At the Finish Line, What Really Matters?

Last week I mused about the impact of relationships and how much they matter. As I shared, one of the reasons for these musings was the battle that one of my mentors, Bob Shank, is going through. As only God would have it, Bob wrote in his weekly Point of View (he has missed a few since being diagnosed but after this one it looks like he is back on track) about relationships.

Check it out below:

Is your story in sand, or stone?

It was on a RCA television – black-and-white, 18” diagonal screen – that I saw my first movie, The Ten Commandments. Made in 1956 by Cecil B. DeMille, it was the epic Bible drama (which allowed it to pass muster for our family entertainment). I was probably six when I managed to sit through the whole 3:40 runtime that made Charlton Heston, for me, forever Moses.

In true Hollywood style, DeMille spiced the film with credible backstories that kept the Bible essentials intact while adding human interest to the mix. In the Oscar-winning version, the conflict between Heston’s Moses and Yul Brynner’s Rameses created palpable tension as the two young men – raised together in Pharaoh’s palace but contending for the approval of Rameses’ father, Seti I – sought to become the likely successor to the throne.

Through intrigue, Rameses manages to betray Moses to his father through misinterpretation of the care extended by Moses to the Jews whom he had learned to be his real familial community.

Sir Cedric Hardwicke played the role of the aging Pharaoh Seti I; his unilateral sentence dismissing Moses from Egypt to become a desert wanderer caught my attention in a way that stunned me as if the story reflected true life. His pronouncement: “Let the name of Moses be stricken from every book and tablet. Stricken from every pylon and obelisk of Egypt. Let the name of Moses be unheard and unspoken, erased from the memory of man, for all time.”

I was six years old, for heaven’s sake, but the idea of the hero that Heston was on that screen being canceled… Continue reading here