The book of Nahum

“You have increased the number of your merchants till they are more than the stars of the sky, but like locusts, they strip the land and then fly away.” (Nahum 3:16)

Warning: according to Grammarly, my post today sounds worried and sad. 😬

Here, like in my Bible post on Joel, we have mention of the locusts again, generations after Jonah warned them of their evil ways the Assyrian city, Nineveh, has forgotten God again. Nahum is a prophet who had a vision of Nineveh’s destruction and is sent by God to warn them. The city was destroyed fifty years after Nahum’s prophecy.

So (forgive my venting) here is my prophecy, sort of: In 2019 our economy was doing very well. Just about every cute and affordable home in my neighborhood (I live in a historic downtown) was bought and torn down to make way for large and expensive ones. What happens when the character and the spirit of a place die? When I look at much of my town now, I feel like life itself has been stripped away from this place and replaced with the synthetic, opportunistic goals of a dying people. The houses they build look so cold and dead to me. What happens when the economy tanks and regular folks like me can’t afford big houses like that or can’t afford to maintain them? Not to mention the environmental impact when buildings are torn down, discarded, and new ones are built in their place. What happens to the neighborhood, the city, the people?

Once the area is no longer suited to their investment needs the newcomers who are using these homes solely to increase their pocketbooks will move on. And who will be left but the people who had always called this town their home–but now my town is almost unrecognizable, ruined (in my opinion) by opportunistic people (locusts) such as these.