43 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-16-17”

  2. Morning, Chas. My class took it too far today. We have thick mats that they sit on. They keep jumping on them or using them for some sort of gymnastic trick, even after they have repeatedly been told not to. Today they lost the mats as I put them in a closet. They are now sitting on the hardwood floor. I told them they have lost them for a week. We will see. After that there are no more chances.

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  3. Re: A discussion from yesterday. I started to join in, but it was too late. (for me).

    A sermon is not an audience participation event. Except for a few “amen’s” etc. It is a message event. Even the “teaching” sermons. I have never heard of the tricks that were used to get attention or make a point. But even in the events mentioned, no overt response was expected. If anyone was embarrassed, it was not the intent of the pastor, it was an attention getter. He would be chagrined to know otherwise.

    Now teaching sessions are different. Pastor Steve at FBCHendersonville has a 30 minute session every Wednesday night he calls “Chasing Rabbits”. People can submit subjects for him to discuss. (Election,, infant baptism and “dedication”, eternal security, etc.) There is some audience participation, but limited because the audience is so large.

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  4. I have a conference call today to talk about a new position. I don’t want to take a leap out of desperation but I am hopeful this is something I really want to do. I have been trying to think of questions they could ask and answers I could give. I just need everything to work out as it should.

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  5. Good Morning! Praying for everything to go well with your call Kim…may He give to you calm and peace…He knows He cares….and so do we!
    I just looked over the weather forecast and it would appear we are going to get a foot of snow this Thursday…oh come on!!! 😛

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  7. I love the sound of meadow larks. We have some down the road but have not been able to lure them in here yet. We do have lots of hummingbirds (had to refill the feeders a couple of times already, and not because ten year old was drinking it) and lots of gold finches. They usually don’t come until the thistles go to seed but are here for the dandelions now.

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  8. We put our hummingbird feeders out in March due to the unseasonably warm weather. They were surprised by two blizzards since and they have another coming this Thursday…but we do have a lot of hummingbirds thus far. They have been nesting in the box woods in front of our porch…I think they will be fine during this next round of cold snowy weather…they are so much fun to watch.

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  13. I don’t know, I have seen quite a few hummingbirds sharing. They do seem to be rather outspoken though.

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  14. Our pastor, in his young, surfer-youth pastor days 30+ years ago, recalls one of his early sermons in which he actually used a garden hose to spray some people. Yikes.

    We do have Baptist-like “Amens” sometimes (quietly) sounding out in the body during sermons, but all is done in good, Presbyterian church order these days. 🙂 Our adult SS is a Q&A format with the pastor which is a free-flowing setting in which people can ask whatever they like. As we have some millennials who are sharp seminary students as well, it can go pretty deep.

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  15. Chas asked me the other day where I found stuff. This is one of the songs my dad and my uncle taught me to dance to. The key to understanding just how funny this was is knowing that my dad was almost 6’7″ and my uncle was 6’5″. Fully grown I am only 5’4″. I take long strides and out walk most people and I can’t dance with short men.

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  16. I have been trying to listen to Happy music so that I will be positive and upbeat for my conference call. I won’t subject you to Palisades Park and other “bubble gum” music from the 50’s and 60’s although I wish I could Fa la la lala live for today sometimes

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  18. Smile through your interview, Kim. Blessings and favor from above be upon you!

    It’s 86 degrees here and y’all are talking snow? Someone or something has gone crazy.

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  19. The eastern part of the company has only ruby-throated hummingbirds, which are more aggressive than some western species. Ruby-throated don’t willingly share a feeder, though first thing in the morning when they are really hungry, they may put up with each other, and mothers will feed with their fledglings.

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  20. The meadowlark singing was the day I walked to find them; it was on a wire, too far away to identify the species, but I zoomed in “just in case,” and it was a meadowlark. It didn’t turn toward me so that I could see its pretty chest, and it was on a wire and not on a branch (I prefer natural scenery), and it was a long zoom and thus not a super-sharp photo, but it was a singing meadowlark and that’s what I was looking for.

    The photo that is up now is the reason I went looking for meadowlarks in the first place–well, that and the fact that they don’t sing very long in the spring and I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. But the photo that’s up now is hilarious to me, and this is why: I was out walking, had never seen meadowlarks in that particular spot (it isn’t all that far from my home), though I’d seen them a quarter mile farther many times. I saw a flash in the grass of a lawn just beyond this cornfield, and I knew it was a meadowlark’s tail. (The black and white tail is the most frequent signal the bird is around, in my experience.) So I watched the yard looking for the bird and found it just as it flew into the old cornfield. In the field it was very well camouflaged and hard to find, and the sun was in my eyes, and all in all it was almost impossible to keep it in view and get some photos. And here is the really funny part: When I got home and pulled this photo up on my computer, I had a meadowlark showing vivid yellow in the frame . . . but I hadn’t seen that bird when I took the photo! I was aiming at the bird on the right, that doesn’t show up very well, and I had no idea there was a second bird there. The next shot, I have zoomed in on the rear bird; this is the only shot I got that included the one facing me, and I only got it because I have learned to take a quick shot or two before zooming in, because sometimes the bird flies before I have time to zoom and that way I at least get something with the animal in it! (This shot is cropped a bit; it was zoomed out a little farther than this.) I’m really “lucky” it’s a good shot of the one in front, that I didn’t somehow fail to include its head, or have a shot where he had his head hidden behind something. In all the shots I got of meadowlarks over the couple of weeks when they are visibly out and about, this is the only one I got showing that pretty front, and I got it by accident.

