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Our Daily Thread 2-10-16

Good Morning!

This is an odd sight for us. Robins don’t usually stay for the winter around these parts, but here they are anyway. With a fresh layer of snow, and temps in the teens to come later this week, they’re probably gonna wish they headed south. 

Or maybe the ground-hog had it right, spring is coming early, and these are the first arrivals. 🙂

Let’s go with that! 😆

Although I doubt I’ll be buying that line of thinking while I freeze later this week. 😉

2-6-16 010

2-6-16 004

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Anyone have a QoD?

 

39 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-10-16”

  4. Today, according to the TV, is Ash Wednesday.
    We Baptists don’t observe lent, so it sneaks up on me.
    They said I was supposed to give up something. Besides liver and onions, that is.

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  5. I’m thankful this morning after just a bad day after not sleeping the night before. Last night I got 8 hours punctuated by lovely dreams: flying to China with friends in a luxurious seat–though anxious I hadn’t charged my Ipad before we left;

    Wandering the streets of my hometown in the dense fog of my youth–the moan of the foghorn, the swirling gray and the scent of the sea: I ended up at Donna’s house for a soiree of reading, laughing friends of hers.

    And finished with a charming story of a family of pear growers who named their two precocious children Anjou and Bosc!

    I’ll take a night like that anytime! 🙂

    When’s the next fun afternoon, Donna?

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  6. Michelle, your link is interesting. I have been prayed over by a “prophetic minister”. It was amazing what she knew and what she said. I shared it with you when it happened, but I am always a little leary. I don’t trust them. To me it borders on fortune telling.

    Did any of you watch the results from New Hampshire last night? While it was going on I was having a FB Messenger conversation with 3 friends. As one of them posted afterwards were were gay, straight, liberal, conservative, kids, no kids, religious, agnostic, Jewish, and G. No one had a melt down….
    Of course the 3 of them support Hillary. Two (the guys) said they would love to live in Bernie’s perfect world but we have had 8 years of getting nothing done so we need to elect Hillary because she knows how to barter a back room deal. Of all the people on the Republican side for them to pick it is Jeb Bush—pretty much for the same reason. He is a political insider and would stick to the middle of the road. He would also have enough clout in the R party to get things done that need to be done.
    I thought the exit polls that CNN were reporting last night were interesting. No one seemed to care about “electability” they mostly cared about honesty and empathy. If you are going for honesty that knocks out 99% of the politicians anywhere. As Chas has reminded us repeatedly, they may be idealistic when the get there but they soon get Potomac Fever.
    I am really getting tired of hearing the media report on what “evangelicals” are doing the the R party. They make them sound like nutjobs then turn around and paint all Christians with the same brush.
    Anyway, I have a 90 minute tutorial to watch, databases to set up and things to do.

    Be Good

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  7. AJ, I noticed the waxwing that sneaked in among the robins.

    A few robins do overwinter, and they seem to specialize in berries. I saw two or three dozen of them in some trees of berries here in January. When I was in college, I saw them in trees with berries, and there was snow on the ground. At the time I was a student, fretting about finances, and I laughed and cried and said to God, “If You can care for robins in the snow, You can care for me, too!”

    Anyway, that is a lovely header photo. I especially like the robin on the right (and the waxwing, a specialized berry eater).

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  8. Well, I had vivid nightmares 😦

    On your link, Michelle, I heartily concur, having lived in a country where people sold their ability to communicate and manipulate the spirits and seen people be driven mad by the torment. When I came home, I spoke at another church which supported me, and mentioned my illness that caused me to come home early. Afterward, a woman came up to me and asked me about my health, saying she had been given the gift of healing. I hurriedly explained I was better now, so she had to content herself with waving her hands in the air and saying some kind of blessing. I wanted to tell her that I’d seen enough of that kind of thing, but it wasn’t the time or the place. I think she was simply indulging in a little wishful thinking, but the last I’d seen of the spiritualism in West Africa was when I was in the city clinic after I collapsed and a group of people came to pray for a man who seemed to have had a stroke. It turned out they were trying to exorcise him, since traditional beliefs say that strokes are caused by demons, but they were using Jesus’ name. It was disturbing to see the spiritual ignorance of those Christians (they caused so much disturbance that they had to leave and it was a clinic run by Muslims), and I began to understand why so much superstition mixed with Christianity in medieval Europe under the Catholic church. Our ancestors also combined their old pagan ideas with Christianity.

