Lift Up Your Heads

I have long struggled with what Psalm 24 is talking about. "Lift up your heads, oh you gates, and be lifted up, you everlasting doors, that the King of glory may come in. I noticed this week that the next psalm opens with "To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul." And then, in Psalm 27, we pray, "Now my head shall be lifted up above my enemies all around me; I will sing, yes, I will sing praises to the Lord." I wonder if that means anything.

Old Fashioned

On one of those blustery days earlier this week, we tellers were frequently chatting with customers about the chilly weather, the grayness, turning on our furnaces or not. One customer said, "We didn't turn on the furnace yet. This is good weather for cuddling up with the old woman."

"The old woman." Gary has never called me that. I don't think Dad ever called Mom that. I don't think Gramp ever called Nanna that. I don't think I've ever heard one of my friends refer to his wife as "the old woman." Maybe "my better half." Maybe "my sweetie." Often "my wife." But never "the old woman." I find that a rather offensive moniker.

The gal that I was working with said after the customer left, "Wow, I didn't realize he was so old-fashioned." I was puzzled. Why would she call him old-fashioned? I racked my brain to come up with something he had done or said that would peg him as "old-fashioned." When I asked, she said she didn't much care for it when a man calls his wife "the old woman."

Huh.
I agree with that.

But where did she get that that was "old-fashioned"?

I guess I tend to think that "old-fashioned" is generally a good thing, whereas my co-worker must think it's a bad thing.

A Prophet Like Moses

In our Bible story for today, we hear that God will raise up for His people "a prophet like Moses" from among their brethren. The word in the Septuagint for "raise up" is the same word used in John 6 ("I will raise him up at the last day") as well as the same word used to describe Jesus' resurrection. So God isn't merely saying that He would turn Jesus into a well-known teacher or a famous prophet. He was saying that He would resurrect a prophet like Moses.

Old Pans

I bake our bread.
It is delicious bread.
With fewer people in the house, I usually make bread only once a week now (four loaves at a time).

I started making bread 27 years ago. It was too hard to find time to go to the grocery store to buy bread. Baby's naps never coincided with Toddler's naps, so I had a booger of a time leaving the house. Talk about being grounded ... that's what happens when it's easier to bake your own bread than buy it from the store that's only a quarter-mile away. (Come to think of it, my parents never grounded me. It was my children that did that.) Anyway, the point is that my pans are old.

About 5-10 years ago I bought new bread pans. The old ones were ugly. I mean seriously ugly, even rusting. But those new bread pans didn't bake the bread nicely. After months of trying, I admitted that I'd wasted the money and relegated those pans to meatloaf or non-bakery type of food.

I hunted online for bread pans that might work. What I found was $20-35 per loaf pan. That's a hunk o' cash even if you know the pans are good. But what if they were no better than my last set of new pans?

Recently my aunt offered me my grandma's pyrex loaf pan. Hunky-dory! But you know what? The bread sticks to that one too, no matter how much I grease it. She also gave me some metal ones that she needed to shoo out of her cupboards. The bread sticks even worse to those.

So now I'm back to my trusty old (old old old) bread pans. A couple of times each year I may have to scrub with steel wool to remove rust spots. The pans may be ugly on the outside too. But the bread bakes evenly and nicely. And I can remove the hot loaves from the pans!!

If any of you have advice about how to find reasonably-priced kitchenware that works properly, I'm all ears. But I suspect I'll be going to my grave with those bread pans still in my kitchen.

A Faithful Saying

Our Bible verse for the week is from 1 Timothy 1: "This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief."

Now, I am no Greek scholar, but I know a little (enough to tutor beginners). And there's something I find odd about this translation. The word translated "a saying" is the same word that John uses for "the Word," as in "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Also, the word that's translated "that" frequently indicates a quote, as it is in most translations of this verse. But another common translation of that word is something akin to "because" or "for" as it shows the purpose of what came before.

So it seems to my simplistic mind that the verse could be saying, "The Word/Logos is faithful and worthy of acceptance, for Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." Why do we know that He (the Logos/Word) is faithful? Why should we desire Him? Because He saves sinners. Because He saves me.




I suppose scholars might know something about translations and why all the Bibles translate "the Logos" here as "a saying" instead of the way it's translated in John's Gospel. Did they think it didn't make sense to translate it "the Word"? It sure makes sense to me ... and is even prettier than the way it's normally translated!

Homeschooling Camelot

In short, there's simply not
a more congenial spot
for happy-ever-aftering
than here in Camelot.