    Anyway, seeing that we apparently had a breeding pair quite close (it is probably one of these birds that was up on the wire singing a day or two later), and another pair not all that much farther beyond them, two pairs in less than two miles from my home, I set out one morning a day or two later to see if I could get some meadowlark shots, and did get the singing one and another bird on a fence (but not singing).

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  24. Little Guy has been enjoying playing Monopoly Jr. a lot lately. We added an element where all the money that is supposed to go to the bank is put in a “pot”. Whoever lands on “Free Time” gets the all the money in the “pot”. (This may be how others play, too, but it’s not in the rules. Chickadee says she has played regular Monopoly that way.)

    The first time I won the pot, Chickadee had just won it, so there was nothing in it. But I went on to win it a couple other times, & won that game by a lot.

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  26. Kizzie, we play Monopoly that way too, but when someone wins the pot, we immediately put $500 into the centre to start it again.

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  29. My husband and I went to Dairy Queen for lunch, and I took a photo of my cup to make sure I got the wording right. They are doing some kind of promotion for a movie, and my cup was featuring a science-fiction raccoon named Rocket. This is the first sentence, exactly as it appeared on my cup: “A unique genetic creation, you’d be hard-pressed to find the tough-talking Rocket’s like anywhere else in the galaxy.”

    Someone’s marketing department skimped somewhere, and they left out the editing department entirely.

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  32. Husband bought fresh strawberries the other day, so, to keep them from going to waste, I was forced to make strawberry shortcake and am now eating one. Life is good.

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  33. I’ve mentioned here before that my friend Mike (he & his wife go to our church) was good friends with singer Gene Pitney. They wrote a song together about the decline of their once-prosperous hometown, & Pitney sang it.

    Mike recently shared on Facebook another song he had written, one of his Christian songs, & I recognized Pitney’s voice singing the song. The neat thing is that Mike does not brag about having been good friends with Pitney. (Cindy, Mike’s wife, says they were lifelong friends.)

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  35. Old joke: Q- Why do hummingbirds hum? A- They don’t know the words.

    Re: Monopoly- We put $50 in the pot. But 4500 sounds more desirable. I usually don’t join the Monopoly games here, since I find it to be more like Monotony. Funny how changing two letters describes the game.

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  37. Cheryl, they were promoting the new ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ film no doubt, and I believe Rocket is a mutant raccoon (I’ve never watched the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ nor read the comics, but I’ve inferred that from the trailers); but even taking that into consideration, the sentence is a disaster.

    Just when I think I’m getting a handle on the statistics, the bar is raised. I’m dealing with probability right now. The Greek and Latin are going pretty well, though the pace is increasing. The Latin professor must think I’m bored because I’m fighting sleep by the time I get to his class, but it is just because I’m at school so many hours. This is the heaviest schedule I’ve had so far.

    It is fascinating listening to the language professors (I still hear everything even though I’m sleepy). Both obviously are enthusiastic about their topic, but the Latin especially uses readings such as short passages from the Vulgate, and the professor often explains the context of the passage or expounds on the concept, meaning that indirectly, some aspect of Christianity is brought up. It happens less often with the Greek, since we are studying an older dialect, Attic, than the koine, in which the New Testament is written (the Greek New Testament will still be understandable, as Attic is actually more complex than the koine), but some of what I’m learning is casting new light on what I know of the Greek New Testament and how it’s translated.

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  38. Peter, puns abound in our house, so Monopoly has come to be called ‘Monotony’ or ‘monotonous Monopoly’ and a ‘bored’ game. When we played it, we used a pot of 200 dollars for landing on Free Parking. We children sometimes had a running game that we extended over days, just making a record of where we left off. Then we just stopped playing it, and when I was much older and tried to play with my niece and nephews, I could have climbed the walls from boredom. I endured for their sakes. Thankfully, three eldest quickly grew out of it, and now play cut-throat games of ‘Settlers of Catan’ or ‘Carcassone’, which presents its own challenges to my patience. We adults prefer a word game such as ‘Balderdash’ or ‘Bananagrams’ (a much faster-paced variant on the Scrabble theme) or ‘Quiddler’.

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  42. Roscouro- one of our children discovered that you can play a quicker version of Monopoly by dealing out all the properties at the beginning. It does cut several times around the board that way.

    We also learned to play Rummy cube faster by just having everyone play at the same time, rather than everyone getting up to two minutes per turn.

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  43. I always played a faster game of monopoly by arranging to put houses on only one property as soon as you buy it.

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