62 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-25-16”

  6. Good morning.
    I have to take both girls to the orthopedist this morning. They want to check Lindsey’s range of motion in her elbow from her broken humerus and Becca has been complaining of pain in her left heel and ankle, so we’re getting that looked into.
    Hopefully, since their appointments are early, they won’t be too backed up and we can get in and out quickly.
    This afternoon I have lots of projects to work on around the house and I have my Moms in Prayer group at one.

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  8. It is really back to work for me today. January is always a time of catching up.
    I have shared music by Angie before. She is releasing a new CD/Album/ Whatever you call them these days. She is doing the marketing through home parties and Lesee is hosting one of them which means that Kim is helping. (I’ve told you before we have dragged each other into our escapades for 20+ years).
    I thought I would share a little of it with you.
    http://www.angielewismusic.com/music/

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  12. I like the “unartistic” view better.

    😆

    I am reading The Quiet Man by John Sununu. An interesting book. But I thought it was funny when he talked (on p. 149) about Bush and Gorbachev, on their helicopter ride to Camp David. With the two of them were two men, each had the code which could destroy the other nation. Presumably sitting together. I imagined the irony of that situation.

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  13. To escape the distress caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.
    ― Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence

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  14. Photo: A rare sunrise shot taken sometime in the past week or so from my front porch. I typically glance out the bedroom window, think, “Oh. That’s a really nice sunrise.” And then fall immediately back to sleep.

    Unseen from this view, but below the tree line and just down the hill, is the busy Port of Los Angeles where ships are unloaded 24/7 so we can have all our “stuff.”

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  15. I just made a chopped chicken with BBQ sauce topped by cole slaw on a toasted sesame seed bun sandwich. It was exceptional,in case anyone needs a good lunch or dinner idea. This uses up the rest of the chicken drumsticks I got on sale and cooked recently in the crockpot. Twelve drumsticks makes for a lot of meals for two people!

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  18. Cheryl, I think for items you will be selling that you need to have competitive shipping charges with Amazon if you hope to engage the general public rather than just friends and family. I think along the lines of Karen, but have not read all views. Up the price of the product to give sense of its value and originality and down the shipping price. If that does not work, then you can always offer the product on sale and at a discount and go up on shipping. You may want to do that as word of mouth and your products advertise themselves when people see them.

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  19. I just read what Kathleena wrote about shipping costs and see we said some similar things. I am not sure about marketing to the wealthier clients because they may already have well known preferences for such items and the places you might put ads for your products for them to notice might be too costly. I don’t have any experience with that so I’m just guessing.

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  21. Pesto on spaghetti squash. The Clean 16 continues . . . saw stars in Zumba and had to sit down for the rest of a dance. This clean eating may kill me. The only thing that feels normal is my brain . . .

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  23. Have you checked shipping prices by ounces for priority. I send things to the grands often, and find that I do better not using the prepriced size package. I use my own package and send it priority for several dollars savings. When I am ordering online, I often look for the free shipping deal, such as order $50 and shipping is free. Seems like $50 of cards could be shipped priority for $3-4.00 in a bubble envelope.

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  24. Anyone here familiar with the Reiki healing practice? It sounds quite New Agey, & a bit scary, from a spiritual point of view.

    Wikipedia describes it this way. . .“Reiki. . .is a form of alternative medicine developed in 1922 by Japanese Buddhist Mikao Usui.[1][2] Since its beginning in Japan, Reiki has been adapted across varying cultural traditions. It uses a technique commonly called palm healing or hands-on-healing. Through the use of this technique, practitioners believe that they are transferring “universal energy” through the palms of the practitioner, which they believe encourages healing.

    “Reiki is considered pseudoscience.[1] It is based on qi (“chi”), which practitioners say is a universal life force, although there is no empirical evidence that such a life force exists.[3] Clinical research has not shown Reiki to be effective as a medical treatment for any medical condition.”

    The Wikipedia article didn’t mention it (unless I missed it as I skimmed), but I’ve heard that the patients are supposed to connect with some sort of spirit guide as they are undergoing the treatment. That’s the scary part.

    My non-Christian SIL is into Reiki (at least she was a few years ago), & my mom had a treatment while she was dying from cancer. (She said she was surprised that her spirit guide was Jesus. I wondered about that – was that a demon deceiving her, or was Jesus trying to get her attention? I don’t know what her experience actually was, because I only heard about it from SIL after Mom’s death.)

