61 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-18-19”

  7. Good whatever part of your day it is!

    Today I start my summer job, even though there is still a week of school. I told them I was available for Saturdays in May and they need me today. So I’ll be underground for part of the day, where it’s a cool 52°.

    Liked by 3 people

  10. Those are lovely flowers!

    Hopefully everyone is off to a good start this weekend. We are suppose to have a very warm weekend . . . up close to 90°. At least all the necessary yard work is complete.

    Yesterday when Brother and I went to mail the boxes of devotional booklets at the post office at the mall, we saw the parking lot blocked off in sections. I told my brother it’s probably for film crew parking at night. He asked the postal clerk, and she said they are filming a scary type children’s movie. She also said that while filming The Mule that Clint Eastwood’s trailer had been in the side area where postal trucks go to pickup their deliveries. She said that all the postal workers got to meet him. This is the mall that is maybe a mile from my home. It is a dead mall except for movie theaters, a Marshall’s, Burlington, Dollar Store, and a few other little stores. This was one of the oldest malls in Atlanta. My friend’s mom got her hair done there so my friend and I got to roam the mall on some Saturdays when I was a teen. Now it is a ghost mall where the parking lot has all the action.

    Liked by 1 person

  12. That article is excellent, Roscuro. Thank you for posting it. Openness about the gospel is the only way to get people to be true believers. The watered down and tickle ears presentation does not bear true fruit.

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  16. What beautiful flowers 🙂

    I remember hearing that when Eastwood was filming in our historic City Hall building (built when we were a city and before joining the city of LA nearly 100 years ago but still in use for city services now) he went around and met a number of people who worked there and everyone said how nice he was.

    What was for breakfast, Chas? Pancakes?

    I loved Tom Sawyer once and hoped to marry him. Sigh.

    I was awakened to the sound of a big truck and “workers” in the driveway next door. A familiar sound, I was just glad it wasn’t happening at my house for a change.

    I think some cultural hostility is good for the church, painful as it can be. Being embraced or “approved,” even superficially, by the secular culture often leads to complacency and weakness, perhaps only the spread of nominal Christianity. The church sits back, enjoys its position in society and feels seldom challenged, especially in the affluent west. Life is good.

    But what we’re seeing now emerge (and in only a very mild form compared to many other areas of the world) — the clash of the two cultures — may lead to a more openness to the gospel, even in the Bible Belt. The church needs to dare to be the church again.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Malls here are trying to transition away from retail and toward more dining and entertainment — bowling, family game hubs, restaurants. It’s a change that’s impacted the plans for our own new waterfront development that’s now being planned. The old (dying/dead) development from the 1960s was a series of quaint little “fishermen’s village” shops and some very popular restaurants connected with cobblestone walkways.

    The new plans look more toward entertainment and dining as the main commercial drivers — a large outdoor amphitheater run by a well-known concert promoter, a “food” building where various restaurants are set up along with individual restaurants and the long-established fish market, innovative container kitchens (as in housed in real shipping containers). Open wharfs created as viewing areas overlooking he port where giant container ships and cruise ships pass by, a boardwalk-style walkway running close to the water’s edge along the entire property, with benches and trees filling in the open spaces.

    Hopefully it works. There’s a lot of skepticism in the community, but that’s driven by years of frustration over seeing these projects ever come to fruition, a bitterness among some over the loss of the town’s beloved (but mostly vacant) old center — and it’s all being fueled, of course, by griping and complaining and arguing on social media, which seems to be many people’s favorite pastime in 2019.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. Those flowers were my first really successful photo on Flickr. (Not successful as in thousands of views, but hundreds of views and 17 or so Faves.) I don’t know what species they are; I haven’t been able to locate them anywhere. But I had one and only one chance to photograph them: I only saw two plants of them (and the other one wasn’t as pretty), and the next day the flowers were closed, and a couple days later I couldn’t even tell where the plant had been. So it was “luck” to get this photo, and the flowers are small enough I could have easily not seen them at all.

    My mother-in-law and I went out on probably the best walking trail this morning, and I think I wore her out. She’ll be 83 this fall, and I kept asking her if she wanted to turn around and she kept telling me she was OK. Finally I told her we are going up as far as that road and then turning around, and she said OK. We probably did four miles in all, or close to it. I was disappointed that it wasn’t as fine a day for that as my previous ones this spring. Very few flowers were in bloom (mostly honeysuckle), and the swallows weren’t flying low after insects as they usually do. We did see lots and lots of robins, a few cardinals, at least one warbler, a flying pileated woodpecker, and assorted other birds, and the trees were green and pretty. It was also quite warm, past 80 by the time we finished, but nice to get out with her.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Haha, you might have lost me. Your mother-in-law is tough. 🙂 I’m guessing it was humid also?