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  9. We usually see a few robins in February. One year, we saw them in the woods on a very cold day. They were sitting so still that we thought they had frozen to death, but they were fine.

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  10. We often have Robins overwinter in our area. We are much further south.

    So, I am watching grandchildren this week. I set up an experiment yesterday morning for an online lab I am taking. I had them all interested in what was going to happen to the gummy bears soaking in tap water and distilled water. Measurements, percentage of increase etc. When the girls got home from school, we sat out on the porch swing while each did their 20 minutes of reading. We went inside to see how much the gummy bears had grown. ….they were gone! Seems my young son found them too tempting, specially the control, sitting on the counter doing nothing. He ate them. So for that portion of the lab, I will be turning in a photo of him beside 3 empty jars holding a sign, with a very forlorn look on his face (post spanking) , that says “I ate mom’s gummy bears”. I am redoing the experiment, but it will be too late for submission. That’s my silly story for the day.

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  12. rkessler, the challenges of science …

    We’ve skipped the rest of winter AND spring and have landed smack in the middle of summer with a record-breaking heat wave. I got to do the weather story yesterday and we had several records broken in our local communities. Meteorologist I interviewed said El Nino may just be “late,” and hopefully not DOA. 😦

    I listened to a full Bernie Sanders speech for the first time last night — driving home, his victory speech was carried live on the radio — and I was stunned, though I don’t know why, he says he’s a socialist, after all. It was like Obama 2.0. If you love how much the federal government already is running your life, you’ll really love the country under Sanders. Medical care? As good as Obamacare has been, he said, he’ll go all the way.

    Take from the rich. Give to the poor. No more rich people. It’s just not moral.

    Coupled with Trump’s big NH win, my head was exploding last night. 😉

    These can’t possible wind up being our final choices come November. Can they??

    Ay-yai-yai.

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  14. I dreamed I was living in a different house, much bigger, with a girlfriend & I decided to let a handyman live in the basement where there was an extra basement.

    Roommate wasn’t amused, but it seemed to make a lot of sense to me, he’d be right there to fix everything that broke. 🙂

    I need to call the Department of Water & Power today, they left a notice on my front door yesterday saying they had to top off a back tree of mine that was too close to one of their power boxes. But my dogs & work schedule, of course, will make setting this appointment up quite complicated.

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  15. I think what weirdly surprised me about Bernie was he seems like such a nice guy compared to Hillary — more honest. certainly. And maybe I thought he’d moderated some of his youthful socialist views by now.

    But no.

    (Really) big government, way more taxes, got to level out everyone’s income and not let anyone have too much.

    He’s clearly still a Socialist, with a capital S. And hearing the crowd cheering his remarks was jarring to me.

    Has the Democratic party really moved that far to the left?

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  16. Yes. And does it not sound good? Everybody gets fed and clothed and all is good. Little details like how that is done are unimportant as long as we know the wealthy are paying for it so nobody has to give up anything except the rich who have too much anyway.

    Sorry, but I don’t want Clinton’s money. Or Trump’s. Or Gate’s.

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  17. I would rather be watching robins out my front window, than the ravens and magpies still cleaning up the deer carcass. I will have to be patient for that, since it is well below zero today. the robins are smart to wait to come back.

