I stand with Israel

It's just a hangnail--not even half the size of New Jersey.

But yet it might as well be the bullseye of the world. Nations rage against it, crazy despots build massive weapons to destroy it.

Because God loves it--and the world hates God and hates whatever God loves.

No, I do not believe the church has ever replaced Israel. If that were true, we would all have to take huge shears and cut away most of the verses of the Bible, or we would have to call God a liar. I don't feel up to that--do you?

But there are actually Christians who are against Israel and Jewish people--as if they don't care to read the actual words God Himself said. This may be the "Church Age", but that age is coming to a close. Isn't it obvious what is happening in world events? Isn't it crazy that a globe like ours, with numerous hot-spots and places of injustice and turmoil, should be concentrating on a little sliver of land tucked in between massive nations?

Just the obsession itself should be a confirmation that God is not through with Israel, that His intent has never changed. This little country is a miracle and a testament to His glory and the truth of His Word.

So I will believe the Word of God, and I will stand with Israel. I will pray for her, and I will love her people. I do not approve of what my leaders are saying and doing at this moment. I pray also for my country as it stands with her enemies--may God have mercy on us all!


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Ever-ready

It's about batteries.

How many situations do I face where I need power? I need it when I get bad news; such as the death of a loved one. I need it when there is too much month and not enough money. I need it when I am facing a defiant 14 year old. I need it when I feel like crawling further under the covers instead of facing another early morning.

I'm like the clock that sits in my bedroom. It is a gaudy, decorative thing. It is painted with flowers and stands ominously atop my bookshelf. But right now it is useless. The hands do not move. For all its glory, its workings are very small, thanks to some computer chips and a little AA battery. But if the AA battery is out of power, the whole thing might as well be in a junk pile.

And so here I am. I am a daughter of God. I can dress up and fix up. I can know some verses and jargon and vernacular. I can go to the right places and rub shoulders with the right people. But if I am not charged up, I am useless.

The time for charging is not in the thick of things. The time for charging is when there are no pressing needs. It is when I am feeling the most wonderful, when I am having a stress-free day with my husband and my meals are all fixed and the laundry all caught up that I need most to be on my knees.

It is in the gazing at the face of my Savior when I least feel the need, adoring Him and reading and reveling in His Word, that will do the most good when my car breaks down in the middle of bumper-to-bumper traffic, or when someone in my life has a cranky day and takes it out on me.

It is not about reacting from crisis to crisis, it is about walking daily--through good and bad--with a God who is all and in all. It is that in Him we live and move and have our being.

Sometimes, when life has been pulling me along at breakneck speed, I need to say, "STOP!" I am allowed to put the breaks on and plug in--I can usually tell when I cannot go another step, when the hands on my face stop moving. I go into my quiet spot, and sometimes I am desperately crying out. I use God's gift of tears to pour out my heart, and I come away with His assurance. Then He is dearer and closer to me than any friend I have ever known. He makes the big things seem so very small.

If you are low, don't forget to take time today to plug into the Master of all life.

If you don't know the Master--you are really missing out! Wouldn't you like to know Someone so wonderful?

The link is still missing...

I don't know if you noticed, but Google's graphic for today has to do with the supposed discovery of the "missing link". I found this out by clicking through the graphic and following some of the links listed.

I was amazed to find what sort of silliness is being called "scientific proof". What struck me was the picture of the fossil findings--nothing humanoid whatsoever, just a lemur-like creature with opposing thumbs, similar to the modern lemur (which also has opposing thumbs--big whoopie).

It seems that the link they are speaking of is not a link between the ape and the human, but the non-ape and the ape--so this is supposed to be the wonderful news they have been searching for? Haven't we been led to believe they already had all sorts of proof in the fossil record?

It's all baloney, Folks, drummed up by foolish minds who do not want to submit to the Creator. Don't be fooled! Don't let your faith be rattled!

Here is an official statement and link from Answers in Genesis on the subject:

Nothing about this fossil indicates that it was a human ancestor. Rather, it is a remarkably well-preserved lemur-like creature, looking nothing like an “apeman.” Besides, why would a fossil found 25 years ago suddenly become a media sensation? Only because of a major PR push by the financial backers of a new book and television documentary about the fossil. Yet even the peer reviewers of the scientific paper on the fossil asked that the human origins hype be removed. For a full exposé, visit www.answersingenesis.org/go/ida

Anti-mothering propaganda

I was in the OB's office waiting for a shot when I spied the April issue of The Atlantic. I never buy mainstream magazines; they are controlled and owned by very few people with an agenda--a negative agenda (I'm sure they think it is a positive one) which ends up being propaganda for the current "think".

This particular issue contained two provocative articles, but one was of particular interest to me; it concerned breatsfeeding.

When I returned home, I read the article online. It was a rant by a woman who feels trapped by the nursing of her baby; she feels breastfeeding makes "equal parenting" impossible, that it keeps women from being "successful", that it is only mildly nutritionally better, and it may even drive women crazy.

I was barely able to stand her self-centered complaints, but I got through the article and forgave her; she is also a victim.

Another article on the same website caught my attention; this one on the battle over daycare. In all honesty, I barely perused it, but I wasn't surprised to find all sorts of studies sited, and all things so boringly scientific I wanted to go to sleep (which was good because it was late at night and I had been fighting insomnia).

