Alia

Because it's too funny to let some of my friends miss, I need to post a couple of stories that Katie's told about my granddaughter recently.


Alia's ballerina dog just said (by way of Alia's mouth) the whole close of the commandments with one "minor" alteration. "I the lord your dog am a jealous dog...

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The joys of Alia are innumerable. Today's bit of awesome: crooning a love song... to a piece of cold pizza.

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And the serious one, as she was pretending church and communion -- "Drink the blood of peace; now you are part of Jesus. Eat the bread that is Jesus for your peace. Forever and ever. Amen."

One of the Best Articles I've Seen on Raising Kids

Don't let the website address for this article put you off. It's a very long article, but it addresses a common struggle -- especially among homeschoolers. How do parents balance their training of a child with their unconditional love for the child? And does the message of that unconditional love of the parents actually get through to the kid?

The same problem pops up frequently in information put out for parents of special needs kids. The social workers and nurses keep telling the parents to love their child, not to treat them according to their disability. And yet, everything you run into from doctors and therapists and teachers is that the child is a project. A project to be conquered, to be tweaked, to be perfected insofar as can be done. But the child isn't a project. The child is a person. A person made in the image of God. A person who has strengths and weaknesses, joys and sorrows, just like all the rest of us.

The article isn't perfect. But the author is at least heading in the right direction.

They Couldn't Do It

This week and next we are praying the Third Article of the Creed:

I believe that I cannot
by my own reason or strength
believe in Jesus Christ my Lord
or come to Him.
But the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel...

One of our Bible stories this week was about the end of Joshua's life (chapter 24). Joshua preaches to the people all that God has done to save them, to rescue them, to defeat their enemies. Joshua asks them to choose whether they'll serve the Lord or all those other gods of the Egyptians and/or the Canaanites. The Israelites respond, "We're gonna serve Him." But Joshua tells them, "You cannot serve the Lord."

What?

Pastor pointed out in chapel how this dovetails with the Creed this week: "I believe that I cannot."

We cannot. We have no ability to trust. We have no strength to serve. But nevertheless, the Holy Spirit calls us, enlightens us, sanctifies us. He does in us and for us what we cannot do ourselves.

Pumpkin Pie

I've been disappointed in the pumpkin pies I've been making. They're good. But they're not awesome. Some were made with pumpkin I baked; some were made with canned pumpkin. I think I've decided that butternut squash is where it's at. When I use butternut squash for the "pumpkin" pie, then we're talking exquisite yumminess!

Witnessing

There was a discussion recently about how people out there in the post-modern Real World (TM) respond to Christians. One of the pastors said something quite wise:

People will react more honestly to "Christianity displayed as important to you than promoted as important for them."

Sanctification

We run into it all the time: people telling us what we need to do to make ourselves holier. But look what it says in the Small Catechism.

(Luther's little expositions are so rich and full that sometimes we are overwhelmed by all that he's saying and don't catch the simplest things. So I'm going to leave out some of the verbs and subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases.)

I believe that I cannot ... but the Holy Ghost has ... sanctified ... me .... In the same way He ... sanctifies the whole Christian Church.

Who sanctifies? Not me. I cannot. But He does.

Naming Nature

Could you possibly be as clueless as I was back a few years ago? I could identify cardinals and robins. I knew what dandelions were. But naming a tree? Not likely. Wildflowers? Ha!

Mary Blocksma was clueless too. She wanted to start learning about the nature around her. This book is her diary. It not only documents the birds and trees and grasses and flowers she learns about, but her journey demonstrates to the reader how to learn more about nature. It's perfect for those of us in Michigan, Wisconsin, and northern Indiana, because the climate and geographical location is perfect for what we're experiencing along with the author.

Reading this book was one of my favorite homeschool projects. The book begins on January 1, so now is the time to buy yourself an el-cheapo copy of the book. Then you'll be all ready to spend a whoppin' 5-10 minutes a day with a tiny dose of nature study. It's so encouraging and empowering to read a nature book by someone who's not an expert, but who is a plain old normal dummy but is undumbifying teaching herself. I caught the bug that year and spent the summer ID-ing a lot of wildflowers (aka, weeds). After getting our feet wet, we turned around the next year and re-read the book. We've read it periodically. I think this January would be a great time to reprise it.