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  25. During that same period of time, when Mom was dying, SIL & Mom had a reading by a psychic. (Apparently, to them, Christianity is too simplistic & unrealistic to be true, but spirit guides & psychics are real. :-/ ) They were impressed by some of what she said. She picked up on Mom’s deep grief over Dad’s passing, & told her that he visited her every night in her dreams. Although she did not remember any dreams about Dad, she accepted that she must be having those dreams, but not remembering them. (Ironically, I was the one having a lot of dreams about Dad.)

    She also predicted that a girl was going to join our family soon. So, I was glad that Emily had a boy. 😉 (Mom knew Emily was pregnant at the time.)

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  26. Karen I think a lot of these healing practices have more to do with the patients belief that they will work.
    I am not discounting that because studies have proven it to be true

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  27. Kim – My main concern about it is the patient calling on a spirit guide, which in reality would be a demon masquerading as something else.

    What made me think about this is that there was a post on the Stafford Bulletin Board Facebook page about a group Rieki healing. I pray for those who are involved or interested to have their eyes opened.

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  28. Karen, I had a friend way back who told me a little about that kind of healing. It sounded way out there to me at the time and I did not want to know more about it because of that other spirit involvement. It seemed like something which could be used by bad or evil people to the harm of vulnerable people who are in need. It is definitely wrong to use Jesus in that practice as if He is one among the many with the power to heal. Good thing to pray over those caught up in such a false practice.

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  29. Karen, I don’t know if you’ve ever read any of Isobel Kuhn’s books. She was a missionary to China in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, and the region of southern China where she worked had a lot of tribal worship of spirits. In her work she talks about how, as the missionaries came into the region, the tribal people began to make contact with a demon that called itself Jesus, which interfered with evangelism efforts. We already know that evil spirits will disguise themselves, and what better way than to pretend to be their enemy. As for the rest of it, Reiki sounds like every other animistic method of dealing with physical illness. Its practitioners would get along quite well with the marabouts of West Africa. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

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  30. RKessler, I used my own box, not the priority boxes (which do seem to be priced quite high). What I’m selling would not be available through amazon, and I don’t think it’s really a “competitor” for amazon. People won’t be expecting free shipping, or items sold at a loss; it’s more like buying from a craft fair, items that use that one individual’s creativity. But since the company charges less of a percentage of shipping costs than of sales cost, it would cost me more to wrap all the shipping costs into the product cost–and I don’t think people expect free shipping on such a site.

    I’ve bought several things online in the last month through outlets other than amazon–Shutterfly, for example. And $7.95 seems to be about the minimum of shipping costs. I just paid $12.99 for shipping on products ordered a few days ago, for example–and that was choosing the cheapest shipping option. Since the order itself was more than $100, and I’d waited for a sale, that cost was spread out over the cost of the items and they were still a good deal. But I’ve paid $7.97, 9.95, etc. on recent orders, and I don’t think I’ve seen shipping less than that except on amazon, but amazon and one other book company charge a fee for each item you buy, and it can go above $10 very quickly unless you buy only amazon products that come with free shipping. (But sometimes I find better deals going to the company websites and NOT getting amazon “free shipping,” since they charge amazon customers more to include the “free” shipping. If you want just one of the item, you buy it through amazon, but if you want more, and you buy it from their site, the lower costs make up for paying something for shipping.)

    I do have one company whose shipping prices have deterred me numerous times. I like what Figi’s sells (petit fours, etc.), but their prices are high. And on numerous occasions I’ve talked myself into ordering something, but then I go to place the order, and they have a two-step shipping. Something like $3.95 per address plus a shipping cost based on the cost of the items, which generally is $9.95 or so. And I just can’t bring myself to pay $14 for shipping on something that’s already overpriced, so I don’t buy. But when I can find free shipping for them, sometimes I buy. If their shipping were $5 or $6, it wouldn’t deter me, but well over $10 tells me that they are definitely counting on a rich clientele, and I’m not!

    But that’s why I’m inclined to think that set-price shipping, well under $10, is better than shipping prices that increase as you buy more. But I’m pretty sure that shipping under $10 won’t look extravagant to people who buy a lot online, unless their only company is amazon.

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  31. Michelle, seeing stars while doing Zumba, for someone who has been doing Zumba for a while, is a very bad sign. My mother tried a detox diet last year, and she had to stop because she had more pain and inflammation than she had before she went on the diet. It made her really sick. These diets can actually be extremely dangerous. My fellow students talked about a patient several of them had assigned to them during training. This woman had been on such a detox diet, and she had collapsed in complete heart failure. They revived her, but not before she received enough brain damage to make her complete unresponsive. She was, as the term is used, a vegetable, and had spent many years that way. If the diet is making you feel worse, stop it.

