Hebel? About Bern Velasco

Nothing special here, just another Christian theist with a blog.  I’m a Christ-follower.  I’m a husband of one and father of two.  I’m a former-Environmental Bureaucrat who later drove a truck to pay my way through seminary.  I’m a native of Tucson, AZ who sojourned in Dallas and now I find myself in beautiful northern California.  I’m a College & Young Adult pastor (www. hessel.org), a graduate of Dallas Seminary (Th. M, 2008) and the University of Arizona (Bachelors of Environmental Science, 2000).  No, that isn’t my bike—I’m too chicken.  Also, I LOVE Cajun food.  What else do you need to know?

So anyway, my absolute favorite book is Ecclesiastes and the most important word in that oft-abused masterpiece is hebel.  Quite literally it means vapor or breath (but is commonly translated “meaningless” or “vanity”).   Now, the weather was beautiful today in Santa Rosa (it’s springtime as I write this), but if you cast your memory back to this past winter you might remember a morning where you walked out to your car, exhausted your lungs with a sigh and wondered why you were up so early.  Chances are you saw your breath, though only for a moment.  As soon as you stop to inhale it vanished.  Hebel.  Life is passing, quickly.  How do we live in the face of death, a death that will void our impatient lives and everything in them?  Ecclesiastes, I thank you.

-Bern Velasco