33 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-9-18”

  4. Lovely header photo! Is that from this year? I had to look to see the name on the picture, because I think I got a photo of that kind of flower last year, or at least one very similar (but didn’t remember that I got that good a shot, and suspected I didn’t). It’s lovely!

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Hey, I know we covered infant baptism at some length already, but I saw this posted to the Aquila Report yesterday and thought it quite good: http://gospelreformation.net/controversy-infant-baptism/

    Particularly, if you think it’s really a stretch to equate baptism and circumcision, or to give it any biblical credence, this piece may not convince you, but it should at least convince you that there is a solid argument to be made.

    Liked by 4 people

  6. My Marine left this morning at 6:30. He has to drive to New Orleans to catch his noon flight to San Diego. I am glad he and his dad got to watch the game last night. I am pleasantly surprised, I did not see him touch one drop of alcohol while he was here.

    I have definite opinions on circumcision and thankfully had a daughter so I didn’t have to make that decision. I was in Rainbow Girls with a girl who died from cervical cancer. Her husband was uncircumsided and there is a specific correlation. I have heard her story more than once.

    Liked by 1 person

  8. Interesting read, Cheryl. It has a lot of support for your point of view and seems to put down the Baptist point of view. I can not see it as black and white as the article makes it out to be. From my point of view, I had our son baptized in my mother’s church. My father had died while I was pregnant, and I thought it would be nice to have son baptized in the small country PUSA church where my father had been an elder. Art and I were not attending church ourselves at that point. As only a nominal Christian, I would not think of us as being a covenant family back then. I did not do the infant baptism for spiritual reasons, or even for sake of tradition since I was not baptized as an infant and neither was Art. The thought I was given previously on blog comments was that none of the human reasoning matters. Infant baptism is a God thing solely dependent upon what He means it to be. On that one point, I can not come to a conclusion, but will say some things of God are a mystery to me. If it matters to Him then I will know for sure at some point. For now I don’t know. But for myself, it was right that I had a believer’s baptism in a Southern Baptist church.

    Liked by 1 person

  11. I’m having a hard time waking up today, I tossed and turned before falling asleep (late) last night, which is rare for me. Then I was up at 2:30, I think, to let Cowboy out. And I vaguely recall hearing quite a downpour sometime after that.

    The cardboard blew off my broken windows still waiting to be replaced, so i need to put that back up. I’d really like to go back to bed this morning.

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  12. I just finished hearing Chet Atkins play “In the Garden” on my CD player.
    It reminded me of “This World is Not My Home” we had yesterday. And I mentioned that we don’t sing songs about personal relationship in our church.
    All praise songs.
    I have wondered about that. Praise songs are good. I can’t say anything about them.
    How could I?
    Yet. I was reading Psalm 9 this morning. It starts out with praise. Then David gets real personal. Then it occurred to me that almost all of the Psalms are about personal relationships.
    It’s hard to imagine, but God has a personal relationship wit billions of people. Each person individually. .
    Whoever wrote “What a friend we have in Jesus” means that He is a personal friend who knows all about you and loves you anyhow>
    Awesome

    Liked by 5 people

  13. One time, after SS class, a guy asked if it is ok to pray against someone who has done you wrong.
    I said, “It’s an OT thing. Jesus said to pray FOR your enemies. But the Psalms are full of it.”
    Many of David’s prayers are the “Avenge me” type.
    No one has ever done me that wrong, but I think, and think God understands, if we feel animosity against someone.
    They guy who asked is in good company.
    But not the best..

    Liked by 1 person

  16. Linda, that’s a very unusual story. Two dogs together can “pack” if provoked, even if just one of them is aggressive – the other one joins in. Some incident also may have set it all up and we’ll probably never know the rest of it. But I did notice these lines in the piece as well which could explain some of the dynamics:

    ____________________________________

    The dogs, which were previously indoor animals, were left in a kennel outside with little human contact, aside from a visit from Stephens about five times a week, Blackwood told reporters.

    “Just trying to create a little background with what might have occurred with that when they became a little distant from their owner towards the end,” he said.
    _____________________________________

    Liked by 2 people

  17. Among questions already answered, here’s Ligonier’s take on baptism:

    https://www.ligonier.org/learn/qas/what-significance-baptism/

    ________________________________________

    Just as an aside, the word significance has as its root the word sign. A sign is something that points to something beyond itself. We all recognize that whatever baptism signifies, Jesus obviously thought it was very important because he gives a command to baptize all nations in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Whatever else it is, baptism is the sign of the new covenant that God makes with his people. We do have the clear mandate in the New Testament that Christians are to be baptized. …

    … It’s a sign of the new covenant. It’s a sign of our participation in Jesus, of being partakers in his death and resurrection, which are at the heart of the gospel. It’s also a sign of our cleansing from sin and guilt by the work of Jesus and the washing of regeneration. What we do outwardly with water, the Spirit does inwardly with his grace. So it’s a sign of our cleansing. It’s also a sign of our sanctification. It’s a sign of our baptism of the Holy Spirit. It’s a sign of our being set apart from the world and given the holy task to fulfill the commission that Christ gives to his church.

    So there are several things that baptism signifies. I think one of our tendencies is to reduce those to one—making it merely a cleansing rite or merely a sign of empowering by the Holy Spirit—when in fact it is a sacrament that is rich and complex with meaning and significance.
    ____________________________________________

    Liked by 1 person

  18. The header is beautiful.

    It’s warmed up to 55°. It feels like spring!