The Distant Triumph Song

I've been dawdling on blogging about a line in "For All the Saints." And now I don't have to. I'll just link to my call-in comment to Issues Etc. Hee hee hee -- Todd liked what I echoed from Pastor, and so I won the prize for best comment. Woo hoo!

I suppose I really ought to share my prize with Pastor. We'll see.



(I'm just a smidge past the halfway mark on the recording.)

The Trouble with Angels

Gary found the movie The Trouble with Angels available on Netflix instant-play. I was working in the kitchen and overhearing bits and pieces of this story from the mid-60s. Pretty soon, I was drawn to sit down with him and watch. The basic story is a couple of somewhat troublesome girls attending a Catholic boarding school. What a great movie! Funny. Sweet. Not offensive in any way, shape, or form. It even included a theme about giving oneself to others. But primarily it was just plain funny! Definitely worth watching!

This one is something my mom would freely enjoy if it showed up at the library or a video store. And if you're a person with munchkins, don't let the PG rating throw you off. All we could figure was that a scene with the girls hiding and smoking cigars bumped the movie from a G to a PG.

If you liked Beverly Cleary's Ramona, you'll like this.

Starting the Morning ...

... with another flat tire. Last month we picked up a nail in one tire of the van. Today Gary noticed another flat on the van. This time the culprit was a screw. Hey, at least it was a different tire. There's also a slow leak on another tire of the van. Thankfully we could pump up the flat and drive it to town for a new tire. So much for the errands I'd planned to do today.

But on the up-side ... I found socks. The most expensive socks I ever bought! But they're wool. And they're men's toe-socks. Who would've thought that toe-socks would be sold in Bigfoot's men's size? Now I'll have something to keep my feet warm while still allowing me to wear the orthotic flipflops which keep the shoe-pain at bay. Woo hoo! (I'm telling myself that this is a medical expense and not an outrageous clothing purchase. That makes it easier to endure the price on these things.)

Now off to make bread.

We Just Want to Thank You ...

A friend mentioned something this morning that he'd heard on Issues Etc recently. When we begin our prayers with "I just wanna" ask God something, it indicates a belief that God is miserly. We don't want to ask anything big. We're just going to trouble Him with a small, not-too-inconvenient request.

"Honey, on our way home, can we stop at Piggly Wiggly? I just wanna grab a bunch of bananas." I wouldn't begin my request to Gary with "I just wanna" if I were planning to be in there for 55 minutes loading up on the sales and making sure we have the entire week's groceries purchased.

Look at the collect for the 11th Sunday after Trinity (also used recently in the three-year series): Almighty and everlasting God, always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve, pour down upon us the abundance of Your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ.

Stuff

We need to take in one of the cars under a recall notice. The dealers are far enough away that it's been too inconvenient to bother with yet.

I did a lot more tree trimming today, getting those branches away from the phone & electric wires. There are still branches out there, near enough the lines that I'm not touching them. But the more clutter I can get out of the way now, the shorter the time we'll have to disconnect the power when we finally get rid of those branches. Right now, my hair is full of sawdust and every now and then I taste a piece of wood.

Some of us have been fighting colds. Sometimes a person is just tireder than seems reasonable. When the people around me are snotty and coughing, and I'm tired, I figure I shouldn't doggedly plow ahead on my to-do list, but just be a lazy-daisy.

We're looking into refinancing the house. Paperwork -- ugh! Prospect of a shorter mortgage -- hooray!

I spent way too much time on the computer this week. Can I at least give myself brownie-points for having less addiction to Facebook now?

I luv-luv-luv that there is a new Aldi, and it's kitty-corner from work. So handy!!

I've been working extra days recently because we lost an employee to a promotion at another branch and because several co-workers are getting in their last vacation days before the end of the year. Being gone more makes it harder to be diligent with keeping up at home when I am home.