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  32. Cheryl, I typically buy from Amazon and Christianbook.com. I have bought a few books from author sites, but not much else online except for ebay which really varies it’s shipping prices. I am often discouraged from buying on ebay because of the shipping costs or encouraged to buy if the cost for shipping is less than other places where I can get the same type items. If you are mostly selling to a particular group that frequents a site then I would do as you are thinking and make the cost for shipping similar to what is the norm there.

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  34. Michelle, what Phos said. Our livers and kidneys are there to detox us, just don’t add to their challenges. I have been watching with concern, afraid to speak up.

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  35. Thanks for your concerns, Roscuro. We have a dietician monitoring us.

    This detox is not all that extreme–just took out sugar, flour (these two were hard for me), alcohol and caffeine. Nothing allowed out of a box, can or jar (though I’m using pesto from a jar tonight–on spaghetti squash). I can eat organic meat, eggs and cheese. (Expensive, yikes!)

    That’s partly why I’m bothered it has been so hard for me. I didn’t think I ate that much from boxes and cans before . . .

    I do see I rely on a lot of conveniences–it was a puzzle to make vegetarian chili the other night because I couldn’t use canned tomatoes! I found some fresh tomatoes but then didn’t cook the beans correctly so we had chopping on the beans chili.

    I was relieved when my husband forgot to put it in the refrigerator–I could then be justified throwing it out!

    I think a lot of this, like dealing with diabetes, is fighting not being able to eat or drink anything I want. It’s allowing me to see how rebellious I am. I’ve had to confess and deal with a complaining attitude as well. And the sleep has been a mess.

    But except for my dance classes, I have plenty of energy and my brain is clear.

    Certainly if a mostly vegetable diet worked for Daniel and friends, it should work for me.

    Unless, I’m totally contrary about everything . . . which may be possible! 🙂

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  37. Could you be drinking too much water? We had that discussion around here a week or so ago.

    I do a detox I buy at the health food store once a year. I haven’t been able to tell that much of a difference when I do it but it makes me feel like I am doing something.

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  38. Michelle, I find when I am use to some sugar in my diet and cut it out it makes me get shaky and faint, maybe like a mini insulin reaction because the body is on routine pumping out insulin to cover the sugar. If it is gone and the insulin has not adjusted then that does ugly things for a few days.

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  39. You didn’t mention no food out of a bag.

    As in tortilla chips.

    You might want to mention to the dietician that you’re feeling kinda lousy, maybe that’s not normal?

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  40. Michelle, Scripture seems to indicate that Daniel and his friends were supernaturally supervised while on that vegetarian diet–notice that the text specifically said they were fatter than those who weren’t on it. That would have been a sign of health in those days, but it isn’t a normal response to a vegetarian diet. I think God honored their desire to obey Him by giving them favor and maybe making up for their loss of adequate nutrition. But certainly the point of that Scripture is not that they chose better nutrition and their bodies responded well to it.

    A vegetarian diet is not really all that healthy. We need fats and protein, and those can be hard to find in a vegetarian diet. If the body thinks it is starving, it may go into survival mode, and that isn’t a good thing unless you actually are starving.

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  41. If you are cutting out flour, you are cutting out complex carbohydrates. Carbohydrates, for all that they are vilified, contain the essential energy ingredient, glucose – the unit of power that all of your body cells use to fuel their functions – and complex carbohydrates are the best source. Simple sugars burn too fast. I know from experience that I have to eat products containing flour. If I confine my diet to protein, vegetables, and fruit, I begin to feel as if I’m starving and my energy levels sink very low. One of my Anatomy and Physiology teachers was a fitness instructor, as well as a registered healthcare provider, and was up on all the latest health fads. She talked about how diet, like the Atkins, which took out carbohydrates forced your body to metabolize itself for energy, thus producing weight loss, but in breaking down proteins for energy, it has to produce several toxic by-products, ammonia being one of them, which poison the body. Exercise needs the most energy, because the muscle cell mitochondria burn up glucose, which is why symptoms would show up during Zumba, but not otherwise.

    Also, in our prosperous world, where we can eat food from far flung areas like Europe and South America, we don’t tend to realize that completely changing diets can be hard on not only our digestion, but also our metabolism. I saw that vividly demonstrated in West Africa, where weaned children became emaciated because their bodies, used to the nutrient rich milk of their mothers, couldn’t adjust quickly enough to the harsh diet that adults ate. We had to treat them with enriched milk to bring them back from the edge – they looked like those pictures of starving children from Africa, while the adults around them looked healthy enough. Missionaries themselves know of the dangers of having to switch to a local diet – many of them develop dysentery, not from any infectious agent, but simply because their system can’t handle the change. I noticed it (I had more diarrhea then I’ve ever had before) and my change wasn’t as drastic as I had access to more Western style foods. If a change needs to be made, it should be made gradually, one food item at a time, rather than all at once.