    I got gas and went through the car wash. It was misty but I thought the dampness was burning off amd the sun was about to show. By the time my car finished getting the ultimate wash, the mist had stopped. Now I am ready to get the oil changed. I did not want to have a dirty car for the service people. We had road grime, especially since we had been in the snow slush and salt.

    I am thrilled to see the afternoon sun. After all the cold dreary days, I can understand the seasonal depression.

    I got Wesley’s package mailed today. I used the large flat rate box so it was close to $19.00 to send it. I could have mailed the books separately by media mail and perhaps saved some money, but it was convenient to mail it all together. Do you typically go for convenience or for savings?

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  21. To send the books media rate would have required fixing up two boxes to mail. I decided I could afford to splurge and save time rather than money on this. My brother would have prepared the two boxes. He is a penny pincher to a fault from my advantage point.

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  22. From my Florida friend. I asked how things were going nearly 4 months post-hurricanes:

    As to the Florida Keys (this it probably much more than you want to know so don’t feel obligated to read it all):
    Her family’s section of the Keys (Big Pine, Marathon + one other)were hardest hit. They finally moved into the recovery stage last week. They had still been in relief stage (needed water and basic necessities plus debris removal).They just started opening stretches of beach.

    80 unidentified bodies were hauled out with boats in September. They cannot be added to death count until they are identified (no name, no one to declare dead—not declared dead-not counted). They still have to pull up the trailers from canals but the squashed mass of metal and fish activity may mean they will not find body remains but that’s where they expect the families to have been. The school is missing many children and families have not asked for records (would be done if they moved). So that’s all very tragic.

    The teenage adopted granddaughter who refused to leave during the hurricane is still in the Keys with a boyfriend the family is concerned may be pimping her. (The adopted father is a pastor). The grief that comes with situations like this is often overwhelming. 😦

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  23. I haven’t caught up on here yet, but I wanted to post this. I’ve been rereading my copy of the announcement of the closure of the World blog and our tearful farewells. This was Drill chiming in:

    But where can I get rid of my excess adjectives, now that Whirled Views is gone?

    If I cannot dump my excess adjectives, my brain becomes bloated and top-heavy, and I have difficulties walking upright, and performing simple tasks.

    For instance, a few years ago, Whirled Views even saved my life.

    I had an extremely convoluted, large descriptive phrase that became hopelessly tangled in a thicket of extraneous surplus nouns, somewhere in the left lobe of my cerebellum.

    The phrase panicked and thrashed, entangled itself even further, and eventually caused a massive backup of words behind it – high-performance verbs began going completely out of control, careening off neuronic pathways, and crashing into innocent prepositional pedestrians and adverbial onlookers.

    A train of thought derailed; several flatcars carrying a load of toxic paragraphs to a Global Warming thread went off the track. The carnage was tragical.

    Fortunately, however, just before the vocabulary core of my brain began a terminal death spiral into linguistic melt-down, I was able to get rid of the problem descriptive phrase on Whirled Views – I think I used it in a post about pancakes, or umbrellas, or maybe it was a post about penguins. Anyway, Whirled Views saved my life.

    Liked by 4 people

  24. At Christmas I ordered several books for my sister’s family through amazon. It would have cost the exact same amount to have them shipped directly to them as to have them shipped to me. Having them come to me meant I had to pay to ship them. But these are children, and wrapping them seemed more personal.

    Can wrapped gifts go media mail? I’m not sure. I purposely put nothing else in the package, but they were wrapped. But there wasn’t time to get them there by Christmas if I sent them media mail, so I sent them priority mail.

    I don’t use those boxes the post office provides. I imagine they are priced as though it’s all heavy items in the box, that nine out of ten times the customer could get a better deal providing his own box–especially if one is sending books that can be sent media mail. I do send books separately, since books are heavy and really weigh down a package, and media mail is considerably cheaper.

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  26. Interesting — from the WSJ

    Cities See a ‘Bright Flight’
    Highly educated Americans are choosing cheaper metropolitan centers in the West and South over more dominant—and expensive—population centers on the coasts and former industrial hubs.
    WSJ.COM

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/cities-see-a-bright-flight-1396561100?tesla=y

    ________________________________

    … The 25 U.S. counties with the largest net inflow of people older than 25 with graduate or professional degrees arriving from out of state are nearly all linked to more affordable cities like Raleigh, N.C., and San Antonio, according to an analysis of census data by The Wall Street Journal.

    Demographers cite several causes for the shift, including soaring property prices in coastal areas, stagnant paychecks and heightened wariness about the increase in debt that is often the price of admission in bigger cities. The proliferation of regional technology hubs in places such as Raleigh also plays a role, while taxes are often lower in parts of the South.

    “It’s a kind of middle-class flight—a bright flight,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a think-tank in Washington, D.C. “People are moving to where the cost of living is reasonable.” …
    ________________________________________

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  28. Thank you Cheryl. The closing of WorldMagBlog to me was devastating. I never posted there again. All of that reminds me to thank AJ once again for providing this site.
    You are all very much a part of my life and I am thankful to have you in my life.

    Liked by 4 people

  31. I miss Drill. I wonder what he is up to? Probably still breaking down pallets at the plant. Or verbalizing nouns and describing adverbial phrases with prepositional interjections in interrogative, reflexive, relative clauses.

    I miss Drill.

    Liked by 2 people

  32. Kim or Cheryl – Maybe you could send the file to AJ and he could either post it in bits or whole in a special thread, or email it to those of us who want it.

    Did I mention I miss Drill?

    Liked by 1 person

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