My grandmother was a superb painter. I often wondered why she stopped making art after awhile. Why so few paintings.
I used to frown upon her lack of ambition, but she knew something I didn't. Fame comes with the price of your morals.
Also, as I get older, I understand how frustrating it can be to pour massive amounts of time into an art project and receive no recognition for it. After awhile, you lose the motivation.
There is a DEVO song that goes "And he wore a hat, and he had a job, and he brought home the bacon so that no one knew...He was a mongoloid."
I used to think that was funny, but now I realize that I am a mongoloid, just working and putting up appearances so that nobody knows.
I've heard a few things from pastors that indicate they don't know everything about the Bible.
One pastor didn't understand what a hyssop was used for.
If you watch Shakespeare in love, he brushes his teeth with a reed. A hyssop was the old time tooth brush and scrub brush.
Another pastor I had didn't understand the tithing of dill and cumin.
Back in ancient times, you made purchases with salt. It's where the word "salary" comes from. Inductively, dill and cumin more than likely had a monitory value, due to the high premium for items that give food flavor.
Heck, even the footnote section in my Bible gets "uncertain" about things. The line about "cast your bread upon the water" for example. That's a psalm referencing the brewing of beer.
There's a famous quote: You don't graduate Bible study until you meet the author face to face. Above are a few examples of that.
Nobody talks about what happens after the beast in Beauty and the Beast becomes human. That's where the story ends. The same thing goes for Ariel in the Little Mermaid. No one cares what they do as a regular person. They're just not interesting after they become regular people. They lose what makes them, them.
Normal is boring. Maybe there's a lesson in that for all of us.
If Belle kept the Beast as a beast, got married and had a family, it would be an interesting story. How would all those relationships work out? Not sure how the prince from little mermaid would keep her relationship going without him drowning, but I guess Aquaman has to come from somewhere.
Of course, in the original tale, Ariel jumps into the sea and drowns because Ursula steals her man. This reinforces my point about them being more interesting (in this case, happier) before they become a normal human.
I think sometimes a book can parallel your life, and give you ironic hints about future events. Sometimes I edit a novel and find certain similar circumstances happening to me in real life. Not the whole story, just parts. It's like the Stephen king novel, bag of bones, where his manuscript is haunted and gives him hints about a ghost. I think that's a mark of great writing, though not necessarily the type that gets published.
Now that I think about it, it's not just an issue of "prophecy," sometimes your writing can speak to you, tell your future self good advice you didn't expect. That's good writing.
I used to hold to an irrational belief that everything I wrote in a completed novel was magic, and I couldn't change a word of it or jinx myself out of getting published. That's probably why I never got published. I spent a huge amount of time picking alternate sentences for a story, and archiving all its possible iterations, in hopes of striking that magical collection of words that make up a bestseller.
Now, as I edit my first novel for the, (I don't know, fiftieth time? ) I have come to the realization that I should have focused on just making a book that doesn't sound stupid, and isn't loaded with filler words.
I saw a program on how a lake in Africa turned orange due to a volcano blowing carbon dioxide into a body of water that doesn't circulate enough to disperse the CO2. It killed the livestock.
I have studied textbooks on the Bible enough to understand that God can sometimes use natural phenomena to accomplish a miracle. The manna in the wilderness, for example, was theorized to be excretion from a certain type of insect.
Regardless of whether the Nile turning red was due to a volcano or something else, the timing is miraculous, and it figures in to the part about Egyptian sorcerers being able to mimic the event.
Moses being able to capitalize on such a weird natural phenomenon that even modern Africans couldn't figure out, that's miraculous. Moses wasn't a scientist, but the phenomenon helped the people of Israel to escape from slavery.
I've frequently found that God seems to work through natural events. He created the laws of physics and such, so taking advantage of what He made is probably convenient for Him, although it makes it hard to scientifically prove His existence. Still, you can't disprove His existence, so take it as you can take it.
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