43 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-25-16”

  1. That looks like a beautiful shot of the moon, but I don’t see the man in the moon.

    Good morning, moon!

    Good morning, evening, and in-between times to all on the blog. Time to get going on the to do list here.

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  6. Janice, I liked your thoughtful comment to Jo on yesterday’s post. In it, you said, “I wish people would give more thought to the singles in community. I know several who feel uncared for by the larger community. I do not know what the answer is, but it is a failure on the part of leadership. I think larger churches have some good programs for singles, but smaller churches often don’t do much for them.”

    When I got to the end of that paragraph, I wanted to comment that as a long-term single, I don’t think singles programs are really the answer, at least not once you get into your thirties and forties and beyond. Being integrated into the life of the body is more important. If single people don’t have family close by, an invitation for a holiday dinner is an excellent start. (I can’t even tell you how much of a relief it was in Chicago when I realized that a friend wasn’t just inviting me for one Christmas, but that she was going to invite me for every Christmas, either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, my choice. After that I no longer had to fret over whether to fly to see family on Christmas–it was a really bad time of year to fly out of O’Hare, and I truly would rather stay in Chicago over Christmas and go to see family in early spring when I was sick of snow but the South had spring, but all of my single friends left town for Christmas, and if I stayed local it meant being lonely until this one elderly friend chose to include me in her family gathering every Christmas.)

    My church in Chicago once did a member analysis, and realized to their shock that close to half the adult members were single. Now, many of those were single mothers, and quite a few more were widows, so don’t think twenty-to-thirty year-old people who aren’t married yet. We also had quite a few of us who were past thirty and likely never to marry, and many of us were very involved in the ministries of the church.

    The church’s surveys showed, to the leaders’ dismay, that even though there were so many of us in the church, we didn’t feel like we “belonged,” like we were valued members of the church. So they had us meet to discuss starting a singles group. And we met several times. And the consensus was we didn’t want a singles group. We wanted just to be adult members, and a singles group would just makes us “more” separate than we already were.

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  7. The moon was shining brightly in CO….the shadows on the snow covered forest floor are a beautiful sight…it was so bright it appeared to be daytime….how I love a full moon! The header photo is beautiful!
    Lulah is being quite affectionate this morning…she still is a bit wobbly as she is on sedatives to keep her in a more calm state so that she can heal…she is my wild child after all 🙂
    As I was checking out at the vet’s office yesterday, an elderly man came running into the office holding his small Yorkie….she had been attacked in her own yard by a neighbor’s dog…everyone jumped into action rushing to the back room….the dog was gone and the man was quite distraught….we were all crying for him an the love shown in that room was the sweetest I have ever witnessed…how I pray this man is comforted by the love of our Lord….

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  8. When my church was talking about how to make singles feel more valued, I sent my pastor a long letter, telling him a few of my own experiences at that church through the years, to show him that I (and probably many other singles) felt misunderstood and shoved aside as a single. I wrote of the Christmas I made and ate my own Christmas dinner because none of my friends were in town, and afterward when one of the pastors heard I’d spent it alone, he said, “Shame on you! You should have had someone over!” That wasn’t actually my problem–I knew no one to invite, and in fact I lived a long way from church at this point, but someone should have had me over.

    I told him of the time I showed up at an event right after church, at the park down the street from church (and, by that time, I lived around the corner from church, so the park was my local park), an event advertised in the bulletin as a “family picnic,” and I naively thought it meant “church family,” but instead it meant parents and children. I was the only single, all the events were for children, and it was clear I didn’t belong. Since I was very involved in teaching many of those children, I should have been welcome, but instead it was an event for a small fraction of the church. For a couple of years I attended a Sunday school class for senior citizens, and though I was only maybe 28-30 at the time, I was very welcome in that class–they even sang “Happy birthday” on my birthday, meaning that they had noted me as a class member and noticed it was my birthday. That kind of inclusion is good.

    I wrote of the time I showed up at a prayer meeting advertised as a “family prayer meeting, to pray about our families, singles welcome.” Now, I always attended prayer meeting, but this one was a special one, and if it hadn’t said “singles welcome,” I might have felt excluded and stayed home. Well, I got there, and they had singles sit on one side of the church and families sitting on the other! That was stupid, and that was wrong. I almost left immediately, but I stayed for a while. I did leave before it was over.

    I wrote of the time I attended a women’s retreat, and in a car on the way home (with three other women), the others in the car insisted on talking for an hour about why I was single, and how I could change that, even though I pleaded with them in tears (and finally even yelled) to please, please change the subject, that I was content being single and this conversation was one I didn’t want. (I’d not met any of the women before that weekend.)

