I Get In Trouble For Talking About Samson Too much During Cleaning Time

The other day I was eating lunch with some of the 9th grade students, and as I was clearing away my lunch tray one of them asked me, “Do you know Samson?”

“Yes,” I answered. “In America we learn about Samson in church.” But after having answered automatically, I now began to wonder how they found out about Samson. The Bible stories, that we take for granted as just being common knowledge in the West, are largely unknown in Japan.

I asked and they responded they had come across Samson’s name in their dictionary, and were interested in knowing more about him. I gave a brief explanation. “Samson was a strong man. He was the strongest man. But he died very young, because he was defeated from by a woman. And from Samson’s story we learn a very important lesson. Women are dangerous.”

This got a good laugh.

Later, during cleaning time, as I was helping the students sweep up the hallway, more students came up to talk to me. “Tell him about Samson,” they said.

So I told the same story again, this time adding in a few more details. “He was really strong. He once killed 300 men with just the jawbone of a donkey. But a woman betrayed him to his enemies, who cut out his eyes and took him captive, so he died very sad. Women are very dangerous. If you don’t understand that, you’re life will be very sad.”

Again, this got a big laugh. So pretty soon big groups of students are coming up and asking to hear about Samson, and I’m adding more and more details until I’m pretty much repeating the whole bible story. And meanwhile no one is doing any cleaning, so finally a teacher comes over and yells at everyone to get back to work.

So we’re back to sweeping the floor. But now some of the girls are a little angry at me. “Why do you keep saying women are dangerous?” one of them asked me.

I guess maybe I should have just said, “oh, that was just a cheap joke,” and left it at that, but I felt the need all of a sudden to back up my statement, so I retold the story of Samson, emphasizing how he should have known this woman was trouble, but instead he let her use him. I was going to say that you have to be careful about any relationship, man or woman, because a lot of people will just screw you over if you give them the chance, but before I could finish the teacher came over and yelled at us again.

So, the rest of the time I just did my best to clean diligently.

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I don't write too much about religion on this blog, not because I'm not interested, but because I don't have anything intelligent to say. But I enjoy reading the thoughts on my friends blog. Particularly Borks recent post on critiquing The Darwin Left.