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  42. Interesting, roscuro — they even advise dog owners to only change foods gradually with their pets.

    Munching on fresh veggie salad with a few pieces of home-roasted turkey breast (and my new favorite, balsamic dressing with olive oil, which my editor likes so much he once called it “crack”).

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  44. Oh, and hypoglycemia, low glucose levels in the blood, makes people irritable. It may not be rebellion or a bad attitude, but the body trying to get one’s attention. The brain lives off glucose, which is why insulin dependent diabetic who take their insulin (insulin is a hormone which facilitates movement of glucose out of the bloodstream and into body cells) without eating can send themselves into a coma. They just got their body to remove all the glucose from the blood stream, without giving a replacement, and the brain shuts down (and the body will soon follow if nothing is done).

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  45. Ok, I thought you were on one of those weird California detox deals. Seventeen grapefruit a day and nothing else.

    When I cut out wheat, which is everywhere, I noticed that the excema on my hands cleared up. It had not done that before.

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  46. I agree with Cheryl. Daniel and his friends were choosing to identify themselves with the God of Israel by refusing to eat the unclean diet of the Babylonians, and that is why God blessed them. That their diet is not intended to be followed is evident, not only from the Mosaic law, which allowed for many other foods than Daniel’s vegetable diet, but also, from what Christ and the apostle Paul taught about the importance of diet in the spiritual life.
    In the words of Christ:

    “And he called the people to him again and said to them, “Hear me, all of you, and understand: There is nothing outside a person that by going into him can defile him, but the things that come out of a person are what defile him.” And when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable. And he said to them, “Then are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile him, since it enters not his heart but his stomach, and is expelled?” (Mark 7:14-19)

    In the words of Paul:

    Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God.
    If with Christ you died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.

    Food for thought: http://thecripplegate.com/kale-and-the-kingdom/

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  47. Eight year old and nine year old are having a bit of a competition. She is organizing their game shelves. He asked if he could organize it when she is done. She asked to organize it because he was organizing it but he had not asked.

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  48. And the passing judgement thing goes both ways. If a person chooses to be a vegetarian or whatever, that is fine. If they choose not to eat haggis or fish heads or whatever, that is okay too. And if they want to eat that stuff, they can. Probably not a good idea to eat them around me though.

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  51. Wow, it is almost scary to think there is such a cold place on this planet. Meanwhile, here on the prairie, the bulbs are pushing their leaves up and out of the ground as Spring quickly approaches.

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  55. You probably had to wear those glove mittens that open up so your fingers are free to work. That must have been cold against that cold metal or plastic. I can’t imagine if there was a wind….

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  56. Wow, thanks for all your thoughtful comments. I read them while cooking dinner. 🙂

    Interesting to me that the lack of sugar may have caused the irritability. I’ve been fine since Saturday, but a week into this, my body should have adapted to normal according to the dietician. The only issue today was this morning and even that was odd given I’d eaten my normal breakfast. We’ll see how I do tomorrow at 6 am.

    Sugars and carbs are coming from the vegetables and fruit.

    I’ll be back to eating normally a week from Wednesday. Today, both the salad I ate and the pesto were too rich. Brussel sprouts, however, were perfect. I think I would have preferred the spaghetti squash with just butter and salt.

    Kim’s comment about the water made me laugh.. Last night I attended the choir potluck with our Lutheran church friends. While they drank wine and ate appetizers I couldn’t eat, I drank water. Again and again for an hour.

    I was up hourly to visit the bathroom until about 3 this morning. I thought it curious that 9 hours after I stopped drinking water I still needed to get up. That was last night’s lack of sleep!

    I’ve now finished drinking water for the day, got in my 10 glasses, but we’ll see if I sleep better tonight.

    In normal life after not sleeping for three days I usually crash. We’ll see if I’m still up at 8 o’clock! LOL.

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  58. Mumsee, I agree with this: “And the passing judgement thing goes both ways. If a person chooses to be a vegetarian or whatever, that is fine.”

    If the person isn’t saying that they are a vegetarian because it’s more biblical. In that case, I call the person on it, because Scripture is quite clear on that one. Personal preference, go for it. More healthy, no. More biblical, absolutely no.

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  59. Food and diet have taken on an almost religious fervor lately —
    I know a couple folks for whom it’s literally almost their sole focus, everything revolves on how and what we eat or don’t eat — well, it’s just odd to me, is all

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