New Sink

BEFORE:
It was stained when we moved in, but it's stained worse now. I think I used the wrong kind of cleansers on it. The edge of the sink was high, which meant it was always a struggle to keep the water from pooling in the small space between the back of the sink and the wall. Even after we caulked that with 50-year-guarantee kitchen/bath-quality caulking, it was nasty within a year. In addition to these problems, the moving parts inside the faucet were going bad: it was quite difficult to turn the faucet from one side of the sink to the other.


AFTER:
Pretty!

Two things to get used to:
1) Do not throw the faucet around. After using so much muscle-effort whenever we had to move the old one, we keep using more energy than is required for the smooth-moving new faucet.
2) The Culligan spigot moved over by the dish rack. This means that stacking dishes the way we used to (never towel-drying, perched precariously while air-drying) will cut off our access to the drinking water. We may be compelled to put away dishes in a more timely manner, possibly even breaking out the dish towels on a twice-daily basis. This may [gasp!] make the kitchen look tidier as well as be more readily usable. Now, can we do it???

Psalm 119:54

Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.

House? On a pilgrimage? Part of the characteristic of being on a pilgrimage is that you do not have a house.

We so often understand "statutes" as law-codes and rules. If you get a parking ticket, it will say that you broke statute thus-and-such. The crime reports in the paper tell what statute was transgressed when the dude was booked by the police.

But God's thoughts are not our thoughts. If His statutes are the covenant made to Abraham, the promises given to the patriarchs, that's a little bit different than our concept of statute. So we sing His statutes in the "house" that is our church. We sing, "Our Lord Jesus Christ, on the night in which He was betrayed, took bread...." We sing, "This is the Word of the Lord." We sing, "O Christ, Thou Lamb of God, that takest away the sin of the world...." We sing, "God spoke to His beloved Son, 'tis time to have compassion..." We sing, "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel for He hath visited and redeemed His people."

His statutes ARE our songs at church (the house of our pilgrimage).

Today's Laugh

A friend's daughter came up with the cutest way to say something when she couldn't remember the right words. Check out Meghan's story.

Knowing the Mysteries

After Jesus told the parable of "The Sower and the Seed," the disciples came to Him, saying, "Huh? We don't get it. Explain, please. Why do You tell these parables anyhow?" And He answered, "To you it has been given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven...."

Really? You'd think not. After all, they don't get it and they have to ask. They also don't get it when Jesus says He has to go up to Jerusalem and die. Even after the resurrection, at Jesus' ascension, they don't get it: "So NOW are You going to restore the kingdom to Israel?"

But Jesus said it's been given to His disciples to know the mysteries. As long as we know Jesus, we know. We may not understand details. Without a good teacher, we may be bamboozled by parables. We may listen to our human reason and our experiences more than we listen to God's word. But as long as we know Jesus and His mercy, as long as we cling to Him and His forgiveness, we know the mysteries. Even when it might appear we don't.

I Keep Your Commandments

All through the Psalter, especially in 119, we pray, "I keep Your word" and "I keep Your commandments." Being creatures with a sinful flesh and thus a works-righteous faith, we see those words and think it's about obeying rules. We like rules. We want God to approve of our efforts to keep His rules. Even when we screw up, we still think that our plan to do better next time will make God happy with us.

"I keep Your word" = "I hang onto Your word."

Whether His word condemns our sin (and we agree with its just judgment) or whether His word forgives the undeserving (and we joyfully agree with its declaration of innocence for the sake of Christ) ... we hang onto it. We cling to it. We don't let go of it.

"I keep Your commandments" is more about what we love, what we believe, and what promises we trust in, than it is about stark obedience to rules.

Zoe

Almost four months:

My Thoughts Are Not Your Thoughts

One of the collects uses the verse from Isaiah 55 ("'My thoughts are not Your thoughts, nor are My ways your ways,' declares the Lord") as if God has His way of doing things, and He's just so big and so great that we cannot understand it. So if there's a hurricane that destroys a city, we pray that, y'know, His thoughts aren't our thoughts, and we don't know what's up with the whole disaster thing, but God must know what He's doing.

And that's not untrue.

But Pastor keeps telling us that "My thoughts are not your thoughts" has nothing to do with God being "beyond us" in smarts (which He is), or about His being capricious (which He's not). It is, rather, about His way of looking at things being so different from ours. We believe people ought to pay for their mistakes. We love the people who are nice to us. We get fed up with those who abuse us and either take our revenge or (if we're the [ahem] patient and nonvengeful sort) at least we know to avoid those stinkers who give us grief.

God is not like that!

God's thoughts are not our thoughts. If you look at the context of that verse, it's so obvious. God calls out at the beginning of the chapter, "Come, all you thirsty ones, and get something to drink. All you hungry people, come and get food without paying for it!" A grocery store sure ain't gonna stay in business if that's how they operate! Later in the chapter, He sends out His word to bring people to Himself, and He promises that it will not fail in the job He sends it to do: work repentance and bestow pardon.

