the right range so that you’re not sitting there for three hours waiting for your plasma to come out. If you’re under-hydrated, your blood will not flow as well, etc.

There’s about nine factors, I think, on the MH spreadsheet. Then, depending on what kind of medication you’re on, you’re eligible or not. If you have blood diseases you’re right out, etc.

Anyway, that’s one thing I do. It’s nice because we basically use the money that they give you in exchange for your time for fun stuff, so we’ll use it for date night sometimes, my wife and I. And actually at one point I was using it to fund most of the home repair in our house.

On a more service-minded level, you’re helping out other people. It doesn’t take that long. Like anything with blood, there’s going to be a risk. I think on the sheet there’s a risk of contracting syphilis and tuberculosis even is a weird one. So if you’re immune-compromised, maybe don’t consider donating plasma, but I’m going to recommend it for healthy people who maybe want to make a little extra money during the month and they want to help people at the same time. Donating plasma is a good way to go.

A lot of times they’ll even have coupons and promotions and stuff. If you’re a first-time donator you can get like $300 in a month instead of the normal $200 or something, but it’s really good. I’ve had a good time getting to know the people there. My wife works there as well, so getting to know her co-workers in a sort of weird set-up, but it’s good. So that’s my recommendation.

And there is something semi-Messianic about giving your blood for the lives of others.

I wouldn’t take it too far, but yes, there is.

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