Closing the Chip Bag

We have several of those clips for the chip bags. Why? Don't wooden clothes-pins do the job? They're cheaper. They don't hog up as much space in the kitchen drawers. And if you need extras or you lose one, you just run to the laundry room and grab a spare.

Double for Her Sins

Speak comfort to Jerusalem, and cry out to her,
that her warfare is ended,
that her iniquity is pardoned;
for she has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40)

As the class was considering this verse, Nancy brought up the connection to Elijah and Elisha. Elisha wanted a double-portion of Elijah's spirit (2 Kings 2). But that's not a quantitative "double" because you can't have more of something you already have in all its fullness. She suggested that both of these "doubles" refer to the double portion of inheritance that is due by right to the firstborn (Deuteronomy 21:17).

After all, we are "in Christ." And He is the firstborn of the Father. And He will share the spoils with us (Isaiah 53). The double portion is ours!

Removing the Sandal

John the Baptist said he was not worthy to loosen the strap of the Messiah's sandal. Most of us heard that all our lives as "I'm nothing and He's everything, and I'm not worthy to even serve Him." But it's more than that.

Pastor likes to remind us of the story of Ruth, and how Boaz was the kinsman-redeemer. He exercised his right of redemption by removing his sandal. This also ties in with Genesis 3 where God tells Satan that the Seed-of-the-Woman will crush his head with His heel.

Last week when we were discussing these things in class, someone brought up the burning bush and how Moses was told to remove his sandals "for the place you are standing is holy ground." I'd always thought that was just a reference to God's holiness and purity, and the dirtiness of us sinners as signified by our dirty shoes. But then Pastor pointed out that Moses was a redeemer figure. He rescued the people. He brought them back from slavery in Egypt. And as a redeemer, he (like Boaz) had the bare feet.

"How beautiful upon the mountain are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace."

Graduation

Paul being "hooded."

During the ceremony.

Being dismissed.

His medallion is for graduating magna cum laude.

New Car

Corolla. Five years old and 110,000 miles. Stickshift. It came from the village just north of here. Now we have to sell the van; we're not experienced in this -- we usually sell our cars to the junk dealer.

Amen

In chapel at Paul's college recently, Gary and I did something outlandish. When the pastor started the service by saying, "In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," we said, "Amen."

It seemed to me like a normal thing to do. Nobody else thought it was a normal thing to do.

At the end of the service, we should have realized that we weren't supposed to say "Amen" when the pastor said, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Ghost be with you all." But y'know, it just kinda pops out of your mouth. And then you're the only ones saying it.

It's weird. After all, what does "amen" mean?

Looking at their hymnal, there are places where the congregation sings "amen" after the invocation or benediction. But the rubrics for most of the prayers and blessings put the "amen" in the mouth of the pastor. I thought "amen" was my agreement with the prayer, that this prayer is true and in accordance with God's will ("yes, yes, it shall be so"), that I want here what God wants and promises to give. If the pastor already spoke the prayer, he's saying it, so it's obviously his prayer. But my "amen" says that it's my prayer too.

Bed-Sharing

Milwaukee is on a campaign to stamp out bed-sharing. Several babies have died when sleeping in bed with Mom, Grandma, or Mom's boyfriend. The city officials want to convince people that they ought never ever ever ever ever sleep with a baby. Some people are talking about passing laws to make it illegal, charging parents with murder if a baby should die in the parents' bed.

Now, I don't think a baby should be sleeping with Grandma or Mom's boyfriend. I even wonder a little about Baby sleeping with Daddy alone. Under no circumstances should a drunk or high mom be sleeping with her baby. But those scenarios are quite different from a sober breastfeeding mom sleeping with her baby.

Cassie tipped me off to a news report on bed-sharing. And the findings certainly ring true. Although alcohol has been implicated in many of the recent deaths, although there have been a disproportionate amount of deaths in the poverty-stricken areas of the city, there is only ONE 100%-consistent factor in these deaths. The babies were formula-fed. None of the babies were sleeping with a nursing mother.

That's critical.

And it's why bed-sharing must not be made illegal.

Today's Laugh

A set of jokes about grammar and punctuation. A sample is:

A comma splice walks into a bar,
it has a drink and then leaves.

Okay, so maybe they're hilarious to me only because of how I wield my red pen to proofread and edit. Nevertheless, check 'em out.

Apologetics

Always be ready to give a defense
to anyone who asks you for a reason
for the hope that is in you (1 Peter 3:15).