Kate Fridkis writes about going to college after a lifetime of homeschooling. My heart melted over this article. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry or shoot HOORAY. One tidbit about "the real world":

For my whole life, people have been telling me that I must not know what the real world is. People always think that home-schoolers live these small lives in a constricted little world. I don’t know how to explain my life to them. I don’t know how to clarify the open-ended world of my childhood, in which the rules made sense and I worked hard because it was fun to be productive. What world is that? It isn’t normal. There are no grades.

Kate also blogs, and I'd love to delve into everything she's written there. Let's just say that the parts I've read really resonate with me! But it probably would mean even more to my kids and some of their homeschooled friends, like the article about not being "for" homeschooling but being it.

I'm not suggesting that homeschooling is a bed of roses. (Well, maybe it is, but that means it comes with some thorns, right?) I'm not suggesting there is a one-size-fits-all decision about where to send your child to school -- or not. I'm not saying that people can live in that lovely World Of Unschooling for decades upon decades.

But for one brief shining moment -- the moments that make up a childhood, the moments that are so influential in how we see ourselves, how we view work, how we view family, how we view our peers -- there can be joy and freedom, there can be learning for the sake of the sheer joy of learning, there can be a life for a child that is lived in the here-and-now and not merely in preparation for the some-day.

It may not be perfect.
But honestly, I really don't think there is a more congenial spot.

Who Is "You"?

Our Bible story for the day was the second giving of the law -- Deuteronomy 5. It's getting time to go into the promised land. The Israelites have been wandering around in the desert for nigh onto 40 years. Moses calls them all together and says, "Listen up, I'm going to tell you what God said when He made the covenant with us back at Mt Sinai."

What I find most intriguing is verse 3: The Lord did not make this covenant with our fathers, but with us, those who are here today, all of us who are alive. The Lord talked with you face to face on the mountain from the midst of the fire.

Except for Joshua and Caleb and the then-kiddos who are now the old folks, everybody who was there at the first giving-of-the-law is now dead. The people who are hearing Moses on this day might have been teenagers or little kids when the Israelites left Egypt, but most of the people listening hadn't even been born yet. Moses doesn't even start in with "Hey, guys, this is what God tells His people." He starts by telling them that God made this covenant with them --even before they were born. With THEM. Not their parents. YOU, the ones who are alive today, whose bodies didn't die in the wilderness (as God had told them would happen when they hated Caleb's advice about going into the promised land 40 years earlier), YOU are the ones with whom God spoke that day at Sinai.

This is beautiful.
It means what God did in those stories of the Bible is for ME and not just the people that it happened to: the healing of the lame and the blind and the deaf, the preaching to the hard of heart, the absolution for Mary Magdalene.
And I think this verse in Deuteronomy 5 also says something about election, and how God chose us to be His own before the foundation of the world.

Cheese

It's bad enough that I have had to avoid milk for the last couple of years. No cold milk with warm cookies. A pot of coffee to go with cookies or coffeecake might be good, but not nearly as fantastic as cold milk alongside warm baked goods.

But now it's looking like cheese might be a problem too. I've had to give up potato soup and clam chowder and sausage-gravy with biscuits. But pizza? Cheese-and-tomato sandwiches? Nachos? Pizza lentils? Cheese & salami & crackers?

Please, NOooooooooo.....


We're due to go out for pizza at Tony's on Thursday night. I hope -- I hope -- I hope -- I hope I feel okay on Friday morning!

Mark 10:18

In the story of the rich young ruler, John Mark came to Jesus and asked what he needed to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus asked him, "Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, and that is God."

Looky there -- even Jesus preaches and catechizes from the Scriptures. "No one is good" comes straight out of Psalm 14 and Psalm 53. God Himself sticks to the texts once given. That is amazing to me.

Private Confession and Absolution

From a discussion between Dr Korby and Todd Wilken:

We are accustomed to confessing our sins to God in privacy, and then we remind ourselves of His love and forgiveness. We think, "Who needs to go to a pastor?" However, God doesn't need us to tell Him about our sins; He already knows. But there is a humiliation in confessing to the pastor or to the Christian-brother instead of confessing to God in the privacy of our minds. (Don't let the word humiliation put you off. Even though it is indeed humiliating to be humiliated, remember that's what it is to be "humble." The words are related.)

What is the point of confession? So that we might hear the absolution! How does forgiveness come to us anyway? By the word of forgiveness!

We have it backwards when we are confessing sin for God's sake and then applying forgiveness to ourselves. We need to confess for our sake, so that we are ready to hear the word (from God's spokesman) which forgives us and which creates and vivifies faith.

