Last Fall Audrey and I spent 28 days in Israel. We marched in the Parade of Nations in Jerusalem during Feast of Tabernacles, we hiked the Akrabim Ascent also known as the Scorpion’s pass and volunteered at Biblical Tamar Park serving others traveling in Israel.

The trip was somewhat of a 60^th birthday present to myself and I had a sense that the Year Five just then beginning was significant.

I had a chance to speak to a tour group at Biblical Tamar Park and my advice to them was that the upcoming Year Five will be dangerous, be alert and take care of your relationships. I had no idea how accurate those words would sound a year later.

Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1970 the stable American life of the post-World War Two was being shattered by Vietnam War protests on college campuses all across the land. Culminating with the shooting at Kent State where 4 students died in a National Guard fiasco that still wrinkles brows to this day.

100 years ago we had race riots and the red scare (Russia had just become the Soviet Union) and the world was just recovering from the influenza pandemic of 1918-19; which killed 40 million people, including 675,000 Americans.

So here we are March 2020.

The market crashed, and the world is in a panic about a virus and on a personal level my father passed away unexpectedly. Welcome to early spring of Year 5 of Shemitah Cycle 6.

Last year for one reason or another (I cannot recall why) I picked up a copy of Peter Drucker’s book Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I was amazed when I found this title to the second chapter, “Purposeful Innovation and the Seven Sources for Innovative Opportunity”.

Old does not equal obsolete! Many ancient ideas are of great value. Some of those ideas have been ignored so long that they have been forgotten completely by most of humanity. It is now clear that this ignorance has yielded great losses and even worse this oversight has cost us many opportunities for creativity, progress and generosity.  

This website uses Bible, Business and History to better inform our decision making . I bring in my spiritual life and thoughts with some trepidation as one of the things I value greatly in life is credibility. It must be recognized  that many hucksters and less than honorable persons have used their so-called faith to gain the trust of naive individuals however, it is also fair to point out that we live in a society which scorns religious hypocrisy to such a degree that many times our culture has become scornful of true faith as well.

I will leave it up to you dear reader to decide what camp to put me in, just know this; it would be easier to keep these opinions to myself. However, in order to have a clear conscience before my Creator I am posting these ideas based on the ancient sources.  Let it be known that I did what I could to inform my generation of his amazing patterns and that these patterns have the ability to improve lives and increase creativity.

Last year I told a business group that if these ideas had been found in Mayan temple in South America our modern media would hold this information in high regard but since it is in your grandmother’s bible it’s thought of little value.

We live in a busy world and it’s hard to get people’s attention.

I tried to create a “one minute” to encourage a unique reading of the book of Genesis. The video ended up being 76 seconds.

If you take the 76 seconds to watch, I am hopeful you will want to watch the 5 minute version as well. Click below for a 76 second unique outlook on the book of Genesis  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80oS1zf4iPM&t=5s

Click here for the five minute version

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-VDmrAznmU

                                                                                                                                              Enjoy!

Ok 342 seconds I went over by 42 seconds

This video is designed to be watched after the two videos on the post I dubbed “76 seconds”

Here is the link to 5 minutes on 50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzxyABpDTxw

If you make it to the end you might have questions about 1929 and 1979, if so you will want to read the article “The Reappearance” here is the link   https://7and50rhymes.com/thereappearance/

Be awake out there!

As a young man playing softball this call from the coach to his infielders, was often heard when runners were in scoring position. From my third baseman position the call for alertness was certainly appropriate as the action at third base can be very quick for good or for bad. The transition from Year Four to Year Five remind me of those defensive innings near the third base bag.

Oh boy! I have been wondering about this one for a long time. What will it bring? How can I be ready? If Year Four was a year to set standards and it was, will the standards set in Year Four hold up when the Fifth-Year birds and fish emerge?

Symbolically let’s review what the Fifth-Day birds and fish represent. This new life is going to be powerful, beautiful, mobile with mouths and teeth. Year Five may carry temptation toward pride, cockiness and conceit if by some means one finds themselves in possession of this new life.  On the other hand, the new life of Year Five may bite, harm and destroy leaving an individual wondering what happened?

