Our Daily Thread 10-6-14

Good Morning!

Today’s header photo is from Janice.

On this day in 1683 the first Mennonites arrived in America aboard the Concord. The German and Dutch families settled in an area that is now a neighborhood in Philadelphia, PA. 

In 1848 the steamboat SS California left New York Harbor for San Francisco via Cape Horn. The steamboat service arrived on February 28, 1849. The trip took 4 months and 21 days. 

In 1866 the Reno Brothers pulled the first train robbery in America near Seymour, IN. The got away with $10,000. 

In 1884 The Naval War College was established in Newport, RI. 

And in 1954 E.L. Lyon became the first male nurse for the U.S. Army. 

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Quote of the Day

I’ve said all along that God is in control.”

Tony Dungy

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 On this day in 1941 Claude Thornhill and his orchestra recorded “Autumn Nocturne.”

And it’s Kevin Cronin’s birthday, which is the perfect excuse to play REO.

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Anyone have a QoD?

51 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-6-14

  1. Good morning, all. Good evening, Jo. I’ve been up since five…after being unable to fall asleep until one…But, I’m not tired, thanks to a couple of cups of coffee…

    Well, Becca just awakened. Time to go be a Mom!

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  2. Morning all. Thanks for praying for our town meeting. It went well. Lots of questions and comments, but it was all positive. I truly felt the unity. It will not be easy, but things are being done.
    I may freeze part of the huge broccoli I bought today. Should I steam it first?
    Such a nice place to get advice.

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  3. so went to the post office this morning and my box was empty.
    Then, when I came for the town meeting, I checked my box again, because aviation delivers mail right before lunch. And I had a golden ticket, saying I had a parcel!!!!
    But, 😦 the post office was closed
    I have to wait until they open tomorrow. I am hoping that it is the vest that I ordered and had my friend mail to me.

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  4. If the first Germans arrived in 1683, my ancestors weren’t far behind They came in 1721. They landed in Philadelphia. I heard on the radio that the Mennonites established a town in Pennsylvania. They called it Germantown.

    I graduated from the Naval War College in 1979.

    Who won the football pool?

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  5. Cut into bite size pieces, steam for a couple of minutes to stop the enzyme activity, place in cold water to stop the cooking activity, shake out water, freeze in convenient size bags. That is what we do around here. Thanks for praying, Jo.

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  6. Good morning. I am sleepy still. The cooler weather seems to do that! Now I need to find a cup of coffee somewhere. Husband was trying to read to me while we drove to the office, but he kept falling asleep. Good thing I was driving.

    I don’t know what that plant is in the picture, but I think it may be the honeysuckle bush. It is covered with those beautiful red berries, and a lot of the leaves are already turning yellow. Unless you get out to take pictures during the various seasons you miss much of the beauty. I had never really noticed these berries before. I always have noticed the nandina berries. With all the berries on these bushes it looks like we will soon have a forest of these plants.

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  7. When we went to the dinner fundraiser, my husband noticed he was one of the few men wearing a tie with his sports jacket. Then he attended the funeral of a client and was wearing his tie and not seeing others. Is this a regional or national thing to do away with the wearing of men’s ties? Do the guys here on the blog or the wives’ husbands still wear ties? My brother still likes to wear his when doing his pharma industry sales job. My friend said her pastor of a medium size Baptist church has stopped wearing his tie for the Sunday service. Thoughts, please, for the fashionably uninformed?

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  8. I wear a coat and tie every Sunday.
    The guy who taught our lesson yesterday was wearing neither.
    The only time I wasn’t wearing a tie at work (regular hours) was the day I retired.

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  9. Husband only wears a tie when he goes to court, unless he has his winter turtleneck under his uniform. Even my dad has stopped wearing a tie to church – never thought that would happen.

    Jo, what Mumsee said, or it will taste like hay. I have a book that came with my freezer many, many years ago that tells one how to freeze different produce, but I still do some googling as times have changed and maybe new ideas are out there.

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  10. California ditched ties years ago, I suspect it’s spreading east.

    Men are considered dressed up in church where I live if they’re wearing long pants rather than shorts with flip flops. 😉

    But our pastor usually wears a tie, no jacket. And long pants, of course.

