Gideon

Just in time for those Easter baskets.

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One day in junior church, I taught about the Bible character Gideon. The following Sunday, for the sake of review, I asked if anyone remembered last week's Bible hero. No hands went up.

"Okay," I said, "I'll give you a clue. He fought a battle using only lamps, pitchers, and trumpets."

Still no response.

"Maybe you remember how he used a fleece to learn of God's will," I said.

Ten little blank faces stared up at me.

"One final clue," I pleaded. "There are people today who call themselves by the same name of our hero, and they go around putting Bibles in hotel rooms."

The hand of one eight-year old eagerly shot up.

"Oh! Oh!" he cried out, "It was Hilton!"

[Davy Troxel, from "Kids of the Kingdom" in New Christian Reader via Your Weekly Church Laughs]

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WORD for YOUR WEEK: Gideon had an intrepid faith. "Intrepid" is one of those Latin words modified by adding the "in" to the front, which implies the opposite of the back half of the word. In this case, "trepidus" was Latin for worry, or alarm; adding "in" means you're not worried, and unalarmed. Over the years, context has added the meaning of "unshaken," or "undaunted." On a side note, when I was in college I wrote and produced a science fiction radio theater called "The Intrepid Adventures." Yeah, it was a blatant rip off of the Star Trek concept, but they had gone off the air and had not yet returned in movie form, so we were filling a cultural gap. At least that's the story we went with.

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