Welcome


Thanks for stopping by, whether you got here by a link or hitting "next blog" -- I am glad you are here. I've also done some writing on homeschooling, and what I learned thinking I was teaching.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Moving

Well, in cyber space.

I'm branching out a bit -- come see me if you can, and please let me know what you think.

A New Location




Hoping to Avoid Thorns

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

The World Today and My Grandchildren?

Holding Precious Hands


These stories weren’t on the front page the Dallas Morning News today. They appeared on the WORLD magazine site – and they are as troubling as reports of racism, cruelty and other upheavals:

·      Conceived by donated sperm or egg, some adult children are calling for regulation of third-party reproduction. Regulating the Marketplace of Children

·      The Nonhuman Rights Project is “ . . . asking the courts to recognize, for the first time, that these cognitively sophisticated, autonomous beings are legal persons who have the basic right to not be held in captivity.”

·      Should Christians stop criticizing murderers because we’re sinners too? If we must be free of sin in order to call out sin, we should all cease talking and writing about it right now. A Pastor's Wife Justifies Her Job at an Abortion Center

I don’t have a clue how to comment on the complex news that greets us each morning, much less how to come along side any of the people who are hurting, confused or just caught up in the craziness these snapshots of today’s world represent. What’s more troubling is that for our grandchildren, these may well be normal in their world, the way abortion and homosexuality are rights in our children’s world.  How do I even talk about topics like these without sounding like Chicken Little?

Tim Keller, retired pastor from Redeemer Church NYC offers one suggestion, “Pray and pray a lot. Especially when you don't feel like praying at all.” 

That’s harder than talking.

So, I opened my Bible, and finished up the book of Numbers, chapters 33-36: God’s warnings and promises to His people. A Bible teacher summed them up: “Don’t affirm evil by excusing it as social issues.” 

Aye – there’s the rub – I don’t see how in the world I can do that! I like a lot the world has to offer – I don’t want to live as a hermit. But if the above articles are among the stories describing the people to whom we are called to go, I’m tempted to stay! (And urge the grandkids not to get involved!)   

God help me – and make a path upon which I can walk – being useful to the folks I love, and those whom you put in my path -- doing no harm, because these times sure seem crazy and overwhelming. 

Almighty God, we confess how hard it is to be your people. You have called us to be the church, to continue the mission of Jesus Christ to our lonely and confused world. Yet we acknowledge we are more apathetic than active, isolated than involved, callous than compassionate, obstinate than obedient, legalistic than loving.   

Gracious Lord, have mercy upon us and forgive our sins. Remove the obstacles preventing us from being Your representatives to a broken world. Awaken our hearts to the promised gift of your indwelling Sprit.

This we pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.  (Prayer of Confession from 03/08/15, Park Cities Presbyterian Church)  





Monday, March 9, 2015

March Daffodils

Survivors! 
Snow and ice pounded my neighbor’s daffodils – They sprang up in the warm sunshine of a few weeks ago, but have had to survive recent icy rain and snow.  Their hardiness fascinated me as I have watched them holding up in the face of the intemperate weather. They are act as a little goad to get a grip and quit griping.

I gripe a lot about how bad things are – that is, how different the world seems from the one in which I thought we would be living.  

This is one scary place! What’s scarier is how we describe what we see; it communicates  frustration more than solutions. News of current events, and the reporters and commentators feel and sound as bitter as the recent icy blasts in Dallas –polarizing has a new adjectival dimension for me.  Moreover, it’s hard to laugh when popular entertainers lean on the F-bomb crutch for laughs to jokes anchored firmly to straw man arguments.   




Good Grief! Have I become like the grousers I used to hate to be around? 

Yes.

That’s why those resilient little flowers intrigued me.  The times may be brutal, and bring much that is unexpected. Our social commentators may be harsh -- a bit like our weather has been.  But I can weather it  -- even flourish. That is true even though a friend said daffodils reminded her of flowers she used to place on graves.

Funereal?


About time to sow those wildflower seeds. (Seeds)



o   Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions. ~Edward R. Murrow



o   Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, but the past perfect! ~Owens Lee Pomeroy

Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Preparing for Purim

A Good Read
So . . . I have had a BUSY day of Facebook. No sooner did I read a link from one friend and share it – another friend posted an idea, prayer, teaching, current event equally pressing. If we were sitting all together in one room – I don’t think I could have fully heard what all my friends were saying!   Reading, one by one though, what they thought was important enough to share, I could hear.

The most galvanizing were reminders from pastors:

·      Christ is in the boat with me – literally and corporately. (The Comforting Presence)
·      How to pray right.  (We Are Praying Wrong)

They enabled me to listen calmly to Israel’s Prime Minister’s address the United States’ Congress. *  Mr. Netanyahu reminded me that tomorrow is Purim – the Jewish holiday of one woman’s courage to thwart a Persian man’s plan to annihilate the Jews.

 . . . Queen Esther exposed the plot and gave for the Jewish people the right to defend themselves against their enemies. The plot was foiled. Our people were saved.

 Today the Jewish people face another attempt by yet another Persian potentate to destroy us. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei  . . . tweets that Israel must be annihilated -- he tweets. . in English that Israel must be destroyed.

. . .

But Iran's regime is not merely a Jewish problem, any more than the Nazi regime was merely a Jewish problem. The 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis were but a fraction of the 60 million people killed in World War II. So, too, Iran's regime poses a grave threat, not only to Israel, but also the peace of the entire world. 

And the Prime Minister reminded us of how the world has changed since 1979 when
. . .  one of the world's great civilizations [was] hijacked by religious zealots -- religious zealots who imposed on them immediately a dark and brutal dictatorship.

That year, the zealots drafted a constitution, a new one for Iran. It directed the revolutionary guards not only to protect Iran's borders, but also to fulfill the ideological mission of jihad. The regime's founder, Ayatollah Khomeini, exhorted his followers to "export the revolution throughout the world."

He then said:  

Iran and ISIS are competing for the crown of militant Islam. One calls itself the Islamic Republic. The other calls itself the Islamic State. Both want to impose a militant Islamic empire first on the region and then on the entire world. They just disagree among themselves who will be the ruler of that empire.

In this deadly game of thrones, there's no place for America or for Israel, no peace for Christians, Jews or Muslims who don't share the Islamist medieval creed, no rights for women, no freedom for anyone.

So, when it comes to Iran and ISIS, the enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

I think back to two books and movies that changed me: The Diary of Anne Frank, and On the Beach by Neil Shute: an eyewitness account of Nazi occupation, and a frightening real imagination of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

Praying the world’s leaders will quickly turn to God in Christ to calm the storms that threaten to swamp us – and that we -- His church -- will not give up praying.**  

We know that in this way we cannot ever really pray wrong. God hears us, and the distant god of our culture cowers in defeat.