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Our Daily Thread 2-21-14

Good Morning!

Today’s header photo is from Jo.

On this day in 1842 John J. Greenough patented the sewing machine.

In 1848 The Communist Manifesto was published by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In 1878 the first telephone directories issued in the U.S. were distributed to residents in New Haven, CT. It was a single page of only fifty names.

In 1965 Malcolm X was assassinated in New York City at the age of 39 by assassins identified as Black Muslims.

And in 1988, in Baton Rouge, LA, TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart confessed to his congregation that he was guilty of an unspecified sin. He announced that he was leaving the pulpit temporarily. 

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Quote of the Day

“Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

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Today is the birthday of one of the greatest guitarists to ever play. From GuitarTube

And it’s Jerry Harrison’s too.

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Anyone have a QoD?

59 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-21-14”

  2. What a way to wake up musically. I pressed on the Talking Heads and when they did not want to begin I pressed on the beautiful guitar music. Partway through the beautiful music, the Talking Heads joined in for a mashup. Now there’s an alarm clock on steroids! 🙂

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  4. How funny. I stopped to look at the photo and asked myself, “Now, who lives in Havaii?” I completely forgot about where Jo lives. What a beautiful site to behold.

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  5. Fair Warning to the World!!!! I am going to be worthless today. We had a terrible storm roll through about 2am. Scaredy-Dog was right up under me. Mr. P got up to check on Lulabelle, he fell asleep and snored. I think I fell back to sleep about 5am on the sofa and awoke to a terrible dream where I was paralyzed for a second and then shook. I was some place where the floor was wet…it sloped to a wall and there was a mark on the wall. My father was sitting in the chair beside me and wouldn’t tell me who Steven was. I decided Steven had been murdered in the house and was haunting it, but if my dad didn’t tell me he would think he was protecting me. I hate dreams like that.

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  6. This is my view from every window of my place. However you can’t take a picture through a window since you have louvers, bars, and screen. So.. for this one I went outside and got a ladder and stood on top with my camera raised above my head to show the view from my office. Janice, you are seeing roofs of homes below me and the dirt is just a mound of dirt that kids ride bikes on.

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  7. Oh but the other dream after that was that we lived next to a garden center/nursery and they didn’t like the way my yard and entry looked. It was ugly and distracting for their business so they offered to landscape for free advertisement.—I looked out front this morning…it was just a dream

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  8. Good morning! I sometimes feel like the Talking Heads song Once in a Lifetime, that goes “and you may ask yourself, how did I get here?!?” Sometimes I am overwhelmed by my good fortune, by God’s merciful provision for my life!

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  9. Nice picture Jo. From my reading of WW II stories, I pictured all of New Gunea as thick jungle with snakes hanging from the trees.
    That is interesting looking country. It is educational to see that.

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  10. All this last week I’ve seen “photo taken by —-” before the photo has popped up, so I wouldn’t have been able to guess if I’d wanted to. This morning I saw the photo before the photographer, decided I needed to guess, and I was right. 🙂 It sure looks different from my yard!

    We were supposed to get 53 yesterday and only made it to 41, so we got cheated out of 12 degrees. We got a good amount of rain, too (an inch or more), so I’m sure all the snow is now heavier than it was, but not nearly as much of it has melted as I hoped. But we finally (as of this morning, not yesterday) have a patch in which grass shows. Other than the spot next to the garage that has stayed bare because of how the wind blows, it is the first time grass has shown all month. It would be nicer if the grass was actually green, but I guess that’s asking too much. 🙂

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  13. Chas, I spoke to one man who was here fifty years ago, a missionary, I asked what differences he saw and he said ‘trees’ I guess these slopes were bare and we started planting trees and then the nationals did too. I can see a ridge from my place that they call ‘lone tree’ yet it now has a mini forest on top.

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  15. The family who lives below me, the husband is quite the gardener. The other large tree that you see is in his yard and he has somehow planted orchids on the trunk of all different kinds

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  18. Cheryl, you may turn into a cat lover before it’s all said and done. 🙂

    Karen I enjoyed hearing about Angel cat. Do you have any pictures? Cheryl would love to see them! 🙂

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  19. I looked at the foliage of banana and mango trees in the picture this morning and thought of The Gambia, but then I saw the mountains in the background.

    The Real, when I saw the label of the “greatest guitarist”, I immediately thought of Segovia; but I somewhat cynically guessed the clip would be of some rock guitarist. You proved me wrong. That is a nice clip of him playing in the Alhambra – the stuff Youtube digs out of the archives is amazing. The American guitarist Christopher Parkening was a student of Segovia’s and you can hear where he got his inspiration.
    I think I like Jars of Clay’s cover of ‘Road to Nowhere’ better than the original. That music video looks a bit like Kim’s nightmares 🙂

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  20. Kittens!

    Great picture, it had me stumped.