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  11. My father generally wears clip-ons to church and other special events like weddings. He hates the tie, often quipping, “The man that invented the tie ought to have been strung up with it.” It is a safety hazard for security and police – they have to use Velcro or clip-ons to avoid being strangled by their own clothes. I don’t like ties. G.K. Chesterton, in his novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, has his main character suddenly break into hilarity over the male dress standards of the early 1900s:

    Now, there is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.
    So the short Government official looked at the coat-tails of the tall Government officials, and through street after street, and round corner after corner, saw only coat-tails, coat-tails, and again coat-tails…when, he did not in the least know why, something happened to his eyes.
    Two black dragons were walking backwards in front of him. Two black dragons were looking at him with evil eyes. The dragons were walking backwards it was true, but they kept their eyes fixed on him none the less. The eyes which he saw were, in truth, only the two buttons at the back of a frock-coat: perhaps some traditional memory of their meaningless character gave this half-witted prominence to their gaze. The slit between the tails was the nose-line of the monster: whenever the tails flapped in the winter wind the dragons licked their lips. It was only a momentary fancy, but the small clerk found it imbedded in his soul ever afterwards. He never could again think of men in frock-coats except as dragons walking backwards.

    That happened to me at some point, I saw ties once too often and now I’m unable to take them seriously – they look rather like tails from the game Pin the Tail on the Donkey, that accidentally got pinned to someone’s shirt front. The origins of the ties go back to the cravats of the 17th century. Those were extremely ornamental, tied in impossibly complicated ways, worn by dandies like Beau Brummel. It has been a couple hundred years, so I think it might be time for the tie to go the way of all fashions.

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  12. Hahaha — that’s funny, roscuro. I was thinking something similar about the cultural endurance of suits and ties not long ago, how odd the whole “uniform” is and how we all just accept that’s the way men ought to dress. But if it weren’t suits/jackets and ties, it would be something else I guess.

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  13. The tail end of this cold has me staying in again today, but it’s on its way out, it’ll be back to work tomorrow for me … I haven’t driving my Jeep since I came home from work late Friday night, which is very weird. I’ll have to get to the grocery store later today.

    Meanwhile, the harbor fog horns are going off non-stop, all night and all through this morning. We’re really socked in on the water today someone said the bridge was completely shrouded earlier.

    After I feed the animals and take a quick shower, I think I’m just heading back to bed …

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  14. I went down the street to the post office not far from our office, and along the way i saw three police cars parked at an establishment. That got my curiosity up as to what was going on, as in a crime, but then I noticed for the first time that the business was a uniform shop. Oh, that’s what’s up! Uniforms, not to worry.

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  15. Re ties: my husband hates them. For many years he had to wear them professionally. For our first “real date” I asked him to wear a coat and tie since I was dressing up (long black dress), and I didn’t mind if I would be the dressiest woman in the place but I wanted him dressed up too. (Actually he offered to dress up, and said he must be crazy to make such an offer, since he hates ties.) Occasionally when we go out I ask him to wear a tie.

    But he had stopped wearing ties to church until he became an elder. He wore long-sleeved dress shirts and a sports coat, but no tie. Now he wears a tie, so I tease him that I asked the elders to consider him as an elder so that he could wear a tie again, for me.

    The reality is that all the different things women have to wear, especially for dress-up, must be worse than a tie. Especially bows that tie in the back. Whoever invented the idea of a knot on the back of a garment that would get in the way when we sit down was an idiot. But I think the invention of high-heeled shoes was pretty silly, too, and I generally just refuse to wear them.

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  16. Agree, men invented both high heels and imaging equipment for mammograms.

    Yesterday in Sunday school I had a nice tablecloth from home and juice and muffins, doughnuts, and gingersnaps for a nice little something different since we don’t often do snacks or special things like that. I asked the children to guess what the special occasion was. It was my idea since it was the first really chilly weekend and the weather was so beautiful that we would celebrate fall and God’s creation of its beauty. The first child to guess was a boy, and he said, “Breast cancer awareness month?” Of course I did not expect that! He realized immediately that he had not gotten it right, but I told him it was a good guess, but that was not it. There were a few more guesses, but no one guessed it was for fall.

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  17. I’m working on my Bible study lesson for tomorrow–second half of James 2–which is the discussion of faith and works.

    To me, this is not a big issues, but it is for this book. To me, if you have faith, it’s demonstrated by your actions and attitudes. How hard is that?

    It takes us to Genesis 22–where Abraham prepares to sacrifice Isaac, as faith being put into action. A tremendous act of faith–Abraham was old, Isaac’s birth was a miracle and to put him to death would have required another tremendous act of God . . .

    I just realized what’s always bothered me about this story. It’s one thing for Abraham to display his great faith in God in picking up that knife–but his act also affected the life of another person. Isaac, too, must have had great faith. Don’t you think?

    I’d welcome some discussion of this, even as I move along in my Bible study prep.

    Thanks.

