Tom And Meg And Pride And Prejudice

I'm in Kansas but no Hallmark movies with Sally yet. Maybe Christmas! This is from December 30, 2015.

I'm back in Houston after traveling to Kansas to Oklahoma and back to Kansas and back to Oklahoma. It was a great nine days spent with Dave and Sally and family. (I missed Scott and Karen this year as they covered a great distance from Kansas to Colorado to Iowa for their holidays.) One thing I like about the Christmas break is that for one of the few times during the year, I'm not on a schedule so I do stuff I rarely do when I'm home. Sally, besides being my fashion consultant, loves watching Christmas movies on the Hallmark and Lifetime channels. As I mentioned, my time expands so I ended up watching parts of five or six Christmas movies. I kid you not- each one had the same story line. Male and female leads loathe each other or are indifferent or confused about their relationship BUT THEY ARE ALL IN LOVE AND IT ALL WORKS OUT IN THE END, SOMETIMES WITH A PUSH FROM SANTA!

On a completely unrelated note, we were at Ben and Courtney's in OKC on the afternoon of the 24th- they were still visiting her folks in Henrietta, home of Troy Aikman. After tiring of sports shows/games, I was flipping through their channels when I came across the start of one of my favorite movies ever, You've Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. If you haven't seen it, Joe (Tom) and Kathleen (Meg) are business competitors who can't stand each other in real life but without knowing it, they are close e-mail friends who are devoted to the cyber relationship. Of course, they find out and fall in love and I assume they get married- it always ends with a kiss and fade to black. One topic that kept coming up between the two was Pride And Prejudice, the 1813 novel by Jane Austen about the romantic lives and travails of an English family with five daughters. It centers around William Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, the characters Kathleen and Joe argue about. Well, Sally tells us she has the movie and we decide to watch it when we get back to Kansas. And we did.

Except, it wasn't really a movie; it was a six part miniseries from PBS. We watched all six episodes over three straight evenings in chilly Wichita. I admit, we (me and Dave) got into it, even googling names so we could keep the characters straight. There were many sub plots and themes but the big question was always,  Would Darcy and Elizabeth ever overcome their loathing of each other and get together? Of course, they would! And we are led to believe they lived happily ever although some of their relatives obviously were not going to share the same joyful future. THE END.

You know, I'm not saying I would like to quickly repeat the holiday cinema marathons but it was a good respite from my normal world. And each story reminded me, sometimes in a silly way,  of how mysterious and often confusing the interplay is between women and men. It must be very important; God addressed it quickly in Genesis when the population was only two. No competition for either Adam's or Eve's attention or affection. Many love stories are woven through the scriptures, including the one the world just focused on with the young earthly parents of the Heavenly King. It's still confounding to me and yet I know it's in God's plan, even if our kind- human kind- has made a mockery of the sanctity of matrimony. So, I'll simply sign off with one of my favorite passages which says plainly what I could only hope to enunciate:
from Proverbs 30, verses 18 and 19 (NLT):
18 There are three things that amaze me—
    no, four things that I don’t understand:
¹⁹ how an eagle glides through the sky,
    how a snake slithers on a rock,
    how a ship navigates the ocean,
    how a man loves a woman
PS: Only 46 days until February 14!


Applicable quote of the day, # 1:

“I have not the pleasure of understanding you.” 

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Applicable quote of the day, # 2:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
― Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

To watch a great clip from You've Got Mail about Pride and Prejudice, copy and paste the link below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br0sTnV84Iw

God bless,
Steve
Luke 18:1

www.hawleybooks.com
E-mail me at steve@hawleybooks.com