Timeline

Teachers "do" timelines in different ways. Some teachers don't consider it important enough to bother hanging on the wall. Some buy a pre-made timeline. Some have the students develop a timeline.

None of those worked for me on a regular basis. Occasionally I'd have the kids build a timeline. But after many attempts at keeping timelines, I settled on one simple plan. I made a bare-bones timeline. It was a pair. The timelines were about 5-7' long each, made of adding-machine tape or something similar, about 4-7" wide. One timeline covered the years 4000 BC to the present, with an inch (or 1.25") per century. The other zoomed in on the final 8% of the first timeline, covering the years 1500-2000, on a scale of 1.5" per decade.

Few events were listed on the timeline. On the full timeline, we listed creation, flood, Abraham, Moses, David, Israel's fall to Assyria, Judah's fall to Babylon, Jesus, fall of Rome, Columbus. On the more detailed, modern timeline, we included the Reformation, Pilgrims coming to Massachusetts, Revolutionary War, Civil War, Laura Ingalls, birth of great-grandparents, WWI, birth of grandparents, WWII, birth of parents, and birth of the kids. This was our skeletal framework. We might pencil in other events: the 7-Years War or the Wright Bros' airplane or Alexander the Great. Even when the timeline wasn't used to record events, it was essentially our map through time. We repeatedly go to the world map to get a feel for where something is happening, be it in a story or in current events. We used the timeline the same way: it was a framework to locate something in history. Because it was a simplistic timeline, it was easy to whip out a replacement when the current timeline was too worn or scribbled too full of additional events. We never had to be without our little map of time.

Meal Plans

I used to cook out of the pantry. With fewer people I can't keep well-stocked the perishable parts of my pantry (particularly the produce). With a part-time job, I can't start cooking a real-food supper at 6:30 in the evening. Partly due to my own failures and partly due to inspiration from Erin, the last few weeks I've been trying to refine the meal plans so that I can make sure to buy the necessary ingredients and to prepare in advance for days when I'm not around to cook. This is what we've got for the upcoming days:

1. Lasagna, lettuce salad, pumpkin muffins.
2. Ham & beans, cornbread, fruit salad.
3. Split pea soup, bread, fruit salad.
4. Pizza, broccoli salad.
5. Gumbo, rice, pumpkin pie.
6. Fish tacos, cole slaw.
7. Baked beans, steamed carrots.
8. Barbecued pulled-beef sandwiches, green bean casserole.
9. Quiche, pineapple.
10. Enchilada soup, tapioca pudding.
11. Crab and California-blend veggies with rotini.
12. Shepherd's pie and a yet-to-be-determined side dish.
13. Salmon and other stuff.
14. Pork & veggie stir fry.

Lunches are
African peanut soup,
tuna salad,
hummus
guacamole,
lettuce salads,
baked potatoes,
deli meat sandwiches,
pbj's,
grilled cheese,
but mostly leftovers.

I like the feel of having this planned out. The question is, "Will I plan again in two weeks?"

I Could Use This

"I could use this."
"I need this."

Those are not the same thing. [Surprise!!!]

I have such good intentions. So few of them are fulfilled. What I have a hard time with, though, is letting go of repeatedly unfulfilled good intentions. There are realities that I just don't want to admit. Cleaning the basement, the attic, the garage, are times when that truth whops you anew.

"I should start roller-blading. I need to keep those skates around. Maybe I could use them." Yes, I do need to get back to exercising. No, I'm not getting around to it. And if I do, will my aging body take well to roller-blading? Seriously? Roller-blading? On hills? Good golly, last weekend I could barely go up and down the stairs to the basement. The injury that precipitated that difficulty would be a mere foretaste of what I'd bump into [hee hee hee] if I took up roller-blading.

For your information, the roller-blades all went to Goodwill.

But I play this game over and over. I lose weight; I gain weight; I keep clothes around in various sizes. Same thing goes for yard tools, kitchen tools, sewing tools, workshop tools, etc. "I should keep those German resources around for when I have time to get back to studying the language."

The best luck I ever had with decluttering was when I removed everything from the living area of the house. I brought back in only the furniture, decorations, entertainments, etc, that we needed. I didn't weed out. I got rid of everything (but only into the garage) and then started afresh. That showed me what I needed. Then everything else had to be disposed of.

How many times are we weighed down by "I think I could probably use this" instead of "I need this"? As important as the nostalgia may be to me, the bigger dragon to slay is how I'm not ready to let go of the ideal in my mind, nor the goals of my heart. Sometimes getting rid of "stuff" means admitting that I cannot or will not ever do that thing I've been meaning to do for ever-so-long. It's admitting defeat. And that is hard.