    I told him of the time I went to someone who worked in the office and said I realized I had time in my schedule, and I had a ministry idea that I and maybe other singles could do. I said I could babysit one day a week for single mothers within the church, offer free babysitting, only at that time I had no idea which single mothers might need such an offer. I asked for a connection, a note in the bulletin, some way for mothers to say, “Yes, that would be a great blessing!” and maybe for other singles to say, “Yes, I could offer that myself.” But instead it was “Good idea, Cheryl, and go for it.” But I’d been at the church five or six years at that point (long enough for them to know me) but most of it as a college student (a college student who was teaching Sunday school and singing in the choir, but still not someone who’d gotten to know others well, because they didn’t invite the college students into their homes). I didn’t have the network to establish it on my own, which is why I volunteered but said I didn’t know who to talk with about it. When the church didn’t show any hint of joining with me, I ended up volunteering that free evening to another organization, a volunteer situation that ended up as a disaster (a director with bad people skills), but that finally got me a good close friend in the church, since another church member volunteered the same evening I did.

    I didn’t use names of people, or even their positions within the church, as I wrote any of those; I just told him that someone involved was church staff (pastor or office employee) and as such represented the church.

    Having a singles group or not having a singles group is secondary. Some singles will want one and some won’t. But whether singles feel like they have friends in the church, and whether they feel welcomed into at least a few homes and welcomed at church events, is vitally important. For me as a single living hundreds of miles from family, and only seeing family if I purchased a plane ticket and flew to see them, it was crucial. (I have six siblings, but when one brother showed up at church with me many years into my time as a member–I want to say at least a decade–someone expressed shock that I had any siblings. That’s because in my 14 years in Chicago, I can count on two hands, with fingers left over, the number of times any sibling or my mother came to Chicago to see me, or even saw me because he happened to be in Chicago–I had one sibling who came several times and didn’t bother to let me know most of the time, because he was there on business and he just wanted to conduct his business and leave.)

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  9. I am glad and laughing at myself that I amused so many of you with my tale of mousicide yesterday. I told Mr. P when I got home (I went to exercise). He asked me if I dented any of the walls. I looked this morning. The walls are blemish free. The background on this is that his first wife was a thrower. She would get angry and clean out the cabinets throwing dishes and things. We discussed this before we ever married. My mother was a thrower. She did the same thing. I have had the same set of dishes for about 25 years and the only piece to be broken was a fruit bowl because I forgot it was in the bottom of a bag and I set it down on the door step to search for my keys to unlock the door. I mourned the loss of that bowl. The reason? By the time I was in elementary school my parents had been through about 5 sets of dishes. We had terrazzo floors in the kitchen and den of that house and I had many a shard of glass dug out of the bottoms of my feet. I am always looking to do the opposite of whatever it was my mother did, so the fact that I lost it yesterday to the degree that I did upset me more than the actual anger that came spewing out of me.
    Thank you for finding the humor in it so that I could laugh as well. I have always told you that if I could find a reason to laugh I would survive.

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  10. What is wrong with poor baby Lulah? Your story of the man rushing in and then losing his beloved companion hurt my heart this morning. You have been through it recently as well, so I am sure you were especially sympathetic to his loss.

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  12. Miss Lulah was spayed yesterday…we “don’t do no puppies”!! Because she tends to be high energy, our vet has her on sedatives to keep her calm in order to heal. She is quite the pitiful pearl this morning 🙂
    It just so happened I was an hour early picking Lulah up yesterday (ok…I don’t have a brain…the staff was amused and my vet thought I was just worried about Lulah so I showed up an hour early!) Anyway, a dear friend, whom I hadn’t seen in a year, was at the office with her puppy….we were both there to witness the tragedy of this elderly gentleman and his beloved dog….we were crying together and I know our Lord had us there for “just a time as this”….

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  15. NancyJill, did they tattoo her? Lulabelle, in addition to being microchipped, has 3 blue dots tattooed on her tummy. If she is ever lost or ends up in a shelter they will know from the tattoos that she has already been spayed.
    Amos is not microchipped and I need to have that done. I have his name and my telephone number on his collar, but as you may remember a month or so ago when the two of them got out the “big, scary, Pit Bull mix played with the neighbors; the little foo-foo dog sat on the front porch, growled, and wouldn’t let anyone near him.

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  16. Kim, in one of my dog books, written years before anyone ever thought of microchipping, they recommend a way to identify your dog in case it is ever lost: on its belly you tattoo it with your social security number! Can you imagine today, some dog rolls over at the dog park, and there is its owner’s social security number?

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  17. Oh Kim I don’t know…I’ll have to go look at her belly when she wakes up!! We did have her micro chipped yesterday while she was knocked out ….she looks funny with her belly shaved…and she doesn’t like it one bit!