His thoughts and His ways are just plain weird.

Can there really truly be that much abundance of mercy?

He Knows Our Frame

In Psalm 103, where it says that the Lord "knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust," this is not merely an intellectual knowing. Yes, His mind recognizes the fact that our bodies were made of the dust of the ground.

But it's more than that. He knows our frame because He has it too. He is human. He took on flesh. He has bones and muscles and skin and eyelashes. He knows our frame not just because He created it, but because it became His own.

Blacking My Driveway

Main lesson learned -- This job should be done in cooler weather!

BEFORE:
This is how the driveway looked after my multitudinous patching jobs last summer. The weather failed before I could get the blacktopping completed.

Thanks to Janelle & Jeff for the loan of the power washer. That made the cleaning job much easier.

AFTER:

There were some parts of this job that were very pleasant. After hearing others' stories, I expected to endure the task, but it wasn't bad. I especially liked the gloop-gloop sound of the blacking as I squeegeed it into its spots. I'm not sure why I was tickled (but I was!) when Maggie came out to ask a question and commented how much she liked that sound. Funny!

I am SO glad my Aunt Sue warned me to wear shoes that I can throw in the garbage! I should have done the same thing with the clothes. (She did tell me to wear clothes that would be disposed of, but I forgot to change between the washing and the blacking.)

The muscles in my back aren't so sure they liked this job. If we don't hire out the job when it needs to be repeated in several years, I will do two things differently. First, I think it would be wise to wash down the driveway the evening before. This risks someone eating her dinner on the driveway and leaving mouse guts or bird innards on my freshly washed driveway. But it would be nice to get all or most of the washing finished on the previous day. Second, I would do the job when it's cooler. The instructions say to apply the blacking between 65 and 90°. It was in the low 80s today. With the heat of the previous week, that was too hot: the goop thickened (on its way to drying) too quickly. In the shade of the garage and in the shade of the plum tree -- those were the two places where the goop spread most smoothly and the results were best. The heat is important to the goop cooking/curing/setting. But too much heat while it's being applied makes the work harder and the results less than ideal. As long as you know the temps are likely to climb into the 80s or 90s later in the day, it would be great to start the job at 7 a.m. when the temps are 65-72°.


I assumed I'd have to wear black hose to work on Wednesday, attempting to hide my splotchiness. But after inadvertently blacktopping my feetsies numerous times, I still managed to scrub them clean.

Sin Held Its Sway Unceasing

A young friend mentioned a yowza point from one of the organist workshops she attended. It's a very cool thing to notice in "Salvation unto Us Has Come"!

In the Bathroom

Karin writes about things moms know. It shouldn't be funny. It's too real. But that's why it's funny!

Friends

Janelle and Susan

Maggie and Leah

Some dear friends are moving away. We'll miss them but are looking forward to seeing them next summer!

The Parable of the Leaven

In Matthew 13, Jesus says, "The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till it was all leavened."

Does anybody else find it very sweet that, in this parable, we have Jesus making bread?

Theology-by-Quote

If you've been around the Lutheran cyberworld, you have run into the Quote Wars. Somebody quotes the Bible or the Confessions to support his point, and then says, "So, what do you say to that?" Or there will be quotes from Luther, from Walther and Pieper, from Cyprian and Augustine, even from Sasse and Marquart: "Take that! And that! So how do you answer that, huh? See, Luther said it. You'd best not disagree with Luther!"



Once upon a time, my children were active on the Higher Things email list. Oftentimes, theological discussions would arise onlist, and those topics would invariably spill over to the dinner table. At one point, there was a discussion of the image of God, what it is, what it's not, what it means, etc. The teenagers onlist were debating; pastors got involved too and gave input. As the kids and I talked about the right and wrong points of various participants, I was reminding them of what Pastor says in Didache (and other venues) about the image of God being interwoven with a plurality of persons in one union, giving and receiving love.

The surprise came when one of the pastors (who was disagreeing with what my kids were saying as they echoed Pastor B) quoted Pastor B to prove his point.

Huh?

When questioned, the pastor was adamant that this quote from Pastor B's book proved that my kids were wrong. It's right there in print; this is what Pastor B says; so thus-and-such is what he means, and he agrees with what I'm saying. Wondering if we might be misunderstanding Pastor, I asked him about the topic. Nope, I'd understood correctly from the start. Nope, that quote was taken out of context and did not mean at all what the other guy took it to mean.

Oh.

It made me wonder about other quotes. What happens when someone says, "This is what Luther says! Don't you agree with Luther?" What happens when someone pulls out a Bible verse and asks, "You aren't going to tell me you disagree with God's word, are you?" (Interestingly, the devil kind of said the same thing to Jesus during the temptations immediately following His baptism.) I've seen quotes that I had a hard time believing were quotes from the person cited; when I looked into the matter further and saw the context of the quote, everything fell into place. No, that writer/speaker was not saying what the quoter suggested he was saying ... even though those are the words that came from his pen or from his mouth.