Mustard

You know that bright yellow mustard that people slap on hotdogs? When I was a kid, I couldn't stand to eat a fast-food burger unless it was made fresh and decorated with ketchup only. I didn't want to know that my mom put a smidge of mustard in the deviled eggs and potato salad.

When I became queen of my own kitchen, I had mustard. I might buy a big ol' bottle of bright yellow mustard once every few years.

Until recently.

When my friend Janelle moved to Nevada this summer, she needed to dump all her refrigerated goods. We ended up with a big pile of bottles that had been decorating her fridge shelves. Lots of different bottles of hot sauces and mustards. My first thought was that we were all set for mustard for a long time. But Janelle's mustards were different. There was a Jack Daniel's mustard. Oh... yummy! There were others too that tasted delicious. My favorite, though, was a chipotle mustard. When I finished the hand-me-down bottle, I had to buy another to revel in its tastiness.

Janelle, I think you just made me a mustard-snob.
And I'm loving it.

The King's Speech

I admit it: I am prejudiced against Oscar-winning films. If a movie wins an award from the type of people who dole out that award, I am suspicious.

But I kept hearing from people whose opinion I respect that The King's Speech was excellent. Even though it's got an R-rating. The PG-13 movies are pushing it for me, with regard to how much ick I can bear. Nevertheless, I bumped into the movie at the library recently and nabbed the DVD to take home.

Oh. my. goodness.

That was one of the best movies I've ever seen. That's right up there with The Blind Side and Rudy and Luther and Anne of Green Gables and Renaissance Man and Gran Torino (and it doesn't even have the ick that Gran Torino does).

The movie says the right thing about duty. About family. About parenting. About persistence. About vocation.

I also liked the way it handled the abdication of King Edward. I remember one Sunday School teacher once upon a long time ago teaching us that it was "such a wonderful thing Edward did, giving up his throne for love. His love was so great, so immense, that he would give up anything, even the crown, to be able to spend his life with his beloved. Isn't that just like God's love for us?" Excuse me, but gag! Edward took another man's wife, selfishly indulging himself. That is NOT a picture of God's love for us; we do not liken the Lord Jesus to an adulterer. So I was glad to see that the movie did not glamorize Edward's decision.

But the thing I loved most about the movie was the "expert." The prince had received treatment and therapies from many doctors and other experts. He finally went to Lionel Logue who was, at the same time, two things: the real expert, and the imposter expert. Lionel wasn't trained, he wasn't credentialed, he wasn't conventional. Who ever let him give speech therapy? In our day and age, he'd probably be hauled before a government tribunal and fined and possibly jailed. The faker!

And yet, he was the one who finally helped. He was the one who employed unique ways of resolving speech difficulties. He was the one who tried to cut to the heart of the problem instead of just treating symptoms. The self-trained guy -- who learned by a) careful observation and b) diving in and doing what needed to be done for his neighbor in need -- found ways to accomplish what none of the other doctors could accomplish. Chalk up a big one for thinking outside the box!

I have some kids who would have been labeled ADD if they'd attended school. But they were homeschooled, and their oddball teacher didn't do the things we're "supposed to do" for ADD kids. My kids thrived.

I have a daughter with VCFS. She is homeschooled, and she is not receiving the typical special-ed that most VCFS kids receive. Neither has she been receiving the typical medical care that most VCFS kids receive. And for some reason, she's doing unusually well -- educationally, socially, and physically. There's no way to know how things would be for her if we'd done what all the medical & educational specialists recommended. But we do know that God has done wondrous things for Maggie "even though" her parents aren't doing what conventional wisdom dictates. The question is, should "even though" in the preceding sentence be replaced by "because"? Who knows? But the tale of The King's Speech shows that "because" ought not be ruled out.

Progress at Work

The paid job: When I started balancing my drawer at work today, the balance sheet came up $1 off. My first response was "So where did I make a mistake on the balance sheet? Did I count one too few $1-bills? Did I put an extra $1-bill in my 'rag' pile and forget to change the entry for mutilated money on my balance sheet?" It didn't cross my mind that maybe I'd counted wrong when I was taking in cash or giving out cash to a customer. That's a good sign! That means I so seldom make cash-counting errors that my assumption is simply a problem with the balance sheet and not the actual amount of cash in my cash drawer.

