42 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 10-3-17”

  3. Good morning. Still thinking much about how Karen and family are coping through this. Prayers.

    I have a lot to do to get ready for the women’s meeting tomorrow I felt to distracted yesterday to work on that, but I did review two of the inmate Bible study lessons. It is such a blessing to read what they write and know that Jesus is making a difference in the darkness of the prison system.

    Several evenings ago I posted a link to a news story about my cousin’s nephew’s wife who went missing in Winter Haven, FL. She was a 56 year old beloved nanny. She was found murdered. Now the person of interest has been found, an ex-con who was homeless. The story seems like something you might see on a television crime show. Unfortunately, it is real.

    I just about feel ill from the Las Vegas event, Karen’s tremendous loss of Leon, and then the murder of my cousin’s relative (and my cousin’s mother, who I am named after, is dying, too), and also sad over my friend’s friend who is in hospice from what recently took Kbells.

    How can so much bad happen at once? I want to stay positive, but maybe the best I can do is remember the Bible verse about being “knocked down but not destroyed.”

    http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/10/01/person-interest-in-death-florida-nanny-is-apprehended.html

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  4. Today is a busy day for me. Amos has to be settled with his “other” family while I am away. I have to pack because once I teach tomorrow and get home around 3:30 we will be heading to New Orleans.
    I have things scheduled while I am gone. The house will be cleaned by a real honest to goodness OCD relative, who will be coming every day to check on the cat—because she loves cats. She will also call the carpet cleaners once she is done so the carpets can be cleaned.
    It isn’t worth arguing with my husband about these sorts of things. Somehow he thinks I can be gone from home 10 hours a day AND keep it clean. I probably could but I don’t want to. I also want to come in from the world and cocoon myself in my space. I love being in the middle of a bunch of people but when I am done, I am done in. I have no energy left.
    I like my environment to be pleasant.
    Now off to start my day.

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  5. I got through my second 12 hour clinical shift yesterday, and even gave some medication by IV. So thankful, as I was struggling with not feeling well the night before (it isn’t an infectious problem), but I woke up yesterday morning with no symptoms.
    Sunday, Second Sibling and spouse came with Tiny Niece to my city church, where Ravi Zacharias was going to speak. Second Sibling-in-law really likes to listen to Ravi, so he was excited. I spent much of the time with Tiny Niece, so her mommy and daddy could listen. When they dropped me off after we ate lunch, Second texted me that Tiny Niece cried as they drove away because I had left.

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  6. Through the open window I hear the sounds of two animals, either goats or sheep, which is certainly an uncommon sound in my neighborhood. I do not know what to think about that. Maybe someone likes homemade feta cheese? I am thinking that Mumsee knows these sounds and could tell me without being able to see the animals exactly what is doing the bleating.

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  8. Janice, maybe mumsee also lurks under your window …

    Ravi, saw/heard him a couple times in years past at Ligonier conferences. He’s good. I think he may have been at the first one I attended, which was in Texas — Colson also was a speaker at that one, as was (a youngish) John Piper.

    Yes, yesterday was tough. I was preoccupied all day with KIzzie & family and had barely read anything, beyond a headline or two, about Las Vegas when I got to work. There were numerous local residents from Southern California at the concert, as it turned out, so the entire day was spent trying to contact and interview them. I listened to my share of stories from folks about what a horrendous experience it was, I can’t even imagine. One man I spoke with (he was at the hospital waiting for a friend to come out of what was 2 surgeries already) was among a group of dockworkers and their wives who go to this concert every year; three of them were shot, one critically though he is expected to survive.

    Of course, everyone is scrambling for a political solution. I’m not opposed to reasonable gun laws, but realize that’s not ever going to be the “fix.” The fix is spiritual, it is God. But no one seems too interested in that discussion.

    Again, I see so much spiritual darkness in our nation which is evident in all the division as well as in these horrible mass shootings. Yet people do not cry out to God, they cry out “More laws! More laws!”

    Hoping today at work will be calmer. The fact that we were all still clumsily navigating what is a new computer system through all the urgency yesterday didn’t help. At one point I noticed our editor’s hair was quite literally standing on end, sticking straight up. 🙂 Kind of funny but I didn’t dare smile, he was “in a mood,” as we say, and not happy with anything or anyone yesterday.

