Excerpt from this morning’s argument during Playdough sculpting.

Tab was making horses.

Thomas was making aliens.

Tabitha : I love horses.
Thomas : I hate horses.
Tabitha : You shouldn’t hate horses. If there was no such things as cars or buses, how would you get to church? You couldn’t unless you have a horse!
Thomas: If there were no cars or buses, I’d stay home from church, kill a horse, make Jello and eat it!
Tabitha: [Mortified] Mom!! Does ALL the gelatin in the world come from horse hooves?
Me: No.
Tabitha: See Thomas? You don’t HAVE to kill horses to make Jello.

While shaking my fist at my oven tonight (I need to recalibrate the temperature - it runs, I’m guessing, about 50 degrees too hot) for burning my homemade onion & rye bread, I was listening to audio from one of Pastor Strawbridge’s archived sermons from March of last year entitled, “The Spiritual Discipline of Prayer”.

At the end of the sermon, Strawbridge read a quote from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters that stuck with me enough to replay the audio and jot it down. The quote encourages Christians to pray even when we feel far from God or don’t feel like praying.

As you read this excerpt, bear in mind that it is written from the point of view of the devil teaching another devil how to tempt a new Christian. When the devil refers to “our cause”, it is the cause of getting Christians to fall away from the Lord. The “Enemy” is, in this context, referring to God.

Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else. The reason is this. To us a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience which the Enemy demands of men is quite a different thing.

Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better.

Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.

*Trough
Pronunciation: \ˈtrȯf, ˈtrȯth, by bakers often ˈtrō\

2 a: A conduit, drain, or channel for water; especially : a gutter along the eaves of a building b: a long and narrow or shallow channel or depression (as between waves or hills); especially : a long but shallow depression in the bed of the sea — compare trench

Ron Paul outlines his agenda and goals as he prepares to run for President.

I made spaghetti with a bland canned sauce - and I didn’t “doctor it up” with spices…

Tab (trying to be tactful) “Mom, is this a new recipe?”
Me: “Kind of.. it’s a different sauce.”

Tab (bowing her head) “Pul-eeeze, dear God, don’t make me have to eat this. AMEN!”

This weekend at our WIC retreat, we talked about being slow to speak and quick to listen.
This is a great Piper blog entry on listening that I enjoyed reading. I also love how he humbly signed his post

Ten Reasons to Listen to Questions Before You Answer:
Meditation on Proverbs 18:13
By John Piper October 25, 2005

Proverbs 18:13 - “If one gives an answer before he hears, it is his folly and shame.”

1. It is arrogant to answer before you hear. Humility does not presume that it knows precisely what a person is asking until the questioner has finished asking the question. How many times have I jumped to a wrong conclusion by starting to formulate my answer before I heard the whole question! Often it is the last word in the question that turns the whole thing around and makes you realize that they are not asking what you thought they were.

2. It is rude to answer a half-asked question. “Rude” is a useful word for Christians. It means “ill-mannered, discourteous.” The New Testament word for it is aschëmonei. It is used in 1 Corinthians 13:5 where modern versions translate it, “Love is not rude,” but the old King James Version has “Love doth not behave itself unseemly.” This means that love not only follows absolute moral standards, but also takes cultural mores and habits and customs into account. What is polite? What is courteous? What are good manners? What is proper? What is good taste? What is suitable? Love is not indifferent to these. It uses them to express its humble desire for people’s good. One such politeness is listening well to a question before you answer

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It’s nuts here.
This mini-chat made me laugh.
It felt good.

Thanking God for her today - my creative, whimsical, godly friend. She’s a great momma (you should have heard her girls singing Amazing Grace last night for a Pioneers Club talent show) and she insists I try fictional books every now and then. Everyone needs a friend like her.

(12:24:25 PM) Susan “Whimsy” Carlson: < auto -REPLY > I’m not here right now
(01:01:11 PM) SJA: I wish I wasn’t here right now
(01:01:13 PM) SJA: it’s nutty
(01:01:41 PM) SJA: how nutty is it?
(01:01:53 PM) Susan “Whimsy” Carlson: peanut or almond?
(01:02:11 PM) Susan “Whimsy” Carlson: cashew or pine?
(01:02:24 PM) Susan “Whimsy” Carlson: walnut or pistachio?
(01:06:32 PM) SJA: macadamian
(01:06:44 PM) SJA: so nutty I can’t even spell that word with the help of spell check
(01:13:23 PM) Susan “Whimsy” Carlson: I see some green tea in my future
(01:13:37 PM) SJA: hahaha
(01:13:49 PM) SJA: As long as you aren’t trying to see the future in your green tea

I woke up with the feeling that someone was in my room. I turned over and about a foot from my face stood my four year old daughter.