The unpaid job, the main job: I've been forcing encouraging Maggie to work with me more in the garden. She has been, and she's finding it not as abhorrent as she expected. We're getting the garden put to bed for the winter much faster than if I were doing the work alone. She's learning something. She's being helpful. And on top of it all, it's been very nice to work alongside her, talking as we go. Besides, could you ask for a more gorgeous week to be working outdoors? As unbelievable as it seems to me, most of the garden work is done, and there is actually an end in sight within the next few days.

But the tomatoes are done. The sadness of eating the last tomato is so so sad. It makes a person desperately yearn for next July.

Me? Stranger Danger?

I understand that I was more into free-range parenting than most other parents I knew. I also understand that, in the past 25 years, society has leaned much further in the direction of Protecting Children At All Costs. But, really, now, c'mon....

For the last two days, I have spent copious hours in the garden, catching up on weeding and tilling that hadn't been done properly since last spring last year. I had kids out there helping me for a good part of the time. The next-door-neighbor kids have a babysitter who's been around for over a year. If I remember correctly, Katie has even taken Alia over to play with those kids and chatted with the sitter.

So I'm sitting in the dirt, trying to separate the Creeping Charley and the grass from my perennial onions. The 3-yr-old girl next door comes over to chat a bit. She's done that several times on weekends when her daddy is working in the yard. But today the babysitter is there. The babysitter called the girl back to the patio. Eventually, the girl wandered back in my direction; she was interested in what I was up to; she wanted to ask about my strawberry patch; she was having a hard time understanding that today I was working on the onions and not the strawberries. Please imagine the picture. The girl is in her own yard, and I am in mine. She is nowhere within my reach -- never closer than 10-15 feet away from me. I am sitting, not standing; I can't bolt over to grab her. We are both in full view of the sitter, only about 40-50 feet from her. We are far enough apart that we have to raise our voices to be heard by each other.

But still, the sitter kept calling the child back to the patio. At one point, I smiled and called to the sitter, "Oh, it's no problem; she's not bothering me!" The sitter ignored my comment: "Come back here and stay on the concrete patio. Don't you go over there!" Pretty soon, the sitter even had interjected herself in the boys' game of catch, rounding up the 6-yr-old and 8-yr-old on the patio, putting herself in the yard where they'd been, stationing herself between me and her charges. She gave them instructions not to go out into the yard.

Wow.

It would make perfect sense to me if the sitter didn't want the kids to follow me into the garage. She doesn't know me well enough to use me for a back-up sitter if an emergency should come up. I understand this. But to keep the kids corralled in a small space outside on a gorgeous day because the neighbor happens to be outside too? Oh dear me.

Coals of Fire on His Head

I guess I'm very bad and vengeful. You know that verse?
If your enemy is hungry, feed him,
and if he is thirsty, give him a drink.
For in doing so, you will heap coals of fire on his head.

(Romans 12:20)

It always struck me as if it were saying, "Be really nice to the dudes who hate you. That'll make 'em feel guilty. Oh yeah, if you're good to them when they're rotten to you, that'll show them! So ha!" What a guilt-free way to get 'em back ... by making them feel small for what they did to such a nice person as you.

Now, that wouldn't be exactly, uh, selfless and giving, now would it??

But you know what? When Isaiah saw heaven and was commissioned to be God's prophet (Isaiah 6) the angel took a coal from the altar and placed it on Isaiah's lips and said, This has has touched your lips; your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is purged.

So maybe the coals are not about "Ha! Got you! Don't you feel bad now?" but maybe it's just plain about the forgiveness of sins. If your enemy is hungry, feed him even though he expects retaliation. If your enemy is thirsty, give him a drink even though he wouldn't do that for you. For in doing so, you will show mercy and forgiveness, and if the absolution is heaped upon his head, it may purge his sin and work love & faith in his heart. "And you will gain your brother."

Grand Babies

They Didn't Drop Dead

God had said, "In the day that you eat of [the fruit of the tree of knowledge] you shall surely die." Then Adam and Eve ate the fruit anyway. A very common question is "Why didn't they drop dead, then and there?"

In yesterday's sermon, Pastor talked about the answers typically given to that question and that there is truth in those answers: they were immediately separated from God; they began to die. But he posited another answer: they didn't keel over and die instantaneously because God is longsuffering. He is patient. He doesn't zot people but gives them time, calling and calling and calling them back to Himself. Adam and Eve weren't zotted, and this was the first demonstration of a God who put up with garbage from His people whom He loved. (We heard about this in the Isaiah 5 reading and the Matthew 21 reading this Sunday.) He loved, they rejected, and still He loved. Still He forgave. Still He bore with them.