Make me!

The 23rd Psalm has come up a couple of times over the past week for me. The second verse has some great imagery:

He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters...

Ah, such a restful picture!

I realized this morning that the first verb is "makes". Not "allows". It doesn't say "He provides green pastures for me to lie down in". The mental picture I had after that realization was a young horse, galloping through forests and meadows, being roped and pulled down, in preparation for breaking (*).

But then I realized that wasn't an accurate picture at all. A horse can easily out-run, out-pull, or out-kick a person (**). A more accurate picture is that of a hyperactive puppy or neurotic terrier, worked into a frenzy by imagined threats or excitement, scurrying around barking jumping and being a general ball of noisy underfoot nuisance, finally being gently (but firmly) grabbed by the scruff of the neck, held down, and soothed until it finally settles down.

We humans get worked up over nothing. We imagine that our circumstances really are crisis: the baby is crying again, the bills are due, my project won't be done in time, the house is a mess and guests are arriving soon, I'm sick, the economy is bad, I'm unemployed, I don't like my job, I'm not happy enough. When I get worked up, it's completely legitimate from my perspective. But from God's perspective (and honestly, sometimes even from the perspective of any other human being), it's overreacting to something imagined or vastly exaggerated. And so He makes me lie down in green pastures. "Settle down," He says, putting me in a headlock, "I have this under control. You're working yourself up, and that's not doing any good. I'll give you rest and refreshment. As for you, settle down. I'll let you loose when you're calm."


* I've ridden some, and read Black Beauty, but really don't know much about horsey things. The real scene would probably be different, and that's fine. Leave a horse-training comment if you like.
** It's a good thing we have brains and language! "You're rum little creatures, you humans." - Bree

Quotes from Computer Architecture

In the distant past, I took a Computer Architecture course. The professor was one of those old graybeard types, and was given to saying things that were quite entertaining. Since I was in the class with a good friend (*), I took to writing them down. Recently, I was going through some papers and found the list.

• "A bunch, here, could mean a whole lot."
• "It's true you have a lot of them, but after a while, you don't."
• "Loops do tend to go back."
• "Sometime today, which means 'not yet'..."
• "Not only quickly, but works faster than the other..."
• "Devices don't usually pop up at random in personal computers."
• "This problem with having devices identify themselves is fairly useful."
• "Now, get yourself a compiler..."
• "Books like 'Internet for Dummies', which, of course, shouldn't be allowed..."
• "...a number of other things--actually quite a lot."

As a bonus, one day he put a schematic of a Pentium processor on the overheard, just for us to look at before class started. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't easy to read. He opened class by saying "Today we're going to talk about ophthalmology, and why you can't read what's written on this screen." From where we were sitting, we could see one of our fellow students dutifully begin to write the heading "Optimology".

* We sat in the back of a large-ish lecture hall and tended to participate more than most of the other students. By "participate", I mean we would answer yes/no questions with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. The other students must have wondered why the professor would ask a question, then respond to as if he'd gotten an answer after a few seconds of silence.