I've become very skeptical of Quote Wars, especially when agreement-with-quotes is used as a litmus test. Wouldn't it work better to communicate in your own words with the individual person?

Is the Collect Advocating Works-Righteousness?

This week's collect (in the three-year series ... a similar one is in the one-year series for the next-to-last Sunday of Trinity season) asks that "ever mindful of Your final judgment, we may be stirred up to holiness of living here and dwell with You in perfect joy hereafter." Those words initially jarred me. After some pondering and then some explanation from Pastor, they didn't sound so bad.

The flesh hears those words and thinks, "Yup, in the final judgment, God is going to go around zotting bad guys, so I better keep my attention on the wrath to come, and that will motivate me to be a good girl now."

But we know that God's judgment was poured out on Jesus at the cross. In the absolution, we hear His judgment of us: "You are righteous. You are holy. You are pure. I have made you My own." When our hearts and minds are captured by that judgment ["so rule and govern our hearts and minds by Your Holy Spirit..."] it brings about a repentance, a faith, a "change of mind," that cannot help but live in the holiness of Christ: doing good, begging forgiveness when we don't do good, and living in prayer and mercy, always with confidence in what He did to save me and not what I do in response.

So here's my plan. If it sounds to me like the collect is teaching works-righteousness, it's high time to figure out what it's really saying. Because it ain't teaching salvation by good works!

Frequency of Sheet-Washing

I can't remember much of anything; there's just too much to keep track of. If I wanted to wash sheets every single Tuesday, probably I could remember, but not everyone in the house needs sheets laundered weekly. And then, what if you have people who wet the bed? (It might be little ones who "wet the bed" the usual way, or it might be middle-aged ones who sweat buckets from the hot flashes.) What if somebody is at a friend's house for half a week, and it would be silly to wash sheets that have been slept in for only three nights, just because you have a sheets-on-Tuesday routine?

I have a pencil and a sheet of paper on top of my clothes dryer, held fast by a magnet. There is one column for each bed. Whenever I wash sheets I scratch down the date under the appropriate bed's column. That way I know how long it's been. When the kids were little, I generally washed sheets only when they wet the bed -- that was plenty frequent enough. But as they got to be 4 or so, and seldom wet the bed anymore, sometimes I'd forget for a long long time that I could wash sheets that hadn't been peed-up. (Who knew?!!??!?) The chart helped me keep track. During spring and summer, when I'm aiming for using the clothesline instead of the dryer, if we have very wet or very dusty days that make line-drying a poor choice, I am not bound to my routine. I can put off sheet-washing for a couple of days without fretting over my failing memory. Really, now, who wants to do the job of sheet-washing and then turn around and do it again in a couple of days just because you're so forgetful??

Speedy Errands

Hitting the grocery store or the hardware store at 8:00 is awesome! This week I left for my errands early, at breakfast time, instead of mid-morning. There were plenty of parking spots right near the doors of the stores. The aisles were not crowded. The check-out lines were short. It was so great that I'm actually thinking about doing this regularly in the future. Wow! Talk about easy shopping!

Today's Laugh

Teachers give us the three R's:
Reading, Writing, 'Rithmetic.

But one starts with a W.
Another starts with an A.
Only one starts with an R.

And these are the people we trust to teach spelling???




We watched Apostles of Comedy last night. This joke is from one of the stand-up comedians. Although there were theological points (particularly during interviews with the comedians) that I didn't always agree with, for the most part the show was good, clean humor: stand-up comedy with no profanity, no dirty jokes, nothing off-color. And amazement of amazement (!) -- it was FUNNY.

Vacation Time

People ask, "So, do you work today?" If I'm scheduled the next day at the bank, I might respond, "I'm off today. I go to work tomorrow."

After the last two days, I'm pondering that phrase.

Today I go to the rest-home. Today I go to the place where there's no lawn to mow, no garden to weed, no dishes to wash, no bread to knead, no driveway-asphalt to repair, no rugs to vacuum and shampoo, no laundry to fold. There's air-conditioning there. There's a mandatory one-hour lunch-time where you can sit and rest and are strictly prohibited from working. I've spent the last two days doing a lot of manual labor outdoors under a heat-advisory.

Today I go to my place of paid employment. And we call this place "work"?

Measuring Time by the Dirty Dishes

It's that season of the year when I can't ever find a clean glass.

We're not often using plates right now. Lunch might be a piece of fruit. Or maybe a sandwich that we pick up and eat, or maybe even get a paper towel for. But we're drinking and drinking and drinking. Lemonade, water, sweet tea, water, Sustain (Melaleuca's much-better version of Gatorade). When I wash dishes, it's all butter knives (for making sandwiches) and drinking glasses.

There are certain times of winter when the dirty dishes are all bowls and spoons and mugs. Oatmeal and soup and chili. Coffee and tea and cocoa.

How about that? Gauging the season of the year by my stack of dirty dishes.