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  19. I’ll admit I’m just not much of a bird watcher. But I do remember the excitement whenever the first robin was spotted after the snowy winters in Iowa whenever we’d visit at that time of year. My grandfather was quite the bird watcher and passed at least some of that on to my mom. I have this memory of my mom taking me to the window and pointing out a robin … 🙂

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  20. For my writer friends. How Authors insult each other…

    1. “There are two ways of disliking poetry; one way is to dislike it, the other is to read Pope.”
    – Oscar Wilde on Alexander Pope
    2. “Miss Austen’s novels . . . seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in artistic invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world.”
    – Ralph Waldo Emerson on Jane Austen
    3. “He’s a full-fledged housewife from Kansas with all the prejudices.”
    – Gore Vidal on Truman Capote
    4. “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
    – William Faulkner on Ernest Hemingway
    5. “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
    – Ernest Hemingway on William Faulkner

    6. “[There] is no eminent writer…whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare. The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.”
    – George Bernard Shaw
    7. “…I read him for the first time in the early ‘forties, something about bells, balls and bulls, and loathed it.”
    – Vladimir Nabokov on Ernest Hemingway
    8. “A great cow full of ink.”
    – Gustave Flaubert on George Sand
    9. “Here are Johnny Keats’ piss-a-bed poetry, and three novels by God knows whom… No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”
    – Lord Byron on John Keats
    10. “I am reading Proust for the first time. Very poor stuff. I think he was mentally defective.”
    – Evelyn Waugh on Marcel Proust

    11. “Wordsworth was a tea-time bore, the great Frost of literature, the verbose, the humourless, the platitudinary reporter of Nature in her dullest moods. Open him at any page: and there lies the English language…in a large, sultry, and unhygienic box. Degutted and desouled.”
    – Dylan Thomas on William Wordsworth
    12. “The awful Whitman. This post-mortem poet. This poet with the private soul leaking out of him all the time. All his privacy leaking out in a sort of dribble, oozing into the universe.”
    – D.H. Lawrence on Walt Whitman
    13. “An unmanly sort of man whose love-life seems to have been largely confined to crying in laps and playing mouse.”
    – W.H. Auden on Edgar Allan Poe
    14. “An idiot child screaming in the hospital.”
    – H.G. Wells on George Bernard Shaw
    15. “…the king of nincompoops, the prince of the superficial, the anti-artist, the spokesman of janitresses, the Father Gigone of the editors of Siecle.”
    – Charles Baudelaire on Voltaire

    16. “His vast paragraphs sweat and struggle … And all for tales of nothingness … It is leviathan retrieving pebbles. It is a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den.”
    – H.G. Wells on Henry James
    17. “A hack writer who would not have been considered a fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven ‘sure-fire’ literary skeletons with sufficient local colour to intrigue the superficial and the lazy.”
    – William Faulkner on Mark Twain
    18. “Everytime I read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
    – Mark Twain on Jane Austen
    19. “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”
    – Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac
    20. “My God, what a clumsy olla putrida James Joyce is! Nothing but old fags and cabbage stumps of quotations from the Bible and the rest stewed in the juice of deliberate, journalistic dirty-mindedness.”
    – D.H. Lawrence on James Joyce

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  27. I agree with some of those insults, Kim!

    In other news, I let Pastor Paul know he had misspelled Ouija–I knew as a fellow UCLA English major, he would want to know.

    He wrote back “blush” and asked us to pray for him. He’s in Norway planting seeds for revival.

    Gorgeous day in northern California. I may eventually get to work on my book . . . 🙂

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  28. They missed one, Mark Twain on James Fenimore Cooper (author of ,The Deerslayer and Last of the Mohicans, etc.). From Twain’s Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences:

    There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two. In Deerslayer Cooper violated eighteen of them. These eighteen require:

    1. That a tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere. But the Deerslayer tale accomplishes nothing and arrives in the air.

    2. They require that the episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. But as the Deerslayer tale is not a tale, and accomplishes nothing and arrives nowhere, the episodes have no rightful place in the work, since there was nothing for them to develop.

    3. They require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others. But this detail has often been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

    4. They require that the personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there. But this detail also has been overlooked in the Deerslayer tale.

    5. They require that when the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say. But this requirement has been ignored from the beginning of the Deerslayer tale to the end of it.

    6. They require that when the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description. But this law gets little or no attention in the Deerslayer tale, as Natty Bumppo’s case will amply prove.

