Our Daily Thread 7-6-15

Good Morning!

7-4-15 0087-4-15 009

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On this day in 1699 Captain William Kidd, the pirate, was captured in Boston, MA, and deported back to England.

In 1777 British forces captured Fort Ticonderoga.

In 1885 Louis Pasteur successfully tested his anti-rabies vaccine. The child used in the test later became the director of the Pasteur Institute.

In 1923 The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established.

And in 1985 the submarine Nautilus arrived in Groton, Connecticut. The vessel had been towed from Mare Island Naval Shipyard.

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Quote of the Day

I wish to have no connection with any ship that does not sail fast; for I intend to go in harm’s way.”

John Paul Jones

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Today is LaVerne Andrews’ birthday. 

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Anyone have a QoD?

28 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 7-6-15

  1. Well AJ, you got one in that I really didn’t know anything about. Ex-Husband used to say “Is you is or is you ain’t” I thought it was something left over that was making fun of the way rural black people spoke.

    Speaking of things rural and Southern. As I was getting dressed this morning I thought of Karen and of saying something about the Assembly of God Church. So this is another Assembly of God Church story I have probably told it before but I laugh every time I remember it.
    There was a retired Assembly of God minister who lived at the end of our street when I was a child. He had been the minister of the church my father’s family attended at one time. His name was Marvin L. Smith. Isn’t that a great name? The Reverend Marvin L Smith. It just sort of rolls out of your mouth. Anyway, I was old enough that Mother let a friend and me walk down the street and back. It was a long street and Rev Smith lived at the bottom of a hill. He would work in his garden and we would stop and talk to him. He had many wonderful stories that he told us. His wife would give us a drink of water for the return trip sometimes if it was really hot. Well, Dear Rev Smith got it into his head that I should steal a watermelon. He was of the opinion that no childhood was complete without having stolen a watermelon. (It’s hardly stealing if the man who planted and owns the watermelon patch tells you to steal one, but it was the principal of the thing). Did I mention that he lived at the bottom of a hill and it seems like miles back up the hill to my house? I kept promising that the next time I visited I would steal a watermelon. It must have been getting late in the season, because one day Rev Smith rang the doorbell, handed my mother a watermelon, and told her, “Kim stole this”. My father laughed and laughed. He said he at least had to carry the one he stole home, it wasn’t delivered for him.

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  2. Elvera was reared in the country. Her father grew watermelons. She said that she and the other children would go out and choose a watermelon, break it open and eat the middle. They would leave the rest for the critters.
    I always thought watermelons were expensive. I sold them for fifty cents each in Columbia, SC for abut a month after I graduated from HS. Before I joined the AF, of course. (1949)

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  3. Good foggy rainy morning! Kim your reference to the Rev. Marvin L Smith reminded me of the pastor who married us 40 years ago…his name was Malcomb B Green….I always loved that name….and he looked just like a young Abe Lincoln…he was such a sweet humble person and had a warm smile about him…I often wonder whatever happened to him and his sweet wife…

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  4. The pastor that married us was Dr. R. Archie Ellis. He is the only person I have known, in all my years, that was named Archie. There was a program on radio where the guy was named Archie Andrews.

    It finally happened. After Summer came on 21 June, the sun started coming up later each day. But sunset was at 8:48 for all these two weeks. Never changed.
    Sunset is at 8:47 tonight in Hendersonville.

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  5. I won’t mention the name of the person who married us, but he was an ordained Episcopal priest who was working as a computer programmer with me. We wanted to get married in the house we’d just bought and couldn’t find anyone who would do that. We weren’t members of a church at the time (so no pastor would do it) and there’s no such thing as a Justice of the Peace in Maryland.

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  6. Oh, I forgot to put that on rants and raves too, Linda — seems like so long ago already! But I did post a recap of the visit during the week, complete with the stuck car alarm episode. 🙂 So glad it worked out.

    Church was good (late as it was — we’re all trying to break ourselves of saying “Good morning” as church begins each afternoon at 3). There was some discussion around the cultural shift we’ve all been struggling with in the past week, including some talk during the adult SS about using FB.

    Our pastor mentioned the link that Kim originally posted here & on FB (then I re-posted on FB which is how our pastor saw it) about taking stands (how to do that and how not to do that as Christians) on social media and said he thought the article had some good advice.

    Someone then asked if FB was the right place to take a stand for the gospel (particularly on current issues related to culture and God’s law) and he said, well, we’re to “shout it from the rooftops,” so what media we use really isn’t the point. But he stressed again (as he always does) that we are to be loving to all, gentle while speaking the truth, quick to hear and slow to speak; we are to choose our timing and our words carefully, and to always-always-always avoid the temptation to respond in kind to the name-callers. When we respond inappropriately we’ve lost the discussion, he said.

    The sermon was from Deuteronomy and had much to say about true liberty the wisdom of God’s law.

    Among his points: Sometimes the offense to God that becomes acceptable and even promoted in a society becomes the very judgement of God, with abortion (killing our own children) being one vivid example. We expect earthquakes when it is our own behavior that reigns down God’s judgement upon us.

    He suggested we are already under God’s judgement, we just don’t see it.