Once my heartbeat returned to normal, I checked the he clock. It was 3:30AM.

Tabitha was shaking and whimpering.

“Sweetie, lets go into the bathroom so you don’t wake up daddy,” I said.

Tab wasn’t moving too readily, so I scooped her up and helped her use the potty – sometimes the sensation of having to use the bathroom will evoke a bad dream.

She calmed down a little bit and asked for “belly medicine” - that is, a Tums.

“Tab, I can give you a Tums – but I don’t know if that will solve a problem,” I said.

“WHY? What’s wrong with me?” she asked and started to cry again.

“Well, it’s just that you seem upset,” I said. “What’s are you thinking about?”

“I’m so so so afraid that bad guys are going to come into our house and get us.”

I gave her a big hug and soaked a wash cloth in warm water and washed her face. “I did lock up all the doors and windows downstairs and the house alarm is on – I do that every night. So, it’d be hard for anyone to get into our house. But, you know, that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible for someone to break in if they didn’t care about being caught…. not that we have anything of value.”

That’s the honest truth. I’m not going to lie.

I put Tabitha back into her bed. She pulled her covers up, over her nose and her hazel-green eyes darted all over the place in fear.

“Tabitha, please listen to mommy, okay? In Bible, in Proverbs 15, God tells us that His eyes are in every place watching over everything. Do you know what this means?”

“That He can see me, right?”

“Yes, just like He can see every spot in our house. Remember, He can even see daddy when daddy’s in Japan and see you at the same time, right?”

“Because He is God,” she said in a very matter-of-fact tone.

“Yes, because He is God. The cool thing is that this means that you don’t have to be looking all around room for bad guys because God’s doing the looking for you. The Bible also tells us in Psalm 121 that God, who made this whole earth, never ever sleeps. God’s watching over you even while you’re sleeping.”

I noticed the covers were slowly moving towards her chest and were no longer shielding her face.
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“I Cried For You” - Katie Melua

You’re beautiful so silently
It lies beneath a shade of blue
It struck me so violently
When I looked at you

But others pass, they never pause,
To feel that magic in your hand
To me you’re like a wild rose
They never understand why

I cried for you
When the sky cried for you
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter
But this life was not for you
Though I learned from you,
That beauty need only be a whisper

I’ll cross the sea for a different world,
With your treasure, a secret for me to hold

In many years they may forget
This love of ours or that we met,
They may not know
how much you meant to me.

I cried for you
And the sky cried for you,
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter.
But this life was not for you,
Though I learned from you,
That beauty need only be a whisper

Without you now I see,
How fragile the world can be
And I know you’ve gone away
But in my heart you’ll always stay.

I cried for you
And the sky cried for you,
And when you went
I became a hopeless drifter.
But this life was not for you,
Though I learned from you,
That beauty need only be a whisper
That beauty need only be a whisper

< sappiness >
When I hear this song, it makes me cry because I can’t imagine life without my Tom.
I do feel like a hopeless drifter when he’s gone.
< /sappiness >

Colossians 1:3-8 says “We always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, when we pray for you, because we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love which you have for all the saints, because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. Of this you have heard before in the word of the truth, the gospel which has come to you, as indeed in the whole world it is bearing fruit and growing - so among yourselves, from the day you heard and understood the grace of God in truth, as you learned it from Epaphras our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf and has made known to us your love in the Spirit.”

Excerpt on Evangelism from John Piper (For complete text this sermon entitled “The Fruit of Hope: Love” , click on the link attached to Piper’s name):

Piper writes:

In summary, direct the attention of your mind day and night to the word of God’s promises, seek in all humility the help of the Holy Spirit to see the wonder of what is really there, and, as Peter says, “Set your hope fully on the grace that is coming to you at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:13).

And by the grace of God the result will be the visible fruit of love. This means:

• We will be more patient, more kind.
• We will be less jealous, and boastful and arrogant and rude.
• We will not just seek our own advancement but will strive to do to others what we would have them do to us.
• We will not be so irritable.
• We won’t be so prone to keep an account of wrongs or return evil for evil.
• We will be inclined to bear all things and endure all things for the sake of our neighbor.
• We will not speak about our neighbor’s faults without first going to the neighbor ourselves.
• We will return good for evil, and use our discretionary time not by maximizing our fleeting comforts but by devising ways to be a blessing to the lost and suffering.
• More and more our whole lives will take on an overflowing and other-directed spirit.

And this love will transform you and your family and the church, and, as Jesus says, the world will see your good deeds and give glory to your Father in heaven (Matthew 5:16).

There is no better evangelism in all the world than a church whose hope in God is so strong that they gladly deny themselves in order to meet the needs of others.