    Kim, that first dream sounded awful. The second one, ok — wish someone would come do a landscaping makeover for me! 🙂

    I dreamed the paint on my jeep was pealing off in huge chunks and it looked horrible. I thought to myself, “Oh weal. Why not.” 😮

    Meanwhile, Cowboy got out of the yard again overnight — so the temporary fix to the back fence that held for a month or more no longer is holding. I heard him barking at around 4:30 but strangely, the barking was coming from in front of my house. I think he was barking at the trash pickers who scour our neighborhoods for recyclables on trash night/morning, rolling their shopping carts up and down the street.

    Anyway, I opened the front door and called him and he came trotting in. I’ll have to lock the dogs in today and try to get home to let them out for a bathroom break mid-day, I inspected the fence this morning and for the life of me can’t figure out where he’s getting out. (It’s somewhere underneath the back fence line.) I keep looking out back to see if he’ll go to the spot & give me a hint, but he’s always just standing there in the middle of the yard looking very innocent whenever I look out. They are smart. At least Tess doesn’t go with him.

    I’ll have to deal with it all sometime tomorrow, I have a memorial service I need to go to at 11 a.m. on Saturday.

    Thanks all for the prayers on the prayer thread yesterday and today. Yesterday continued to be stressful but I did find a story to do and another one for today — plus I’ll have several hold-overs that refused to come together this week that I’ll be able to start with first thing on Monday. Our education reporter has been working non-stop on a series of investigative pieces about a superintendent of one of our smaller school districts so all the editors are obsessed with that 24/7 right now, the rest of us are pretty much relegated to just trying to fill in the space around his daily blockbusters. 😉

    Onward.

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  21. My former roommate played guitar and loved Christopher Parkening, she went to see him in concert a couple times.

    And like roscuro, I was initially confused by the mixed landscapes in Jo’s picture. 🙂 Mountains … tropical trees … so confusing!

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  22. We had a banana tree in our backyard when I was growing up. It was “3rd base” whenever we played baseball. And it always seemed to be crawling with ants. My mom had it removed some years after I’d moved out.

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  23. Hi all. It’s been busy, and we’ve been fighting illness, so I’m not finding much time for the usual blog reading. Mostly just trying to stay on top of my home responsibilities, with added time at the piano preparing for the piano show I’m in next month.

    I also found an interesting blog, The Bulletproof Musician, that has a lot of great tips on preparing for performances. It’s not written from a Christian perspective, and I did find one article so far that was a little new-agey (talking about your “inner energy” or something like that), but overall there are excellent ideas on there that I’ve found useful as I prepare my music. There are over 150 posts on the blog, and my aim is to read them all before the March 29th piano show.

    That’s about all the blog reading I have time for, along with everything else. (I do pop in here to check the “picture of the day”, though, and have been enjoying those.) You’ll have to catch me up on everything else that’s been happening around here after the show is over.

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  25. Good Morning…the photo had me stumped…and I confess…I thought the banana tree was a huge dandelion!! ( I hadn’t had my coffee yet!)
    It is a beautiful place in which you live Jo…the closest to tropical I have lived is Florida…we had an orange tree in our yard 🙂

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  26. We also had an orange tee — and a plumb tree.

    Well, Cowboy got out again, he was scratching go be let in at the front door a few minutes ago, all 4 paws & his belly wet and muddy. He thinks he’s very clever.

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  28. Donna, he is very clever. At least give him that.

    My neighbors on one side have two little dogs, and the other day they went up and over the fenced area in their own yard and greeted Misten from the other side of our fence. Misten kept looking back over her shoulder at us, and my husband guessed she wanted to tell us indignantly, “See! They can get out, why won’t you let me?” But after they got out the second time, wandering farther afield that time, the neighbor came up with his shovel and attacked their drift/exit.

    That’s what people are, dogs’ party poopers.

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  29. Finally, it’s Friday!!! (How’s that for finding the link, Chas?)

    Lovely view, Jo. All it needs is the ocean in the background and it would look like Puerto Rico. I remember my first time in Puerto Rico at my grandma’s house. When we wanted bananas for breakfast she just went out the back door and came in a minute or two later with a bunch.

    Donna- Our bases were similar, excpet we had a fruitless mulberry and an elm tree. I forget what the other bases were.

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  30. Trying to remember what we used for bases. Mostly just remeber when playng kickball on the street we would finf rocks that we could draw with, maybe had limestone in them, and we could make marks on the street for bases. I doubt most children in our country know about such things today. My son only did organized baseball through the YMCA.

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  31. Great quote from C S Lewis in the Heaven workbook: “If you read history, you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied by Heaven. It is sense Christens have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth thrown in: aim at earth and you will get neither.”

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  32. Bosley wants to know if her friendly cohort in kitten rambunctiousness has arrived yet? Did I even get that word spelled correctly? Sorta like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (sp?)

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  37. You have to realize the Ukarumpa is at 5,000 feet. Love it at this elevation. The jungle that Chas mentioned is on the coast, not in the Highlands.
    Fun to read your comments, I tried 15 times to get on this morning, but nothing worked.

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  41. Yay! She is twice as old as when Bosley arrived for Christmas! Get ready for a lot of laughs. Didn’t Art Linkletter say, “Kitties do the darndest things,,” or some such?