    Today my dog park friend J is set to come over to start on the outdoor lights — he’s starting from the front of the house and working his way back. I’ll leave the house unlocked as he’ll need to be in and out perhaps as well (there are 2 outlets that need replacing in the living room). He has the garage door opener (he’s the one that also installed that automatic garage door) as all the new light fixtures are in there.

    The foundation job is still set to begin oct. 16 and I called the window restoration company and they’re going to be able to squeeze me in for Nov. 9. Normally, I’d have to wait until February as they’re booked until then, but she said they like to leave a little wiggle room for customers like me who have put deposits down far in advance but weren’t ready until now to get the work done.

    So I may be a very happy camper by Thanksgiving, with just the painting left to do.

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  9. Back to the shootings and the responses I saw yesterday — prayer was being openly mocked in some corners, as people claimed “Not working!” followed by “More laws! More laws!”

    Sigh.

    Perhaps not the time to try to embark on a spiritual discussion with those folks, but it is so frustrating to watch those who don’t have (as of yet, awaiting God’s grace we can hope) the eyes to see and walk in spiritual blindness.

    It feels like a season of repentance is rightfully upon our country in these days. Perhaps that’s a call the church, at least, will hear?

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  10. Janice, Ravi originally emigrated from India to Canada (there is a Commonwealth connection), specifically Toronto, Ontario – his brother-in-law has also spoken at the city church in the past year, and before he retired, he pastored a church in a nearby city. Ravi was reminiscing about those years in the early 1970s, when there were only about 500 immigrants from India in Toronto, and he said that the only Indian restaurant was terrible and should have had a sign saying “We’re trying”. Now, he said, there are 500,000 Indians living in Toronto, and it has some of the best Indian restaurants in the world. His point, since he was speaking about how Christians should live in the world today, was that multiculturalism brought many good things. Indeed, I know that Ravi’s brother-in-law, who also was born and raised in India, came to Christ after he emigrated to Canada and was introduced to the Gospel here. God uses everything for His good purposes.

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  11. Seems like a long time ago people were clamoring for more laws! more laws! We don’t want God, we want to be like our neighbors. We want to fit in. He said it would be tough as the government would take over and take our children and make them slaves…..

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  12. Miss Bosley thinks those bleating birds are quite fascinating.

    Late yesterday I heard commotion in front of our house and looked out the window to catch two folks loading our used refrigerator into their truck. Nice not to continue to wait for the county to pick it up.

    I did hear a long time back that Ravi’ s daughter went to Covenant College. We have an Indian congregation which meets in our church building. The pastor and his wife are super nice.

    I wish we could be there in person for Kizzie. I so much wish that.

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  14. I had a lovely dinner with Ravi’s brother-in-law, Sunder Krishnan, in Banff last November. It was a little awkward as we are both introverts and the rest of the table were not, but we had a nice conversation with each other. He was the main speaker for our camp conference.

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  16. I spent most of yesterday painting two gates and the fences they are set in with my husband. We were bone weary at the end of the day, but as I painted I kept thinking that the work was so much better done alongside someone else, and the knowledge that Kizzie has lost that blessing. Though my hands were busy my heart was distracted and numb. I have also seen so many in my family lose spouses young (my mother lost Dad when he was 67–not super young, but short of “threescore and ten” and he had always been healthy; my sister-in-law died at 52, and my brother-in-law at 46; and the girls lost their mother when she was in her early forties–all but my brother had children still at home), and I don’t know that pain personally but have seen it up close too many times.

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  20. Meanwhile, meltdown by colleague now has him pulled into a room for pow wow with senior editor — and we’re still trying to navigate that very sensitive territory of trying to talk to grieving families and friends which is simply no fun, believe me. And there are so many stories and so few reporters left — sorry

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  24. Okay, enough of down in the dumps.With apologies to Karen and family, I need to tell a story.

    Once upon a time an earnest young man went to Ecuador as a Peace Corps volunteer. He was helping establish agricultural communities somewhere in the country.

    A tall, hale young man he and a couple friends were hiking with donkeys up a tall mountain. As it is near the equator, it was a rainy afternoon and the donkeys were irritable and the men all wet.

    I don’t remember exactly how, but one of the donkeys acted up and our friend J reached to settle it down–and fell off the mountain.