Maggie is joining the girls at church (most of whom graduated from the parochial school) for a book club with the headmistress. They're reading Ivanhoe. Ivanhoe?! Yikes. We're not going for easy here, are we? So my plan is to read it with her. First we read the Wiki-synopsis. Then we read a kiddie-version of a picture book. We could (?) step up to an abridged version, but instead we decided to dive in. Boy, did I procrastinate on that: it scared me. But we got through chapter 1 yesterday. Right now I am procrastinating on starting chapter 2. Somebody recommended a miniseries that's supposed to be very good. We'll throw that into the hopper too.

Funerals are such lovely opportunities for a pastor to preach the sweet Gospel to people who seldom care to cross the doorstep of a church.

A Sign from God

from class last night:

It is wrong to pray for a sign from God when He has spoken to the issue clearly in His Word. "Give me a sign if I should leave my wife who hates me and hang out with my secretary who is understanding and kind." "Give me a sign if I should have an abortion or keep this baby conceived in my sinful lusts." "Give me a sign if it's okay to take that money from my neighbor who doesn't need it as badly as I do."

After all, the devil can provide a sign too.

Meal Plans

~ roast chicken, lettuce salad, pumpkin pie
~ baked beans, fresh pineapple
~ enchilada soup, cranberry muffins
~ lasagna, lettuce salad
~ beef stew
~ crab & rotini (with California blend, parmesan, and garlic)
~ chicken, corn, black beans, over Mexican-seasoned rice
~ teriyaki chicken & rice
~ hamburgers
~ lentil soup
~ stir fry veggies and pork


Hmm. Gary's going to think there's too much rice in this line-up.

Reformation

Salvation free by faith in Thee,
that is Thy Gospel's preaching,
the heart and core of Bible-lore
in all its sacred teaching.
In Christ we must put all our trust,
not in our deeds or labor;
with conscience pure and heart secure
love Thee, Lord, and our neighbor. (TLH 266:2)

Holiness

Is holiness seen in God's sinlessness, His purity, His perfection?

Or is holiness seen in His willingness to be made the sinner, taking our sin as His own?

Maybe holiness is not in the purity but in the dirtiness ... because it's not His own dirtiness but ours that has been imputed to Him.

Trick-or-Treat

Our favorite blues girl:

Our attempt at the Deathly Hallows:

Stuff

I hate pulling one of those plastic forks out of the box when I eat lunch at work. It sounds fakey green environmentalist-whacko, but I seriously am having a hard time with those plastic forks. You use it and toss it in the trash can. A waste of money. A waste of energy. More garbage than needs to be created. I think I need to find a real fork to leave in the drawer, along with the real spoon that's already there.

We left the pumpkin sitting next to the stoop instead of on the concrete where it might have been accidentally bumped off. Well, leaving it sit on the garden was not a good plan. It started to compost on the bottom, and it's all buggy. Ick -- don't want to make that into our jack-o-lantern! We need to buy a new pumpkin before trick-or-treat tomorrow evening.

What a lazy day yesterday! I didn't wake up until 9:20 and didn't get out of bed until 10:00. I ached and had a headache, but I kept trying to force myself to Get To Work. When Gary called and said he was coming home from work early, and his symptoms sounded just like mine, I suddenly realized that maybe it was germies and not mere laziness. Maggie and I watched a long movie about Lady Jane Gray. And we ate canned chicken-noodle soup for supper. Today is better, but still slow.

My annual evaluation at work was this week. I need to get better about remembering customers' names and about making decisions in the "gray areas." The bosses actually scored me better in some areas than I anticipated. (They keep telling me I'm too hard on myself.) They told me the next task I'd be learning. We've lost several great employees to other branches, and we have several newbies, so it's necessary that some of us start learning how to do jobs besides just the teller transactions. The manager told me that she was quite pleased with how things have gone since they hired me, seeing as how I hadn't been an employee before. She was trying to say that I hadn't had a "real job" before, but that sounded so negative and belittling of how I've spent my life, and she sure didn't mean that. But somehow she wanted to get across that I've done the work, learned oodles of new things, kept improving, and have been an asset to the team. Y'know, that's kind of nice to know! Whew....

All sorts of things rattling around in my mind to blog about, but maybe it's time for another nap or some more tv-viewing.