    Show the photo to someone at a nursery or garden shop, someone will know what they are — or maybe someone here knows. I’m awful when it comes to identifying flowers, which is why I have that app 🙂

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  21. The long read for the weekend: Asia Bibi and Pakistan’s blasphemy law – from the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/Asia_Bibi
    From the middle of the article:
    ‘Originally the law was codified by the British in 1860. The purpose was to contain religious strife between Hindus, Muslims, Christians and Sikhs across British-ruled India. It protected places of worship and sacred objects and made it a crime to disturb religious assemblies, to trespass on burial sites, and to deliberately insult religious beliefs of any person, punishable by up to ten years in prison.

    ‘In 1927, during a time of political tension and antagonism between different communities, the law was tightened.

    ‘But the blasphemy laws didn’t favour any specific religion until 1986 when Pakistan’s parliament introduced new amendments and inserted a clause which made the use of derogatory remarks against the Prophet Muhammad a crime punishable by death, or life imprisonment.’

    Note: Between 1927 and 1986 was the end of the British Raj in 1947, and the violent partition of India into India and Pakistan.

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  22. I went mall shopping last weekend. What did I buy? Nothing. I was looking for a skirt to wear for graduation, having worn mine all out and not having sewn anything for the last year and a half. I had already discovered that Amazon does not carry a good selection of skirts and other online retailers seemed no better. I went into every possible clothing boutique in the mall and found nothing (I nearly fainted at the prices for dresses). All the skirts, of which there were only a handful to be found, were too short or too sheer. The rest on the items of clothing that appeared at first glance to be skirts turned out to be culottes. In my awkward teen years in ATI, culottes were deemed acceptable informal wear at home, if the activity was not suitable for a skirt, although culottes were forbidden at training centres. I hate and despise culottes, nor do they suit me. My general impression by the end of my excursion was that there is no real difference between clothing brands and boutiques, as they all use the same patterns, just with different colours and materials. I will be wearing dress pants for graduation – since I will have a graduation gown on it doesn’t really matter anyway.

    Liked by 2 people

  23. Sounds like a reasonable and comfortable choice, roscuro. I suppose skirt styles depend on what’s “in” style right now. Short, long, in between …

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  25. Here is the link to the park the girls and I went to on Wednesday. I think we walked around the various gardens for about an hour. It was a lovely day, the first one in a while with no rain or cloudy skies, and the temperature was warm enough, but also cool enough, to make walking around a lot a comfortable pleasure.

    http://wickhampark.org/

    Liked by 2 people

  27. The dress pant I have belonged to my grandmother. I have a nice shirt and cardigan to wear with them, all black, and the graduation gown will be black. The major part of the ceremony is to be ‘hooded’ and walk across the stage after shaking hands with the top brass of the university, who will be in full academic regalia. The Bachelor degree hoods have distinctive linings according to program, and only Masters and Doctors of Philosophy wear mortarboard hats for graduation.

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  29. The flowers, by the way, were growing wild on the hiking trail–but flowers that grow wild are sometimes escapees from a garden, so there is no telling whether it’s a true wildflower. Really, the distinction is nearly meaningless. Heavily bred flowers such as roses and irises are garden flowers. Dandelions are clearly wildflowers–but like starlings and house sparrows they are not native to North America. But many others can be garden flowers or wildflowers depending on whether you or someone else planted them where they are now.

    This week I found yellow lady’s slippers growing in a garden patch outside some shops. But lady’s slippers are said to be flowers it’s virtually impossible to grow in a garden, so I suspect it’s likely that one or two flowers were growing there, and the shop owners made sure they got the right treatment and left them alone, and they’ve done well.

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  31. Culottes. . .

    https://www.google.com/search?q=culottes&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQ_Yvg3aXiAhXpwVQKHRcXD5UQ_AUIDygC&biw=1455&bih=688

    I used to like culottes when I was younger, but they don’t go well with the kinds of longish tunics I now wear.