    His colleagues climbed down and discovered J had broken his back.

    Somehow, they fashioned a stretcher and climbed back up to the trail, hustling him as fast as possible down the slippery, muddy wet trail.

    He was paralyzed.

    When they got to the closest place resembling a medical clinic–a two room hut–they left him with a surprised but capable doctor who spoke English. He sent the local Spanish-speaking men to the closest town to find an ambulance.

    It was now nightfall. They found a rickety ambulance whose equipment was a blood pressure cuff, but needed a nurse. An American couple had arrived in the town that day from the US–I think they were Peace Corps as well. Someone, somehow, knew the woman was a nurse. They pounded on the door and begged her to come help.

    She went out into the inky black rainstorm with two men who didn’t speak English to a place no one could explain in an ambulance that barely ran with a blood pressure cuff.

    “I can’t imagine what I was thinking,” she recounted later.

    The ambulance ground to a halt beside a hut and she climbed out, not sure what to expect and no one could explain.

    Inside she found J, paralyzed, and a Johns Hopkins-trained neurologist who had stabilized him. They loaded J into the ambulance and the nurse rode with him to the nearest hospital, full of directions from a tremendously skilled physician who spoke English.

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  25. J was paralyzed and he never walked again.

    If he had not been left with a doctor who had returned to Ecuador after God healed his hands (“I promised I would return to my nation if God healed my hands.”), if a trained nurse had not ridden beside him to the hospital, he would not have survived.

    He returned to the US and went through countless surgeries, hospital visits, personal disappointments and pain. For ten years he wandered. His beard grew down his chest, his hair to his waist. He wore a thin and haunted look from the depths of his wheel chair.

    Ten years later he lay on his death bed in Sacramento, his parents by his side. A classy, attractive single mother nurse came on duty that night. (She whispered to the nurse she replaced, “will he survive the night?” The nurse shrugged).

    C learned the parents were Christians and something about that angry dying man caught her eye. She tended him well. He survived the night.

    Indeed, he began to heal from that day forward.

    When C brought him home to meet her teenagers, her daughter pulled her aside and asked, “WHAT were you thinking bringing this guy home?”

    Readers, she married him.

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  26. We attended J’s memorial service on Saturday. A joyous, celebratory service full of tears for a man who, after wandering for so long in pain, found his way back to God and lived a full, rich and wonderful life.

    He raised those two kids. He went back to school, ultimately earning a PhD in Ancient History. He got a job as a headhunter, he moved to our town with C and became an elder. On Saturday his four grandchildren stood with tears in their eyes and told of how wonderful he was.

    J spent nearly 50 years in his wheelchair.

    (He willingly and with laughter gave kids rides on the motorized chair).

    When we watched the slideshow about his life, you could see in his eyes when everything changed. Not right at marriage, but a few years later, he shaved his beard and got his hair cut. He looked a lot like Christopher Reeve did in Superman.

    Jesus came into a life that didn’t feel worth living and redeemed it.

    Thanks be to God.

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  33. My light post is done but now it leans. A lot. I was sent a photo of it and I had to tip my head to the left. I think the top must have been too heavy for the old wooden post.

    It’s all so symbolic.

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  34. ‘To God Be the Glory’ at my suggestion, surely a god moment, we sang this song with Alex and Lois Vincent as they stepped off the helicopter coming back to Ukarumpa from their last time in the village. The helicopter landed on the high school field so we could celebrate their work. Both were now 80 and above. They had come to PNG in 1956 or soon after. Met there and were married there and I had the privilege of attending a celebration there for their 50th wedding anniversary. Alex quipped that he was met by half of the residents of Ukarumpa just like when he first came. At that time he was the third resident, so when one fellow met him, that was half the population of Ukarumpa at that time. He was Australian and she was a foundling from New Jersey. They now live in North Carolina. We all helped find them a home near their children as they had made no plans for retirement.

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  39. They’re going to try to fix it without having to take everything out and replacing post and/or base completely — they think they can by building up the base with something. 🙂

    The crookedness kind of makes me crazy; it’s pretty light but being all tipsy is kind of too noticeable a flaw, right?

    These guys also paint so I may go that route to paint the house when it’s time.

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  41. I think I remember this place. Lamp post, spare room.

    I believe that is one of the lines from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the Pevensy children say after many years in Narnia.

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