What Makes America Great

There's a marvelous old-fashioned series of books that homeschoolers might want to put on their reading list. The Twins series by Lucy Fitch Perkins is mighty rare in Wisconsin libraries. [You've gotta love interlibrary loan!] If you can get your hands on some, they're just right for kids who have started reading chapter books. They were written about 100 years ago. Each book is set in a different country and contains a simple story about a pair of twins (about age 7). The stories introduce kids to certain aspects of the culture of that country. And the stories are gentle -- none of the mouthiness and immorality and political correctness that fills so many kids' books today.

So now that I've given my commercial, I took notice of one paragraph near the end of The Irish Twins which Maggie and I were reading last week. A neighbor's son had tired of the landlord's games, with the landlord always taking any profit earned. This man had gone to America and become successful. He was back in Ireland to fetch his mom, singing the praises of this wonderful country of America. One of the neighbors suggested that surely not everything was perfect in America. And this is the response:

There do be faults with her, and I'll never be the man to say otherwise. There's plenty of things to be said about America that would leave you thinking tis a long way this side of heaven. But whatever it is that's wrong, tis the people themselves that make it so. And by the same token it is themselves that can cure the trouble when they're so minded. It's not like having your troubles put down on you by the people that's above you, and that you can't reach at all for to be correcting them!"

Fast-forward 100 years.
Progressive tax rates?
Regulation of small businesses?
Quotas on hiring?
Allowing people to sue each other for no reason at all?

Can we cure the troubles if we have a mind to do so? Or are many of America's troubles brought down on us by the people above?

Extra-Terrestrial Life

Does life exist elsewhere in the universe? One of Philip's friends once asked us to add our computers to a nation-wide project that searches for patterns or messages that may be coming to earth as other life-forms attempt to communicate with us. At first I thought he was joking. As much as we may have fun with Star Trek and Babylon 5 and other science fiction, there is no complex life anywhere but on Earth.

But how do I know? What if I'm wrong? Maybe there is, and I'm just close-minded.

Last month, we had a movie night at church, watching a documentary, The Privileged Planet. It wasn't from a Christian perspective, or even a religious perspective. It was simply the science of Earth's unique characteristics: the iron core which gives us the magnetic field we have; a location in a particular belt around our sun, not too hot and not too cold; our location in the Milky Way; the chemical make-up of our atmosphere; the abundance of liquid water to moderate the climate; gas-giant planets to help protect our solar system from cosmic junk; etc. These things (and many more) are necessary to sustaining life.

But how do we know whether --in the vastness of the universe-- there might be other places with intelligent life? Or if life there might look very different from life here, and not need the same support system?

Does theology tell us what science can only guess at? I think so.

1. Either there is life elsewhere or there is not.

2. If there is life elsewhere, it is similar to human life, or it is not.
2a. If it is not similar to human life, then it is not made in the image of God. Seriously, do I care if there's life elsewhere in the universe if it's an amoeba or a speck of fungus?

3. If there is life that we'd recognize as "like us," then they are sinners or they are not.
3a. Is it possible for there to be life without having them be sinners? Romans 8 tells us that the whole creation has come under the curse and is waiting to be released. Luke 15 tells us that there is more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 just persons who need no repentance. Is it theologically conceivable that there could be life out there that has continued since creation without sinning on their own, and without being sunk into sin by Adam's fall?

4. If there is life out there, and if they are sinners, then they were saved or they were not.
4a. God left them to be damned? Um. No.


5. If God saved them, how could this happen?
5a. God saved them through Jesus' work on our earth. But how would they hear? As Luke 24 shows, it's not enough that Jesus die for sin. It must also be preached.
5b. God saved them through another Savior. Impossible. There is only one Son of God.
5c. God saved them through Jesus' work on their earth. But Scripture tells us His sacrifice was once and for all. This would mean He had to be in two places at once, with His life, suffering, death, and resurrection happening there in those other worlds exactly at the same time as He dwelt among us.

It's looking to me like a little logic, in combination with what the Bible says, rules out every option except "There is no intelligent life-form elsewhere in the universe."