Sackcloth and Ashes

  [513 words] Did you ever wear a starchy feedsack shirt? (I mean a real one, not the store-bought kind you see now-a-days.) Scratchy, ain’t they? Can’t you just imagine one made out of towsack? (Grass-sack, for some of us.) Well, wearing sackcloth had a special meaning at one time.  King Ahab, stirred by Jezebel, was an evil man. But when Elijah told him the dogs would eat Jezebel, he “rent his clothes, and put sackcloth upon his flesh, and fasted, and lay in sackcloth, and went softly.” And God said, “because he humbleth himself before me” judgment upon his house will be postponed. (1 Kings 21:27-29)  When Mordicai wished to mourn the plight of the Jews, he “put on sackcloth with ashes, and went out into the midst of the city, and cried with a bitter cry.” (Esther 4:1-f.)  Then, in Nineveh, when the people heard the prophet foretell…