New Life'n

Another tragedy so big the numbers don't mean anything

6,000 dead.  200,000 homeless.  What we can do and pray for.

6 things I read (or heard) or thought about this morning

1.  If you're afraid of people it will mess you up.  And, you can rely on them too much, too; you can try all you want to get some man to listen to you, but only God can really give you justice.
   

2.  Asked God to speak to me.  Then, very subtle, like a whisper...

• spend time in My Word
• calm down
• be careful with projects--do them but don't drag them out
• don't dilly dalley
• prove you trust Me by letting go and doing some other things--lighten up
• don't be afraid to be bold
     

3.  Am I more concerned with my personal ambitions (even if they're Godly) than I am with God's purpose and judgment being done?
   

4.  As a born-again righteous person, I don't need the law to lead me; I have God's Spirit doing the leading.
   

5.  The story of Lenny the Misfit...

Lenny scribbles his thoughts in journals and draws little pictures in the margins. Although no publisher is willing to publish these random thoughts, Bill Gates recently paid 30 million dollars for just one of Lenny's journals...
   

6.  And a Nobel Prize winning scientist tells the tale of his revolutionary discovery involving synthetic DNA (gee, that sounds like I knew what I said; I don't).  It's loooooong, and gets a little technical (actually, it's his Nobel Lecture when he won), but it captured me for 30 minutes.  It reminded me that everybody has a story.  Even when the subject is way out there the human part is the same for all of us...

Somehow, I thought, it had to be an illusion. Otherwise it would change DNA chemistry forever. Otherwise it would make me famous. It was too easy. Someone else would have done it and I would surely have heard of it. We would be doing it all the time. What was I failing to see? "Jennifer, wake up. I've thought of something incredible."

Later, on the climactic day when his experiment that would "change DNA chemisty forever" is successful, and he knows it will "make me famous," it doesn't matter nearly as much as what matters most to all of us...

In Berkeley it drizzles in the winter. Avocados ripen at odd times and the tree in Fred's front yard was wet and sagging from a load of fruit. I was sagging as I walked out to my little silver Honda Civic, which never failed to start. Neither Fred, empty Becks bottles, nor the sweet smell of the dawn of the age of PCR could replace Jenny. I was lonesome.

"Greater love has no one than this, that he..."

Home of the brave.

Hall of Heroes

Thank you.

The Good News in that big fire Wednesday night

Charlotte firefighter Mo Taylor knew he needed a lifeline. 

Once you realize your destiny, you don't argue about the way of rescue.

One of 16 million

Dad would've been in that massive invasion of Japan if Truman hadn't dropped the bomb in August, 1945.  I read once that Japan figured we only had one and that was why they didn't surrender at first.  Thus, Nagasaki. 

Dad was an engineer in the Pacific.  He didn't tell stories about the war.  I know more about what J. D. Wetterling did than about what Dad did, and I've never met or talked to J.D. 

This little glass paperweight sat on my grandparent's desk in the spare bedroom.  In my mind (no one ever said), Goldia cut out a picture of her son in uniform to fit the paperweight.  She kept it on her desk when he went off to war in 1942, and it stayed there when he got back and got married and had kids.  It's one of my memories of their house when I was a kid.

It's on my desk, now.

I wish I could have gone here with him.

His truth is marching on

The story behind The Battle Hymn of the Republic:

...when Julia Ward Howe heard the song for the first time that fall day, “John Brown’s Body” was already famous. She loved the martial vigor of the music, but knew the words were “inadequate for a lasting hymn”. So her minister, Dr Clark, suggested she write some new ones. And early the following morning at her Washington hotel she rose before dawn and on a piece of Sanitary Commission paper wrote the words we sing today, casting the war as a conflict in which one side has the advantage of God’s “terrible swift sword”:

I have seen Him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps…

She finished the words and went back to bed. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. They didn’t credit Mrs Howe and they paid her only four dollars.

Actually, that's the end of the story.  The whole thing is way more complicated (but fascinating).  You can read it here at SteynOnline, but be warned, you'll need a flow-chart or a calculator or something to keep up.

We call him Spanky

And the other 2 grandson's are Sparky and Spike.

Today is Spanky's birthday.  He's 6. 

His mom took him to Wal-Mart this morning and told him to pick out something.  She ended up with a cart full of weapons--machine gun, light sabre, shotgun, sword...and a football.  She told him he had to put something back. 

He put the football back.

This was on the top shelf, out of sight of 6-year olds (not very smart).  But, it's good to know there's another 'S' name available for the next grandson.

DVC One-Stop Shop

If I was limited to only one place I could go to answer questions raised in The Da Vinci Code, it might be Jesus and Da Vinci.  It also has articles on how we got our Bible and how it IS reliable, the evidence for Jesus and His divinity, and the historic creeds of the Christian faith.

And a CIU professor has stumbled across a connection between The DVC and the contemporary witchcraft of Wicca.  Yikes.

They're hungry

It'll take you 2:07 to see what our friends in Boone are doing about it.  (you might turn your speakers up, too)