Again, let me remind you, I write to figure out what I think. A lot of times I write stuff that is never posted because after I write it, I don’t agree with myself. Yes, that is humorous and it’s also true. I have been working on this post for over a year and have scrapped its previous versions, numerous times, for the just noted reason. This time I am posting it but I continue to wrestle over the implications of the ideas herein expressed. Therefore dear reader beware I am indeed wandering in to uncharted waters.

The biblical counts of Seven and Fifty create some interesting tension on an annual basis. It appears that the end of the Seventh Year is in the Seventh Month, the month of Feast of Tabernacles as spelled out in Deuteronomy 31.

And Moses commanded them, “At the end of every seven years, at the set time in the year of release, at the Feast of Tabernacles, Deuteronomy 31:10

One would expect that all other years also find their ending in the Seventh Month as well.  That does not mean however, that the month following Feast of Tabernacles is the beginning of the New Year, in fact Exodus in the context of explaining Passover gives us this about the spring month when the barley is ripe:

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, “This month shall be for you the beginning of months. It shall be the first month of the year for you. Exodus 12:1-2

Abib (month of Barley) is first month of the year in the spring and so begins the count to Tabernacles in the Seventh month. Passover and Tabernacles both have in them a sense of starting over, or if you will, a new beginning.

There is one other pilgrimage festival, it also seems a “New Beginning”. As spring nears its end each year, Shavuot is remembered and appropriately celebrated, in the west it is often known by its Greek name, Pentecost. The instructions for finding the day of Shavuot is different than all the other appointed times in that a month and day is not named but a count is declared from a previous set day.

At the end of May, Audrey and I made the trip to the Meuse-Argonne in France to see my grandfather’s battlefield of 100 years ago. My love of history and my conviction that 50-year segments of time are significant induced us to make the trip this year. Thanks to all the staff at Military Historical Tours of Woodbridge Virginia and a special thanks to John and Bob who went the extra “many” miles to put us on the 79th division’s battlefield. 

Sunday, November 3, 1918 my grandfather would often recall as his worst day, losing many buddies and experiencing  numerous personal close calls, as a sergeant in the 304^th engineers of the 79^th division of the US Army. The 79th was in the early stages of attempting to capture “Corn Willy Hill” from the Germans to take away the eyes of their artillery. That same German artillery had found the 304^th engineer train’s staging area on Samogneux hill just to the south thus the losses that Sunday. The 79^th would succeed in their mission but lose many good men over the next several days. However, November 3, 1918 always stuck out to my grandfather as his most perilous hours.

November 11 and the end of WW1 was only 8 days away, imagine the roller coaster of emotions in those early days of November 100 years ago. He and my grandmother (the girl he left behind) always celebrated November 11, Armistice Day, as the day they got their lives back.       

Our upcoming Veterans day on November 11, 2018 is 100 years in the making.

To all our veterans, Thank you for your service!

At Camp Mead ready to ship out. Summer 1918.

  The New Year which starts in few days will mark seven years since I finally understood Joseph’s story. This chart helps explain the Genesis One creation story’s paradigm of seven in the second half of Genesis. The Seven Years Jacob worked for Rachel is a “FOUR”. In other words it is a fourth set of seven years of a 50 year Jubilee cycle. Publishing this chart now is a small attempt to set a new standard of understanding as Year-Four begins.

For three years I have gently put my book and website out for public consumption. I was purposefully low key about the fact that this information can balance your emotions as you invest in the modern market place. I took this quite approach mostly because I value my credibility and the last thing I want is to be seen as just one more prognosticator. I have no interest in predicting the future but I am interested in learning how to think about the future based on the same information I believe Joseph creatively deployed in Egypt. In fact, I will go so far as to say I expect the blessings on Joseph and his sons found in Genesis 48:1-6, 49:22-26 and Deuteronomy 33:13-17 are being restored after a very long and painful ordeal.