    He also noted that there have so far been about 5 generations since the U.S. was formed and we’ve all grown up in a land where there has never been a severe lack of freedom. But we take that for granted, we’ve become rather spoiled; it’s a delusion, he said, that freedom is part of the “natural state of affairs” for mankind.

    That was driven home for me last night when I decided to watch Schindler’s List, a film I’d originally avoided when it came out as it sounded so hard to watch. It was really hard to watch, but such an important reminder of the depths of evil to which mankind (and governments) are capable of descending.

    What a dark period in the world’s very recent history — and how quickly it seems to be fading in the world’s collective memory.

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  7. saw a family at church yesterday that I hadn’t seen for 11 years. They went elsewhere for a while. So sweet as we struggled to remember each other’s names.
    Then some lovely ladies took me out to lunch and one gave me a gift which will cover the last minute expenses of this week, those little things.

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  8. I was at the Nautilus’ decommissioning and also was there in New London when it came up the Thames River in 1985–with two boys instead of zero at the decommissioning. 🙂

    And, I’ll be there this weekend visiting old friends. I love CT. And I loved our Navy life.

    Going to say goodbye to friends this afternoon–and to pick up their pots and pans, they’ve sold and emptied their house because they’re moving to Hawai’i to set up a school for Korean missionaries.

    I’m breathless at what they’ve done. Shut down this life completely, with four children between 14 and 7, sold and given away nearly everything. I’m taking the pots and pans because mine are 37 years old and falling apart; but also so that if I visit Hawai’i in the next couple years, I can bring them something from their old life . . .

    But it’s making me homesick for Hawai’i.

    My husband shook his head. “Are you craving an adventure?”

    Well . . . . yes.

    🙂

    So, I’m going to CT to see friends for the weekend and then flying to Chicago to spend five days in the stacks hunting . . . and adventure?

    You never know. 🙂

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  9. I am still busy clearing some things out from our house. I asked son if I can donate the small size microwave he has in his bedroom that he brought home from the dorm. If he later needs one, I think he would want a larger one. I am making some executive discisions about some of what to get rid of. Husband still wants to keep an advanced mathematics textbook from a course he took at Georgia Tech. I kept one textbook on Accounting which covered two quarters of classes. So my question is, have you kept textbooks or notebooks from any of your past school days?

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  10. Janice, I have:
    An introduction to Astrodynamics,
    Astrodynamics,
    and
    Basic Physics of the Solar System

    among other utterly useless junk.
    And that isn’t all.
    No, I’ll let chuck & Linda worry about them.
    Unless I have to downsize to go into assisted living, or some such.
    That’s another story.
    .

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  11. reading in 2 Chronicles 31:20 this morning, “Hezekiah did… what was good, right, and true before the Lord his God.
    Praying for each of us that we might also do what is good, right and true.

    Liked by 3 people

  12. Another good read from Olasky — especially interesting if you live near San Franciso or are members of either the PCA or OPC and other Reformed churches, but relevant to all of us

    http://www.worldmag.com/2015/06/blindsided#.VZr1X-agxGA.twitter

    RELIGION | Hundreds of evangelicals were caught off guard in March when their church leaders, without any open discussion, announced that sexually active homosexuals could become members. How did that happen, and what steps can members of other churches take to forestall such surprises?

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  13. Interesting article exploring the question of why so many straight people are pro-gay.

    http://www.crisismagazine.com/2015/the-protohomosexual#.VZaX0Pp_r3x.facebook

    Why are so many straight people pro gay? Because the normalization of homosexuality is the premier achievement of heterosexual ideology. “Gay” and “straight” are not taxonomies but ideologies. They are not orientations but disorientations: whether bi-, homo-, or hetero-, hyphenated sexuality makes us lose our sense of direction toward the truly sexual, and the victims of such ideology are children.

    The words “homosexual” and “heterosexual” are nineteenth-century neologisms made to sever romance from responsibility and sex from fecundity. “Heterosexuality was made to serve as this fanciful framework’s regulating ideal,” writes Michael Hannon, summarizing Foucault, “preserving the social prohibitions against sodomy and other sexual debaucheries without requiring recourse to the procreative nature of human sexuality.” The myth has become fact, and that is why so many straight people are pro gay. Homosexuality ratifies heterosexuality.

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  14. Janice, I might still have an old text from a college Music Theory course I took, but I rarely refer to it anymore.

    I do have all my piano, viola and voice repertoire I studied in college.

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  15. Physical therapy went pretty well today, although one stretch he did was more painful than anything I’ve experienced so far. I couldn’t talk through that one, it pretty much took my breath away. He sort of eased up after I told him after that stretch that that one was really tough. (He says I’m tougher than most people, so if it really hurts for me, then he knows that was a hard one.) 🙂

    My range of motion is definitely getting better, and I felt really good after my therapy session. I can raise my left hand to the side farther than I’ve been able to in months. If you imagine your arms as hands of a clock, with arms hanging at your sides as 6:00, straight up as 12:00, and straight out as 3:00 for the right arm and 9:00 for the left arm, I can (of course) get my right arm up to 12:00. But a week-and-a-half ago, after my initial therapy appointment, my left arm could only get out to about a 7:00 position. A few days ago I could get it to 8:00, and this afternoon after therapy I can now get it straight out to 9:00.

    Ah, progress. Rough going, sometimes, but satisfying when it happens.

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