{"id":68,"date":"2009-08-11T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-08-12T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/2008\/07\/24\/the-wisdom-of-sampson\/"},"modified":"2009-08-11T20:28:23","modified_gmt":"2009-08-12T06:28:23","slug":"the-wisdom-of-sampson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/2009\/08\/11\/the-wisdom-of-sampson\/","title":{"rendered":"The Wisdom of Sampson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Judges 16<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Sampson taught me my first glimmer of wisdom. I was in the sixth grade and madly infatuated with a handsome boy in my Sunday youth group. He, in turn, was infatuated with someone else.<\/p>\n

The someone he was infatuated with wasn’t a very nice girl. She attended church only under duress and while there pouted, snarled, and pretty much tried to make the rest of us miserable. I couldn’t understand why he liked her, yet I tried my best to act just like her so he would like me!<\/p>\n

One Sunday, after having said something mean, despicable and nasty to a visiting teen (who probably thought she’d landed in the only Sunday School class in hell), my wannabe paramour finally noticed me with approval — but I was feeling rather sick to my stomach and ashamed of myself.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Worthington stepped into the room to start class and I stared at my lesson book in misery while we read about Sampson and Delilah. While listening to the story, I could see the boy I’d been trying to impress still laughing about what I’d said. I could see the new girl trying not to cry. And I felt abominable.<\/p>\n

And somewhere in all of that, I realized I was behaving just like Sampson! I wanted someone who wasn’t worth my time or effort, and because of it, I was doing incredibly horrid and self-destructive things.<\/p>\n

Poof! Infatuation ended. I did try to apologize to the new girl, but she wasn’t very receptive — not that I blame her. And I walked out of that classroom a bit older and wiser than when I walked in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Judges 16 Sampson taught me my first glimmer of wisdom. I was in the sixth grade and madly infatuated with a handsome boy in my Sunday youth group. He, in turn, was infatuated with someone else. The someone he was infatuated with wasn’t a very nice girl. She attended church only under duress and while […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meditation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":69,"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions\/69"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.quilldancer.com\/meditations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}