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  19. so sad about the man and his little dog, that must have been traumatic. 😦

    I saw the header photo and thought, ‘Oh, there’s roscuro’s rainbow moon!’ Our moon has been big and orange lately, wish I got off from work earlier as it would make a great photo over the harbor. But it’s way too high in the sky by the time my commute home is done.

    I have a speech to cover today, but at least it’s local.

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  22. Interesting video Kim..the look upon all of those faces…wistful and longing…….and that is what Jesus has given to us…”a clean slate”…washing it clean with His blood….thankful ❤

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  24. A similar tone from Ross Dothan at the NYT:

    _____________________________

    … To those of us who invested early and consistently in the notion that Trump would eventually be halted in his path toward the Republican nomination, the situation is rather extraordinary. Trump is winning everywhere, he is winning easily — and very, very little is being done to stop him. Donors are skittish about spending money on anti-Trump ad campaigns — because, Politico reports, they fear his insults and rumor-mongering. …

    … In the last few days that Rubio strategy has come under withering fire from many of my fellow conservative pundits. As John Podhoretz of Commentary wrote yesterday, “Republicans who are horrified at the prospect of a Trump presidency actually need a champion,” not just a likable-enough alternative. Against a force like Trump, being available and plausible is not enough: The still-extant not-Trump majority in the G.O.P. will not remain a majority for long without a candidate who’s actually willing to make the not-Trump case.

    So what is Rubio waiting for? What is his campaign thinking? …
    ______________________________

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  28. I really liked what Dr. Carson said when asked by an African American, how he would address that community. Dr. Carson said he does not change his policy talk depending on who he is talking to. By implementing his suggestions, everybody would be helped

    I was trying to figure out how I threw Donna.

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  33. Kim, I think it’s interesting that the “biggest regret” didn’t show any actual sins (at least not that I saw). Did no one write “my abortion” or “abandoning my family” or “the years I spent as an alcoholic”? The focus was on “I didn’t follow my dreams” as though the worst regret a person might have is about “me.” (One did say “not spending enough time with family,” I think, but they didn’t show the whole bit of writing and it might have ended differently than I was expecting.)

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  34. Sun just coming up here.
    As I was walking yesterday I finally realized that the light I want replaced is on the power of the flat next door which is owned by housing so a department. I am going to take the light bulb I got back and have them do it. So funny that I should have realized that what they were telling me was right, I did not need that light.
    I agree with Cheryl, we want to be included with the families.

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  37. Some of the worst things that people experience may be what makes them realize the need to accept Jesus as Lord or Master of their life. The guy at my church who is an alcoholic who no longer drinks and relies now on Jesus, I suspect, might not say he regretted being an alcoholic if God used that bad to bring good into his life. I am just guessing about that, but he has a good and useful testimony to reach people who are alcoholics.

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  39. Kim, I suppose that’s true some of the time.

    But some man walks out on his family, running off with some younger woman, and a year later that woman leaves him. Is his biggest regret going to be that he never got his MBA? I’d hope not.

    It seems to me that most people’s “biggest regret” might be personal: I didn’t forgive my dad until after he died. My mom died just before my wedding day. (That “regret” isn’t for something the person did . . . but it might be, if the couple could have married two years earlier.) I moved my family across the country for that job, and the job wasn’t worth the turmoil it caused my family.

    However, I suspect the forum (putting a board in a public place and filming people who write on it) would limit people from saying “I regret beating my wife” or “I regret screaming at my daughter until she ran away” or “I regret that I didn’t listen to my dad’s warnings and I married my husband” or whatever. And since those things weren’t the “message” they were trying to portray, they wouldn’t have been included, anyway.

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  40. I’m finally reading a book that my family has talked about since before we married. (My older daughter had to read it in college, and recommended it to my husband, who has never finished it but has mentioned it multiple times.) It’s called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

    It’s really a fascinating book. I’m maybe 40% through (I started it yesterday), so I don’t know all that is said. But it has a lot more data than I expected, including a history of technology (including the clock . . . my husband had mentioned that part . . . and of writing), a look at brain research, and more.

    I’d never thought about this quite the way he writes about it, but he points out that many, many types of technology are incorporated into the Internet. Here are a few: maps, clocks, telephones, postal service, books, magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, stores . . . He points out that reading online is not at all like reading a book, partly because you have the hyperlinks in the article, but you also have all those other gizmos at the sides of the pages, tempting you to watch videos, read more, and purchase.

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  41. Nine year old was just telling me he did not understand why they called the third day, Tuesday. Now, I have seen calendars where the second day is Tuesday but I tried to explain it is a different tue than two or to or too.

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  42. First Day is Sunday. (ingrained in me from my Quaker days 🙂 )

    So I couldn’t find the can of cheese-wiz for dogs that I use to give Tess her thyroid pills.

    Found it in the backyard. Well, I found part of it — the top is missing.

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