Some people say that this verse commands us to have scientific or historical evidence that we can trot out, proving the "reason" for our faith.

But science and historical evidence do not create faith. The reason for our faith is not "reason" (although neither is it unreasonable).

Isn't the Apostles Creed a primary example of the reason for our hope? "Why do you do a good job at work even though you don't get credit for it?" Or "Why do you forgive your neighbor when he's not even sorry for cheating on the property line?" Or "Why do you pray for the country's leaders?" Or even just "Why do you keep getting up on Sunday morning when you could sleep in and rest up?"

Because I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord, ....

That's why Christians do those weird things.

Double for Her Sins

She has received from the Lord's hand
double for all her sins. (Isaiah 40)


From Sunday's sermon,
"Double for her sins" means

twice as much mercy and grace
and salvation as you need.

Every Valley

Every valley shall be exalted,
and every mountain and hill made low (Isaiah 40).

"By the preaching of Law and Gospel, John the Forerunner leveled the high mountains of pride and self-righteousness and filled up the valleys of contrite humility and unworthiness with God's mercy."

(Stolen from Sunday's church bulletin)

That Calendar

Maggie connived me into watching an episode of Psych with her. (Bad Maggie! Naughty Maggie! Bad girl!) (Boy, it seems I have no power to resist that show.) To quasi-redeem the time, I hauled out the 2012 planning calendar and began to pencil in birthdays and tax payments and symposia and other reminders. Of course, to do this necessitated consultation with the 2011 planning calendar.

That was when we saw the eye doctor? But I thought it was just a couple of weeks ago.

The calendar says Nat & Sarah's wedding was back in July, but they just got married.

Look at all those doctor appointments for Maggie in January. How could that have been nearly a year ago? It was so recent.

The last time I went downtown for training at work was in March? It couldn't have been that long ago!





I'm getting old.


Will time keep going faster?
Or when we get old enough and feeble enough and frail enough, unable to fill our days with too-much-to-do, does the time slow down again, like when we were little kids and the days dragged?

Feast of St Nicholas

A few years ago I wrote about my favorite Santa story, where Santa punched out Arius.

Wonderful Shoes

Too many people had been asking me, "Aren't your feet cold?" Yes, wearing flip-flops in November did indeed make my feet cold. But I answered that I'd change to real shoes when the pain of the cold outweighed the pain of the different shoes, and that might be a while yet. I kept wishing for fat wool socks like I had with my Birkenstocks, but you can't do that with thongs.

Or can you? I decided to try googling "men's wool toe-socks" and was utterly shocked to find hits. Turns out that the popularity of Vibrams has resulted in the manufacture of Bigfoot toe socks, and not only toe socks, but wool ones! So I'm still bopping around in my flipflops, but without the bareness.

When it was time to leave for work on Saturday, I realized that I didn't have my car. Sure, there was another car to drive. But my work-shoes live in the car; I normally put them on in the parking lot at work, and I take them off before I drive home. I had to abide by dress code. So I went to Gary's closet and nabbed the Skechers I'd bought earlier this year but then handed-down to him. I got through the morning okay. But after 3 hours, I started noticing pain. It worsened all day Saturday, even after I'd slipped my feet back into my lovely, wonderful, beautiful, comfortable, pain-free Orthaheels. Gary reminded me that, when I'd worn the Skechers before, I used my inserts. But on Saturday I never thought of that.

Mom, I knew what you were talking about when you were in the hospital without your inserts and without your Birkenstocks. But boy, now I really know! I don't always wear my orthotics; sometimes I'm [gasp] barefoot when I let the cat outdoors in the middle of the night. Sometimes I'll even go as far as the laundry room with bare feet. But several hours in normal shoes ... it makes me immensely grateful for the doctors and technicians who make such wonderful shoes and inserts!

And Rachel and Katie (and Alia), wear supportive shoes now. Because it's gonna get you eventually. Better later than earlier.

Youth Group

So the kids and Pastor are reading & discussing A Little Book of Joy. They meet twice a month on Friday afternoons. This week, they finished their book discussion earlier than normal. So what to do then? They sang Advent hymns; everybody picked a favorite. This is youth group.

I love my church.

