Neil Diamond: "Brooklyn Roads"

I identify with this autobiographical song. Like Neil, I was a daydreamer. My fantasies kept away the misery of being in a residential school five hundred miles from home.

Check the song out here:

I also identified with the Israelites when they were slaves in Egypt, though I wasn't overworked and beaten. I was far from the land I loved.

And just as God heard my tearful prayers, he heard the agonized cries of Jacob's descendents. As Exodus 3:9 (Bible in Basic English) reads, "For now, truly, the cry of the children of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the cruel behaviour of the Egyptians to them."

The Israelites also were deported to Babylon for seventy years. As they sang in Psalms 137:1 and 2 (BBE), "By the rivers of Babylon we were seated, weeping at the memory of Zion, Hanging our instruments of music on the trees by the waterside."

And as I finally left that residential school six years later, the Israelites returned home. Daniel 9:1 and 2 (BBE) explains, "In the first year of Darius, the son of Ahasuerus, of the seed of the Medes, who was made king over the kingdom of the Chaldaeans; In the first year of his rule, I, Daniel, saw clearly from the books the number of years given by the word of the Lord to the prophet Jeremiah, in which the making waste of Jerusalem was to be complete, that is, seventy years."

Even so, we Christians await our inheritance of the good things God promised to his people. That's why Ephesians 2:19-21 (BBE) is such good news for us. "So then you are no longer as those who have no part or place in the kingdom of God, but you are numbered among the saints, and of the family of God, Resting on the base of the Apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the chief keystone, In whom all the building, rightly joined together, comes to be a holy house of God in the Lord;"

If our hoped-for saviour hasn't returned by Thursday, I expect to post about precious wisdom.