    Speaking of tunics, someone recently mentioned tunics being rather expensive. But I buy mine online from Woman Within (most often) and usually get them “on the cheap” when they are on sale, or there is a good deal going on. 🙂

    (So if anyone wonders what tunics are. . .

    https://www.google.com/search?q=tunic+tops&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwizz9Lv3qXiAhWWtZ4KHYSkDb4Q_AUIDygC&biw=1455&bih=688 )

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  33. The new photo is a paw paw blossom and the fruit forming in the middle. I found it a very pretty but also very interesting flower. Flowers on the tree were in different stages of ripeness, and they had different colors, from green to maroon. The petals have a substantial look, not flimsy at all. I think I read that the paw paw is the largest fruit native to America–it isn’t very large, I don’t think, just that bigger ones aren’t native. I hadn’t seen them before this spring. One flower was left on the tree this morning, so I was able to show it to my mother-in-law when we went on our walk.

    Liked by 1 person

  34. Ah, computer viruses = gone.

    Took it over to former photo editor’s house (nearby) and his son swept it clean. Turns out these things “bundle” themselves and attach to legit app logos (which is how they infected mine, I was asked to update flash player, which is a familiar app for most of us). But he said when they fly in on an internet site asking you to update it, it could be one of the versions that contains the bad stuff seeking entrance. (Flash Player is an adobe product, so he said always go there if you want or need to update it.)

    Anyway, took them about 15 minutes and now it’s good.

    Liked by 3 people

  35. I wear culottes here all the time. Well not really that much. That is what I wear to the weight room since I don’t wear pants here of any kind. Most do now, but it wasn’t acceptable in this culture previously, so I just continue to wear skirts.

    Liked by 1 person

  36. Today I can’t like posts. I do not understand the inconsistency.

    I am thankful we have so many different styles of clothing to wear these days, and we do not have to be perfectly matched. Today there is so much more freedom than we had when I was a young lady.

    Liked by 2 people

  37. I only went underground once today. I sold tickets most of the day, but went on a tour of a new guide to check her off.

    Now I’m watching the Cubs during commercial breaks of an Abbott and Costello movie I hadn’t seen before: “Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein”.

    Liked by 4 people

  38. We’ve had nice weather here the past couple of days. (60F) but although I usually plant the garden on the May long weekend, the soil is still very cold so I will wait at least another week.

    We did get the bamboo trellises for the peas and cucumbers up and the poles for husband’s pole beans (I plant purple bush beans). Once it’s warm enough, out go all the plants we started back in February and March. Hopefully I can get some seeds into the ground in the next ew days (peas, beans, carrots, beets, kohlrabi…)

    In the meantime I wheel the large garden wagon full of bedding plants in and out the back door onto the deck during the day and back in at night (we’re still getting frost overnight).

    Liked by 2 people

  42. I used to see all the Abbot and Costello movies.
    But I can’t remember any.
    I was disappointed to learn the they didn’t like each other.
    Did not get along as friends.

    Liked by 1 person

  43. Wasn’t that also true of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis? I suspect it comes with the territory of being a hit together on screen — jealousies and competition creep in, as is common in human nature, and that would sour any kind of personal friendship.

    So maybe it’s the public success itself that kills the possibility of a friendship. It’s surprising when we hear these things because they manage to pull off their partnerships so successfully on the screen for our entertainment.

    It’s raining here — and has been through the night since about 1 a.m., I think. This is a rare late rainfall for us, we rarely get rain in late spring or anytime during the summer.

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  44. Not positive, but I think Martin and Lewis were friendly in the beginning, and then some animosity set in. On one of Lewis’ MDA Labor Day telethons, Frank Sinatra brought the two together again. I think I saw that when it happened, but I could merely be remembering clips of the moment that I have seen since then.

    Hubby was a big Jerry Lewis fan. (He was also a big Three Stooges fan.) Lewis died just a little over a month before Hubby died.

    We often had the Labor Day telethon on in our home on and off throughout each Labor Day, both when I was growing up, and with Hubby. Anyone else watch it regularly? Or occasionally?

    Hubby was disappointed when Lewis was pretty much kicked off the telethon after hosting it for decades.

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  45. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis broke up.
    “Hardin & Weaver” a radio team on WMAL drive time in Washington didn’t associate offline. They just had different interests. One was a golfer, the other spent his time on his yacht in the Potomac.
    But the Lone Ranger and Tonto remained friends always.

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  46. I remember the Labor Day telethon — my parents and my next-door grandparents both would have it on.

    Andy Griffith and Aunt Bea was another example I’d heard of actors not getting along with each other.

    Liked by 1 person

  47. File this under “I’ll Probably Regret This Later, But For Now I Don’t Care”. 😀

    YA shared a post supposedly from a Christian minister that espouses the same old stereotype of pro-lifers only caring about the baby before it is born, because it is easier to care about someone who makes no demands on us. It ends by saying that we put all our efforts into saving the unborn (and ignoring them after they are born), and “throw under the bus” the poor, widows, prisoners, etc. – the ones the Bible specifically tells us to care for. Oh, brother.

