JCL
When I graduated college, I had to decide between a high school teaching job and going to graduate school. At the time, I really was torn with deciding. I believe that the fact that I asked my now wife to marry me and she said yes, nudged me to choose a high school math teaching job. I have never regretted that decision due to the sequence of events God had planned for my life. But I’m jumping forward.
When I accepted the teaching job (at my old high school, no less), I found out that besides the math classes, I was teaching a computer class in Fortran and COBOL (a semester of each). The Fortran I had learned and used in college but I had no experience with COBOL. I decided I better take a summer programing class in COBOL at my local community college.
Sorry, I have to drag you down to the geek level but when you use a mainframe (at least then), you need to give the mainframe certain instructions before you run the program - which tape to load (yes, I’m that old), what the expected CPU usage is, whether you need to merge or match two data sets, etc. This is called JCL for job control language. And practically, for users (as opposed to computer programmers), JCL is something you copy from another program and tweak the parameters if you have to. Think of it like an oil change for a car - it doesn’t make your car take you from point A to B but if you neglect it, the car won’t take you anywhere.
The community college where I took the COBOL class gave the students a program template with the JCL to use. Think of it like, “insert program here” type template.
Anyway, fast forward 3 years. I had decided to leave teaching due to a few parents unreasonable expectation (or lack of any expectation) for their kid. I applied for and was offered an actuarial student job (two offers from the same company but that’s a different story). I had updated my resume (I think they’re referred to as CVs now), and had added my experience with COBOL programming. They had me fill out a skills inventory and one of the questions was whether I was knowledgeable about JCL. I said yes due to my community college programming experience.
I started my job and I remember panicking when my boss asked me to create a report on something using a mainframe data file and a new, to me, computer programming language called Easytrieve (a simplified COBOL language). That’s when I found out, from one of my fellow actuarial students (Brian, if you’ve read about him), that all users, more or less, copy their JCL from one program to the next and tweak it when necessary.
Fast forward to this morning. In my in-depth study of Romans with Dr. Sproul, we are going through Romans 9:
“But it is not as though the word of God has failed. For not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel, and not all are children of Abraham because they are his offspring, but “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as offspring.” - Romans 9:6-8 ESV
Dr. Sproul’s delved into verses 6 & 7 to point out that Paul was stating that there is a visible and invisible church and they aren’t necessarily the same. The nation of Israel was made up of more and less than the heirs of Isaac (Ishmael wasn’t a part of the nation of Israel for example). Similarly, the visible church of those attending church regularly may include people who haven’t surrendered their life to Christ.
The significant part of the devotion was his emphasis on the children coming to church. Dr. Sproul suggested, and I think it’s a good suggestion, that we should serve the children diligently so that we might see them, by God’s good pleasure, embrace the promise of salvation by faith.
“Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked the people, but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven.” And he laid his hands on them and went away.” - Matthew 19:13-15
In that first mainframe computer job, I wasn’t thinking and I programmed the computer to print out the detail on 30k people when all I needed was a couple of totals from the bottom of the report. It took me days to get my output and it arrived in a box. I never made that mistake again (at least not in the same magnitude).