    7. They require that when a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a negro minstrel in the end of it. But this rule is flung down and danced upon in the Deerslayer tale.

    8. They require that crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader as “the craft of the woodsman, the delicate art of the forest,” by either the author or the people in the tale. But this rule is persistently violated in the Deerslayer tale.

    9. They require that the personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable. But these rules are not respected in the Deerslayer tale.

    10. They require that the author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and in their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones. But the reader of the Deerslayer tale dislikes the good people in it, is indifferent to the others, and wishes they would all get drowned together.

    11. They require that the characters in a tale shall be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency. But in the Deerslayer tale this rule is vacated.

    Link: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htm

    As an aside, I tend to agree with Twain. A children’s illustrated version of The Last of the Mohicans was one of my favorite library books as a child, except of course for the ending (which, unlike the very strange film version, is wholly tragic); but when I attempted to read Cooper’s full works later, I found them very disappointing, and I could have wrung the Deerslayer’s neck.

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  31. It’s Religious Freedom Day in Georgia. My brother and I went to a breakfast at 7:30 at the Freight Depot down near the capitol. We heard Kelvin Cochran, Alveda King, Raphael Cruz, and the Benham Brothers speak. Then there was a time for lobbying and finally there was the outdoor at Liberty Plaza gathering for the Decision Tour with Franklin Graham. It was all excellent. We saw snow flurries while walking over to the capitol. The sky was blue with a few wispy clouds during the outdoor event. I think about 7, 000 people showed up for the Decision Tour!
    I am very tired and hope to take a nap.

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  32. Michelle, I looked for a comments section to see if anyone had pointed out that misspelling, though I wondered briefly if there might be a newer, simplified spelling I’d never seen . . .

    Jo, one of my daughters has a birthday today, and for her card I chose a photo I took in the front year two or three years ago, purple crocuses poking through the snow.

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  37. Kim – Regarding the “prophetic minister”: I will admit that I am skeptical of self-proclaimed prophets. But I also know that there are some godly people who are more open to hearing whispers from the Holy Spirit (or are gifted in that way, perhaps) when they pray for people.

    I have read & heard many stories of ministers (or even spiritually-sensitive lay persons) praying for someone’s expressed need, & then sensing in their spirit that there is more to the story. Such as a lady asking prayer for a physical ailment, but the Holy Spirit gives the person praying supernatural insight to know that the lady actually needs emotional healing from sexual abuse. After gently talking to the lady, she breaks down in tears, acknowledging that she was indeed abused, & as she receives God’s healing & comfort, her physical ailment resolves.

    Or a man asking for prayer for one thing, & the Holy Spirit shows the person praying that there is a hidden sin that needs to be dealt with.

    Lee was prayed over for a back pain a few years ago. The visiting preacher who prayed for him said he saw, in his mind, Lee easily moving something like firewood. We don’t have a fireplace, so Lee didn’t think much of it, but I filed it away in my memory.

    Several months later, his back feeling much better, Lee spent part of a morning moving into the back of his truck several large, heavy “chunks” from a couple trees that had been taken down & cut up. He marveled at how good his back felt, & that he was able to do that. Then I remembered what the man had said.

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  38. Having said that, though, I don’t think it is good for people to go around claiming to have that as a gift. The Holy Spirit can use a person as He chooses, or not. And telling a person that the Spirit has shown one that he or she has hidden guilt or was sexually abused or whatnot must be done with utmost gentleness & humility.

    There was a lady in our former church who was used that way occasionally, & she was quite humble & gentle about it, & didn’t “advertise” that God had used her in that way. One evening at a special ladies meeting, she felt led to come pray for me. As she prayed, the Holy Spirit gave her insight into something deep within me that I had not even acknowledged. She prayed, & I cried & prayed, & I think the issue was healed that night.

    God’s gifts are often abused (& the devil has his counterfeits of them), but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a proper way to use them. But yes, we should always be a bit skeptical, & “test the spirits”, as the Bible says.

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