Outdated

We're refinancing the house. Y'know, lower interest rates these days, and all. So yesterday I'm talking to the mortgage officer. When he called, he inquired about the back side of a document, of which I'd forwarded only the front side. My very long phone cord, attached to the landline telephone which is attached to the kitchen wall, allows me to reach most of the rooms in the house, albeit only into the doorways of the furthest rooms. So I'm stretching the cord, stretching my arm, but I still can't quite reach the desk with the pertinent sheet of paper. "Excuse me, I'll need to put down the phone a minute. It doesn't reach far enough. I'll be right back."

(Moving to a new subject, but --hang on-- it's not irrelevant...)
Yesterday's mail brought another pile of paperwork for the refinancing, including the appraisal on the house. (Good news: the house has lost only 13% of its value over the last four years. Given what some people have experienced in this economy, that's not bad at all.) Looking over the appraiser's notes, I noticed this: "Dated kitchen and bathrooms. General lack of interior cosmetic updating."

I laughed! How often I complain that our society isn't comfortable with nice, normal, functional rooms, but we must always be remodeling and updating and trying to keep up with whatever the interior decorators tell us is stylish. "Dated kitchen." Heck, yeah! And what would we do to cosmetically update the interior anyhow? Raising the roof 4-10' isn't feasible. Restructuring the interior walls isn't either. Is it that terrible that my house built in the 60s looks like a 40-yr-old house?

Just about at that moment, I remembered the phone call in the afternoon. "Excuse me. I'll need to put down the phone. It doesn't reach far enough." Whoa! That comment revealed something definitely "outdated."

There are some young people who might not even understand what my sentence meant.

Muddy, Black Water

Do normal people shampoo the floor mats in their cars?

Maybe I've been perpetually neglecting a basic task. I've been getting the van ready to sell: finding the loose change, removing the myriads of maps, cleaning out the glove compartment, vacuuming. While vacuuming, I noticed some doozy stains on the floor mats. I'd really like to advertise this old van as "clean." So it crossed my mind to use some Resolve stain remover and then to wash them. Scrub brush. Bath tub. Lots of water. Black black black water running down the drain. (I hope I didn't plug up the septic system with mud!) Lather; rinse; repeat. Squeegee the water off the mats. Sore muscles and tired arms.

How many years will it take for these things to dry?

And the $64,000 question -- Ought I do the same thing for the middle-aged cars before they get old, before the mats become even dirtier than they are now? And if I ought, ... will I?

Santa and Jesus

Later than all retail stores, and later even than the other branches of our bank, our branch's Christmas music finally hit the airwaves this week. I've been finding it harder to work when there's really good music playing. Paying attention to my transactions and other duties interrupts [gasp] the preaching of the Gospel which flows forth in "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and "Angels We Have Heard on High" and "Oh, Come, All Ye Faithful." Yes, there's some "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree" and I even had to endure "Santa Baby" a couple of times. But the majority of our Christmas music is Julie Andrews and Bing Crosby and friends singing hymns. At one point, I heard "pleased as Man with man to dwell" four times in one hour this week -- and I am certainly okay with that.

But eventually something crossed my mind. The Santa songs are there too. Do my customers and my co-workers think that the Santa songs and the Jesus songs are same thing: songs about those mythical Christmas-story-dudes which we sing just because we like the sentimentality of it all?

I hope they're listening.

Extreme Domesticity

Lora linked to an article about the younger generation discovering do-it-yourself domestic pursuits. Katie and Rachel fit in the age-range for these women who are cooking, baking bread, mending, knitting, gardening, healing with herbs, etc. But they're not blundering about, trying to figure out these domestic matters, almost as if they're spiting the feminism that was foisted upon them by my generation. Because I taught them a lot of these skills, and I sure didn't foist feminism upon them!

After reading the article, I still can't figure out if I'm avant garde or if I'm hopelessly old-fashioned. Not that it matters much, especially if those two are merging into the same thing these days.

I find it terribly amusing.

The Parable of the Talents

Remember the story in Matthew where the lord gives treasure to some of his servants to manage while he's gone? One receives five talents and has doubled it before the master returns. Another receives two and doubles it before the master returns. The third received one talent and hid it, so there wasn't even interest earned when the master came back.

It confused me. On the one hand, the first two were invited to "enter into the joy of your lord." But the third said, "I knew you to be a hard man," and the master seemed to agree with that assessment. What's up with that? Is this lord a guy who is hard and unyielding? Or is he a guy who rewards generously and ensures that joy come to his servants?

When I finally asked Pastor, his answer was quick: "He is a hard man. There is only one way, and He is unyielding with regard to one who insists on saving himself, meriting his own heaven." But that kind of hardness by no means precludes His generosity in bestowing joy.