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  18. Men used to wear high-heeled shoes. Look at any full-length portrait of a gentleman in the 1600s. As for bows at the back of a dress, they are left over from the days of the bustle, an object of torture designed to increase the… err, size of a woman’s posterior. If you have ever sat in furniture from a bygone era, and wondered why it feels so uncomfortable, it may be because it was designed to accommodate a woman’s bustle – or hoop skirt.

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  19. Several of you have selfies or photos of yourself for your gravatar, and I decided that’s a very good idea. What do you think of mine? I especially like the eyelash detail. My husband liked the good look at the nostrils.

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  20. Michelle, I have just been reading Isaac’s story, and it strikes me that Isaac, though he had faith in God, it wasn’t as strong or as personal as Abraham’s. Jacob refers to his father’s faith in an interesting way in Genesis 31:42 “If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been on my side…” and again in verse 53, “”The God of Abraham and the God of Nahor, the God of their father, judge between us” So Jacob swore by the Fear of his father Isaac” [ESV]. It says in Hebrew 11:20, “By faith Isaac blessed Jacob and Esau concerning things to come.” But in reading how he came to bless them both, it seems that he did it blindly, literally and figuratively, in spite of his own desires. In the case of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, remember in the patriarchal culture, the parents had the power of life and death over their children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21), so Isaac would have been simply being obedient to his father. Isaac’s story, to me, is an example of the saving power of God, that He can overcome even our unbelief and fear to bring us to Himself.

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  21. My impression is that Isaac did not realize that his father was going to sacrifice him, because he asked where the lamb was.

    Roscuro – Could it be that that phrase was a poetic way of saying the Faith and Fear of Abraham and Isaac?

    Here’s the Amplified Bible’s interesting interpretation of that phrase…

    “And if the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Dread [lest he should fall] and Fear [lest he offend] of Isaac, …:

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  22. I just finished reading Bill O’Reilly’s book< Killing Patton. It is a good book, well researched and readable. Short chapters make it easier to read in brief breaks.
    It isn’t really about killing Patton (except for the final chapters), The fact takes place in the preface. It is about the final months of WW II, specifically about the Battle of the Bulge. We have glimpses into the German prison camps, and other places. It stands out that for the people of Poland and East Germany, the Russians were worse than the Germans.
    Eisenhower, Montgomery and Truman do not look good in this. They are indecisive, except for Truman who just doesn’t like Patton.
    Lots of people wanted Patton dead, including Americans and Russians.

    I highly recommend the book if you have an interest in such things.

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  23. Now, Karen, you know false humility is very unbecoming. You put great time and effort into your choices, same as I do. It just so happens that this time, the person in charge decided to influence the vote your way. Nothing wrong with accepting that you did a fine job. Of course, last week, I did get six of them correct but the person in charge neglected to call me the winner.

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  24. Babies and children learn to trust when they are taken care of by their parents. I would assume that was Isaac’s background. If those relationships are good and worthy of trust then it is easier for the child to develop faith in a loving God. So Isaac trusted his father fully to show love and not ultimately hurt him, therefore his question about the ram. He didn’t see the ram, but he had trust his loving father would provide. Could Isaac’s question at that point have prompted Abraham’s exhibit of faith? Is this a case, in a sense, of the child leading the way? His words showed God conquering death of His children by a substitute.

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  25. Very little is said in Scripture about Isaac, and not much about his faith. I edited a book recently that looked at some of the OT characters in a fictional way, and they had Isaac asking Abraham all sorts of questions about God. Surprised, Abraham points out that he seemed to show faith on Mount Moriah. Isaac tells him (in effect), “Dad, it was you I trusted, not God. I knew very little about God.” The reality is we just don’t know–we know Abraham had great faith, and we know Isaac was a believer. More details, we don’t have.

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  26. I just walked all of the doors and windows. Stories are surfacing about boy showing up in various people’s rooms in the middle of the night. I told son he could not sleep here again until dad was home and then we would talk. I reminded him that I love him but rules are in place to keep everybody safe. It is his birthday tomorrow.

    Karate went well. Daughter learned lots of self defense positions. And the teacher gave instruction in a loud voice so the son who was responsible for the current alarms would know she was learning this stuff.

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  27. Oh the moon is shining brightly in the Forest this evening…it is still and quiet and the air is crisp….but my dogs are sleeping 🙂
    We were going to head up to Leadville this weekend for a getaway… until we saw the weather forecast…snow on Thurs, Fri, and Sunday….high of 40 on Saturday….high of 30 on Sunday….we are staying home..brrrrr

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