The Good Portion

For my friends who don't attend my church, here are a couple of links to the Advent message my dear Paul delivered on the Sunday evening before Christmas. The first is the printed version on his blog. The second is the audio version - so you can hear his wonderful voice. (Okay, I think it's wonderful - you don't have to. But the message is really good.) http://possumbane.livejournal.com/446502.html http://www.sovereignjoycf.org/podcast/Advent/04%20Advent%202008,%20Week%204.mp3

Okay, this is to all my Blogger friends, since the Blogger help function has failed in itsfunction. Can anyone tell me if and how I can put part of my lengthier posts " behind the cut" - or as some might know it "keep reading"? On livejournal I could type in a code that would do it, but I haven't been able to find how to do it here. Anyone?.....Anyone?....

I find great comfort in the sovereignty of God, and early in my Christian life began "collecting" Scriptures pertaining to just that. Some people find the doctrine of God's sovereignty over all things unsettling, or even distasteful. One reason I find comfort instead is that knowing God is in control of whatever happens means that no pain or sorrow I experience is futile or meaningless. I can trust that there is a good purpose in it. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of pain and physical trauma some women are willing to undergo to be beautiful. They will allow themselves to be cut open, peeled apart, suctioned, stuffed, etc. and undergo long and painful recovery just so their dying body will look pretty for a few extra years. Or think about the dentist. If our pain becomes bad enough, we are willing to endure more pain for a promised relief in the end. The pain in life is made immeasurably more bearable when we know there will be a good outcome, that it is not futile...

I wasn't expecting to have to fight back tears during the interlude music on NPR this morning. In my defense, the song O Holy Night almost invariable makes me tear up - but I certainly did not expect this rendition to do it. Take a listen: click the link then click "Listen now" for a sample. Promise me you'll listen through the chorus before you right me off as crazy. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?saId=98658604

from a forthright athiest. This is one of the most deeply challenging things I've seen: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JHS8adO3hM (Thanks to Ken at Cross Happenings .)

When I was a kid I wondered why the Flinstones booted their cat out of the house at night. As the owner of three cats, I don't wonder about that anymore. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q&eurl=&feature=player_embedded

I've been working on a "real post" for a couple of days now, and trying to keep up with the Mere Christianity reading group. My "real post" is taking on a life of it's own and pretty much everything that truly interests me is wrapped up in it. My point is, because of my limited mental capacities, I don't seem to have much left over to write about. I can tell about how today I did laundry and dishes, and about how Ginger peed on my bed 'cause I was ignoring her pleas to be taken out (She'd just been out an hour earlier, for Pete's sake!) Oh, and there's the ants. These have been the bane of the last three days of my existence. And the washer - I stopped one leak only to see three more, lesser leaks, sprout in its stead. The best part of the day was Paul getting home from work unexpectedly early, cookie platter in hand. We spent the afternoon together and then went to the local artsy theater to see Synecdoche, New York. It was a strange exp...

I saw this meme on my friend Andy C.'s blog and it looked like fun. Try it. Go through the list and bold the items you have done in your life. 1. Started your own blog (Really?) 2. Slept under the stars 3. Played in a band 4. Visited Hawaii 5. Watched a meteor shower 6. Given more than you can afford to charity 7. Been to Disneyland 8. Climbed a mountain 9. Held a praying mantis 10. Sang a solo 11. Bungee jumped 12. Visited Paris 13. Watched a lightning storm 14. Taught yourself an art from scratch 15. Adopted a child 16. Had food poisoning 17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty 18. Grown your own vegetables 19. Seen the Mona Lisa in France 20. Slept on an overnight train 21. Had a pillow fight 22. Hitch hiked 23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill 24. Built a snow fort 25. Held a lamb 26. Gone skinny dipping (more than twenty years ago) 27. Run a Marathon 28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice 29. Seen a total eclipse 30. Watched a sunrise or sunset 31. Hit a home run 32. B...

I can reduce the size of the leak from my washer and purchase epoxy to hopefully eliminate it altogther, saving many hundreds of dollars. I can paint the first wall of my kitchen green. (See preliminary before and after pics. The lighting for the after pic is terrible, so you can't really tell how pretty it is. Oh, and there's the sink full of dishes I was talking about. The lighting in the before pic is so good, you can't really tell how bad it really looked.) I can recover the ottoman the cats turned into a scratching post. I can do every stitch of laundry in the house and put it away. I can make a giant pot of exactly fantastic black bean soup. I can drive a friend to the store and to visit my mother. And even more...but I still have a sink full of dishes! Oh, and this...

Paul and I both had the day off from work. I made waffles for breakfast, using my new mixer for the first time. Strangely enough, they tasted markedly better than when I made them with the hand mixer. I'm not sure why this is the case. I think the texture was much improved. Paul commented on it as well, so I know it's not just my imagination. So, after lollygagging around a while longer, we headed out to get a Christmas tree. I decided to get a much smaller tree this year and am very happy with that outcome. Last year's was an 8 ft. bushy monstrosity that we couldn't keep the cats out of, and that took a huge bite out of our already limited floorspace. For this one I didn't even have to rearrange the furniture. Tomorrow we'll set about decorating it. After that adventure we headed off to buy some books to put on-line. Then it was time to take my mom to a doctor appointment. This month is going to be full of those. For some reason all her check-ups and lab tests...

I've been gradually accumulating photos from my husband's blog and saving them to my computer. Here're a few recent ones I thought were fun. The ones in the living room really hightlight the horrible wallpaper that came with the house. We didn't know it was there when we bought it because the tenants who lived here when we viewed the house had stuff piled from floor to ceiling and wall to wall. It was pretty clear that they were hoping to keep the house from getting sold. So, when we took possession we were shocked to find that dizzying eighties southwestern zigzag. Paul, who is by no means picky about such things, vowed that stuff would be the first thing to go. I agreed. It'll be two years on April 1, since the day I moved in. It's still there. But we still plan to get to it, after I've painted the kitchen; after we've redone the floors in the spare bedroom and made a den of it. The picture of me is Paul's new favorite. I like it,too. It's the ...

I couldn't resist this one . It's a little commentary on one of the stranger paradoxes of our times: children being treated like grown-ups while grown-ups behave like children. Have a read.

Here's a story out of the UK .

As any dear soul who reads this blog is already aware, I've recently completed reading through Jonathan Edwards' book Religious Affections with a group of bloggers at www.challies.com . Now Tim Challies is leading us through another classic, Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis. (I'm very excited to have my husband participating in this reading as well!) It's really amazing to follow a great Calvinistic thinker with a great non-Calvinistic one. (I'm not experienced enough in things-Lewis to be able to classify him more specifally than that.) Because the last reading is so fresh in my mind, and because Edwards has left a deep impression, I find it nearly impossible not to make comparisons. One of the main thrusts of Edwards' Religious Affections was to enable discernment between false and true Christianity in oneself and in others. So as I headed into Lewis, it seemed I was met almost immediately with a contradiction to Edwards' entire premise. Lewis says ...