Chosen Rather To Share Our Pain

Monday Quote: You’re Playing Like Betty White Out There

You’re Playing Like Betty White Out There!

Sunday Scripture

¹⁸The LORD God is waiting

   to show how kind He is

   and to have pity on you.

   The LORD always does right;

   He blesses those who trust him. Isaiah 30:18

Contemporary English Version Bible

Give Up All Other Worlds…

“When your eyes are tired,

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone no part

of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark where the

night has eyes to recognize its own.

There you can be sure you are

not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds except

the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the

sweet confinement of your aloneness

To learn anything or anyone that does

not bring you alive is too small for you.”

 

David Whyte, Sweet Darkness

Friday Humor-Because Jim and I Think it’s funny–Victor Borge Inflationary Language

Cool Word of This Day

Retributive—Adjective. Proportional, related to Retribution and Retributive justice, dispensing or receiving of reward or punishment especially in the hereafter. Too often associated with revenge.

Nemesis was the Greek goddess of retributive justice. There is also a nemesia flower which makes me happy to know that something pretty came from a concept that seems to foster revenge in today’s connotation.

The Scarlett Letter exacts a punishment that is retributive. Perhaps a restorative judgement would have been more effective.

Just retribution, which seeks to establish the right order of things, should not be confused with vindictiveness.

Monday Quote

Books provide lessons so subtle and varied that it may take years before we use everything we absorb.  Anita Silvey

A book becomes the person who is reading it. Eric Rohmann

Sunday Scripture

“In the house of the wise are stores of choice food and oil, but a foolish man devours all he has.”
Proverbs 21:20

Great Recycling Idea

Want to get a jump on Spring Cleaning? Give holiday greeting cards a future life by donating them to St. Jude’s Ranch for Children, an organization for abused, abandoned, and neglected children. The children earn money by removing the fronts of donated cards to make new ones sold in packets of 10 for $10.00.  They also have a current need for birthday and thank you cards.

Cards will be accepted through February 28, 2010. See www.stjudesranch.org for donation and purchasing details.

Friday Humor- Because Jim and I think it’s funny-Ralph the Wonder Dog

Cool Word of This Day

Doodleywonked—Adjective.  Being out of balance, too focused on the tug rather than the tenor. Inclining toward the pull of the cacophony rather than the still small voice of God. 

First read about the word Doodleywonked in the blogpost of  Cottage Garden.

Monday Quote

“The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because he made us.  He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.”
C. S. Lewis

Friday Humor: Conan Explains Dog

Cool Word of This Day

Impunity—Noun. Exemption from punishment, penalty, or loss; escaping without hurt. Most current definitions relate to political issues, but also encompasses a 1954 children’s book called Impunity Jane.

She had a job at the firm that allowed her to indulge in scrapbooking with impunity.

Certain in Uncertainty

The nature of the spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty…a gracious uncertainty…where  we are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God.
Oswald Chambers, in My Utmost for His Highest

Street Sweepers/Michelangelo/Beethoven/ Shakespeare…& me!

If a man is called to be a street sweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great street sweeper who did his job well.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Monday Quote

“The reason why many are still troubled, still seeking, still making little forward progress is because they haven’t yet come to the end of themselves. We’re still trying to give orders, and interfering with God’s work within us.”
A.W. Tozer

Cool Word of This Day

Zeno’s Paradox—an unstable particle, if observed continuously, will never decay. The quantum Zeno effect is the main method by which the mind holds a superposition of the state of the brain in the attention. The name Zeno effect was coined by George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra of the University of Texas in 1977, references ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea. motion is not merely impossible, it “unexists.”

Examples: 

Achilles and the Tortoise: Imagine that Achilles meets a Tortoise, who challenges him to a foot race. Achilles is amused when the Tortoise asks merely for a modest head start. But then the Tortoise explains that by agreeing to this demand, Achilles has already lost! The logic, says the Tortoise, is that if he starts ahead of Achilles at point A, Achilles will have to run to point A before he can overtake the Tortoise (which is, of course, obvious enough). Meanwhile, the Tortoise will have moved ahead slightly to point B. Again, Achilles must advance to point B before he can push ahead, by which time the Tortoise will have traveled farther (if only by inches), to point C. And so on. Although with each successive point in the race the Tortoise moves smaller and smaller distances, Achilles never quite catches up, always remaining one segment behind. And thus, says Zeno, the faster can never overtake the slower.

The Dichotomy: Another variation on the same theme is called the “dichotomy paradox” (or sometimes the “bisection paradox” or “race course paradox”). Suppose you want to cross a room. In order to get to the other side, you must first get to the halfway point, which will take you some finite amount of time. And before you can get halfway, you have to cross half of that distance, at which point you’d be a quarter of the way across. And before that, you’d have to cross half of a quarter, and so on infinitely. Each of these steps must take a finite amount of time. And yet, you have to cross an infinite number of distances to walk across the room—or indeed any distance at all. And since one cannot travel an infinite number of distances in a finite period of time, motion itself is impossible.

Read More

Good Question…

This year…

…What wish do you wish to explore?

Optimism

Optimism isn’t just a shift in perspective. It is an act of bravery.

Monday Quote

Gratitude is the memory of the heart.
J.B. Massieu

Sunday Scripture

but let him who glories glory in this, that he has understanding, and knows me, that I am Yahweh who exercises loving kindness, justice, and righteousness, in the earth: for in these things I delight, says Yahweh.    Jeremiah 9:24

(Can you see the smile?)

The Question I Am Afraid To Ask

How do I know God loves me?

• God says he loves me (Psalm 145:9);
• I am never out of his sight (Ps. 139:3);
• He cares about every detail of my life (Matt. 10:30);
• He gave me the capacity to enjoy all kinds of pleasure (1 Tim. 6:17b);
• He has good plans for my life (Jer. 29:11);
• He forgives me (Ps. 86:5);
• He’s patient with me (Ps. 145:8);
• He sacrificed his Son for me! (Rom. 5:8).

All this applies to you, too!

The Stress Diet

This diet is designed to help you cope with the stress that builds up during the day.

Breakfast:
1 grapefruit
1 slice whole wheat toast
8 oz. skim milk

Lunch:
4 oz. lean broiled chicken breast
1 cup steamed spinach
1 cup herb tea
1 Oreo cookie

Mid-Afternoon snack:
The rest of Oreos in the package
2 pints Rocky Road ice cream, nuts, cherries and whipped cream
1 jar hot fudge sauce

Dinner:
2 loaves garlic bread
4 cans or 1 large pitcher Coke
1 large sausage, mushroom, and cheese pizza
3 Snickers bars

Evening Snack:
Entire frozen Sara Lee cheesecake
(eaten directly from freezer)

Cool Word of This Day

Capacious—Capable of containing a large quantity; spacious or roomy.
adjective

The telescope scanned a capacious universe.