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  43. I don’t want a kitten. They are cute, and many cats are beautiful, but I admire them from a distance, not as something I want to share my home.

    Totally different subject. For those who have followed Bill Gothard’s “ministry” (Institute for Basic Youth Conflicts when I knew people involved with it, but other names too), some very sobering material is being gathered. This is one of many, many articles. I’m linking to the last in a series because it gives a pretty good summary if you only read one piece. If you have time to read more, or you have a personal interest in the ministry, then look for where it mentions the introduction and click on that instead: http://www.recoveringgrace.org/2014/02/the-scandal-1980/#more

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  45. Cheryl, I have been following the Recovering Grace reporting closely. As I have mentioned before, that is the homeschooling program in which I spent my adolescent and teen years. Nothing written so far has surprised me; from personal experience and what other students from the program have shared with me, I can affirm that all that which has been reported is within the bounds of probability. The multitude of witnesses, with their overlapping and coinciding accounts, prove that the accusations are factual. IBYC, later known as IBLP (Institute of Basic Life Principles) or ATI (Advanced Training Institute) is a cult, led by a false teacher. I do not say this in bitterness; I say it out of a deep conviction that is what the Bible says about an organization which contradicts the Gospel of grace and bears such rotten fruit.

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  46. I have a cat. I don’t want a cat. She is here. I can’t get rid of her. I am NOT cleaning the little box. I will take my clothes to the laundromat before I will change the litter. We are at a stand off at my house.

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  48. Cheryl, why are you following the Bill Gothsrd story? I read through some of that link. I did not know anything about that. My brother use to go to their one week seminars and he would be an usher for them. He always took off from work to br there. I saw him become more rigid under their influence. I was not a true Christian back then and I guess you could say from what I saw with my brother, just from legalism, it made me less interested in Christianity. Even later after I had my son my brother was buying these exprnsive books they put out on character for me to use with my son. I was never interested in using those books but felt badly knowing he must have spent a lot for them. We have not spoken of the group for many years now. Maybe I will ask him about them now that I have seen this information. Scary stuff!

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  50. Not sure I’ve heard of Bill Gothard but will check out the links. What’s everyone’s take on the new “Son of God” film coming out? Sounds like churches are buying up seats by the hundreds for special showings (or just to pack the previews).

    Being in a reformed church, we’re not keen on religious movies or pictures — based on that whole carved image commandment. 😉 So I probably won’t be going to see it.

    While “Noah” sounds like it’s pretty heretical, though, this one is “supposed to be” more biblically grounded.

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  52. I was not very connected with a Christian homeschooling community so I did not know any homeschoolers who did this Gothard program. I am not sure how my brother got involved with them. I am just hearing about all this scandel for the first time tonight. All those poor ladies! I am now very curious if my brother has heard about this.

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  53. Donna, I cringed when I saw the link for the trailer on Youtube. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it. My Baptist background makes me neither fish nor fowl when it comes to the everlasting debate about images and icons in the Church. I believe Christians and the Bible have a lot to offer the performing and visual arts, but another blockbuster movie about Jesus isn’t one of them. If they will not hear the ‘King of Kings’ (1927), ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’ (1965), ‘The Passion’ (2005) and others, neither shall they hear though ‘Son of God’ is released in movie theaters. I just looked up the dates for the afore mentioned movies and found a long list of Christian movies – the number released has increased dramatically over the years. There is one scheduled for next year called ‘The Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

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  54. Only 54 posts (counting this one)? I am ready to go to bed, but I don’t want to “talk to myself”, so I guess I’ll have to let the other 57-ers take that number.

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  55. Remember when Gibson’s “Passion” was going to transform the world? I never saw that either.

    I’m catching up, meanwhile, on secular movies I’ve somehow missed — including “Crash” (couple nights ago) and (tonight) “Silver Linings Playbook.”

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  57. Janice, I haven’t had direct contact with Gothard, but indirect contact on several fronts. One brother married a girl (now deceased) whose parents deeply respected the ministry. My sister had a couple dates with our sister-in-law’s younger brother, and she found him completely unable to think for himself, and based on things he said she blamed it on the Gothard influence. (He was in his late twenties and living at home, and if she’d raise a point or ask a question about the Bible, he’d say, “That’s a good question. I’ll have to ask my parents.” She ran the other way.)

    A guy with whom I did some sort-of-online-dating (we never met in person, but talked by phone for more than a year) had had some Gothard background, wasn’t too impressed by it, but was (I think) somewhat influenced by it.

    And nearly my whole family is in the conservative homeschooling movement; even though as far as I know none of my siblings uses his material, they simply have to be using the material of some people influenced by him, or in contact with other homeschoolers who are. I have good and bad feelings about the conservative branch of the homeschooling movement. They get some things right, some things wrong. Since I have nieces and nephews very much under that influence, I do want to know the ins and outs. Since some of them are being raised in some aspect of “patriarchy,” for instance, I want to know the strengths, weaknesses, and biblical critique of that movement. And I have a hunch some of that movement was an offshoot of some of Gothard’s stuff.

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