    I should have merely scrolled on by and ignored it, but I came back to it to reply, more for the others reading the post than for YA herself. I replied that many individual Christians and Christian ministries are helping all of those groups, and that they don’t necessarily toot their own horn or get mentions in the press, so their deeds go unseen. And I mentioned that I personally know Christians who are or have been involved with prisoners, the homeless, single moms in crisis, feeding the poor, and a clothing ministry. That’s just off the top of my head, and I don’t know all that my friends do or donate money to.

    I wanted to add, “IOW, this is hogwash.” But I didn’t.

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  48. 6 Arrows – You may have noticed that Aunt Bee did not have a southern accent. Frances Bavier, the actress who played her, did not want to do that.

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  49. Well, YA did reply with one of her long screeds, but she actually acknowledged that only a minority of pro-lifers probably fit the stereotype. That’s pretty amazing coming from her, and I thanked her for acknowledging that.

    She then went on to say that the only opinion that counts is that of the pregnant woman, and she said something about bodily autonomy. I said that it is tragic that so many women feel forced into abortion by parents or boyfriends/husbands.

    So, so far, I don’t regret commenting on her post after all. 🙂

    Liked by 2 people

  51. Today I remembered why I prefer working on a real estate team. I got a new listing Thursday. I entered the description and details on Friday. The photographer took the photos yesterday. I saw them in my email this morning. I have spent the afternoon resizing, naming, and uploading 49 photos.

    Liked by 2 people

  52. My dad disliked Jerry Lewis so we never watched the telethon that I remember.

    Kim, that sounds like a lot. I hate dealing with photos and now that we’re short-handed and what’s left of our photo dept is so overwhelmed, reporters usually have to upload, attach and export photos with their stories themselves, often writing or re-writing the captions. It can be a whole lot of extra work.

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  53. Had a long conversation with a couple other church friends in the lobby after SS today about the abortion issue.

    Our sermon today (from Philemon) was given by one of our ruling elders, an attorney and young dad who was born in Tawian (his mother was Buddhist) and was brought to the U.S. when he was 5. He became a Christian as a young teen.

    Afterward, during the Q&A SS, I asked him about ‘kinism’ so I have a better idea of what it is. He stressed that it is a very small (heretical) group, and they do have a website (which he didn’t give out). Another church member, a seminary student, said it linked back to a splinter of the Dutch Reformed movement in Europe and linked in with some churches in the south in the U.S. after the Civil War, but he added that he would not say it is growing or is in any way “emerging” anew right now.

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  54. When we sold our house, I didn’t like the photos the first realtor took. We tried to sell it on Craig’s list, so I took a bunch of pictures. Then when we got a new realtor, I asked if I could use the pictures from the CL ad. He liked them, so we used them. I think one reason was because he represented a small, local firm, whereas the first one was a larger firm from a nearby city, which didn’t have many, if any, listings in our town.

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  55. DJ, the “splinter” of the Dutch Reformed supported apartheid in South Africa, while the “some” churches in the southern U.S. after the Civil War supported Jim Crow and anti-miscegenation laws. Not quite so insignificant as the seminary student makes it out to seem.

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  56. On comedy pairs: One comedy pair who were steadfast close friends was Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Before we got a computer and used its screen to watch videos, we would borrow a reel-to-reel projector and reels from the library, where my mother worked. We got to watch a lot of old films, and Laurel and Hardy films were some of our favorites – we also love Charlie Chaplain and Buster Keaton. The joke at the beginning of the clip is that the division of the Foreign Legion marching around is looking for the duo to arrest them:

    Liked by 1 person

  58. I don’t think he said it was insignificant, but rather that it was a relatively small movement within the church and that in his view it is not something that’s currently expanding.

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  59. My former/retired pastor, who was at service this morning to preside over communion, was familiar with kinism but when I asked his wife about it, she said she’d never heard of it — they’re both very active in the Presbytery and one of their sons also is a Presbyterian minister.

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  60. I suppose the point being, heresy really is just about everywhere and anywhere at any given time in all its forms. It should not surprise us that remnants of it exist and remain active — they bear careful watching and correction. But I’m not getting the sense that white nationalism is exactly sweeping through conservative reformed churches.

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  61. Not too long ago, I read an article about Laurel and Hardy. Stan Laurel stopped making films after Oliver Hardy’s death, in honor of his partner and friend.

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