My neighbors assume I was born and raised in a parsonage in an ivory tower. Who could blame them? I walk around in skirts with long hair, and I bake cookies and sew and play with my children.

They don't know I grew up in a trailer court and caught the schoolbus every day in front of a topless bar on the bad side of town. They don't know I was put in daycare myself from an early age and then became part of the first wave of "latch-key children".

As a child I kept having a recurring dream. In it I was sitting at a table with other children. I remember vomiting, and then having a woman jerk me by the hair and scream at me as she held my head over a flushing toilet. As I grew older, I learned things that helped my dream make sense.

It seems that when my parents divorced the first time, my mother went to work and put me in a daycare center. The woman in charge seemed as though she loved children, and my mother felt confident leaving me there. But I contracted a kidney infection, with a high fever. It was during this time that I experienced the events of my above recurring nightmare. My mother described to me how she would come to pick me up and find me burning with fever, wrapped in a heavy blanket, and without any evidence that my antibiotics had been dispensed to me.

It was abuse and neglect, and I am sure the daycare worker thought I would never remember--little children are easy that way, aren't they?

I was put in daycare again at the age of 7. I remember how lost I felt those first few days, and how I lay on a cot and cried silently during naptime. Over a period of the next 3 years I experienced two more daycare experiences. One was pretty good, the other treated children like animals to be corraled and fed like prisoners.

I have also seen daycare from other perspectives. I spent a summer in high school working in such a center. We placed the "criers" in playpens, fed the babies like cars on an assembly line, and unceremoniously patted their bottoms so they would sleep in the afternoons. So neat, and no attachment necessary.

After my own first daughter was 6 weeks old, I had to return to my Army obligations--it was the law--even though I begged to be let out. I trusted my tiny child into the arms of a Christian woman at church. My baby would not take the bottle--and the babysitter even tried using an eyedropper to feed her. I would pick her up and hold her all the way home as she stared deeply into my eyes--a pleading, desperate sort of stare. My husband changed shifts so we could work opposite of each other and one of us could be with her at all times. Eventually he stayed home altogether while I worked. This didn't seem to help our daughter; she lost more and more weight. We had her in the hospital for lots of tests--but there was nothing more wrong with her than a broken heart. My leaving her to go overseas did not help much. I have pictures of her as a 1 year old with her ribs showing.

But as soon as I was able to care for her myself, she flourished. I have pictures taken of her just a few months after being reunited--and she is plump and filled-out.

It wasn't the formula or anything else; she just needed her mamma.

If we could all step back for a minute and consider life, not from a materialistic, pragmatic standpoint, we could see it. If we could put on lenses that showed what is truly important, we might find that nurturing, nursing, loving and passionate affection, are all to be held in the highest esteem.

B.F. Skinner, an infamous thinker of our modern era (one still revered by the education system in our country), considered human beings to be no more than mere machines. He advocated the doing away with human freedom and dignity--stressing that every action, thought and feeling is prompted by outward stimuli, and that by harnessing and purposely directing this stimuli, we could change the individual's behavior, and, thus, society. He believed so much in this premise that he put his own daughter in a "Skinner Box" so that every input she received could be scientifically controlled. At first the experiment was encouraging, but the end result was a despondent young woman driven to suicide.

We are not just a collection of chemicals and electrical responses. We are eternal--there is a spirit residing in each of us. This spirit needs more than just a fully-nutritional pill to be swallowed with purified water each morning. We need affection, we need connections and nurturing and interaction with others. We were not created in the image of R2D2, we were created in the image of God.

And God knows all these needs, and He created mothers for the express purpose of meeting those needs in the lives of babies and children. You can feed a baby with a machine, but it will die without the comfort and soothing of a human being. You can throw a small child in the midst of a group of children his age and expect him to thrive, but something essential to the development of his soul will be lost--never again to be recovered. To touch and be loved, to know there is someone specifically watching over you--these are the essence of living.

So I don't really care whether or not mother's milk is "superior" to formula. It is the nurturing that is important. It is that I am willing to interrupt my busy schedule to take the time to soothe and rock and caress. It is that I am giving of more than some physical nutrition; I am giving a little bit of myself and pouring it into the life of my child. I am saying, "You are precious to me--I freely give this time to you."

Children need us--they need our input and our hovering and our cloistered wings around their shoulders--even when they are old and gray, they will need that soft spot, to remember someone holding their hand in the dark.

We shouldn't be ashamed or sad or embittered about our role--we should be embracing it and living it to its fullness..

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

-St. Francis of Assisi

Analog vs. digital

I don't like spending money on the "new" and pizaz, when the tried and true didn't need improving in the first place.

Take these new cleaning devices, for instance. We are being convinced that our homes will not come clean without some cheap plastic thing-a-ma-jig that squirts out some sort of cleaning solution (do we really know what's in that stuff?) or uses pre-treated cloths, etc. Oh, and don't forget the refills, which cost almost as much as the flimsy device itself. Even cleaning toilets cannot be done properly now without some do-hickey.

Every time I walk into a grocers it seems there is something new--with displays and coupons and demonstrations. It is curious to me that a lot of money is being poured into all this advertisement. Do these companies really care just how clean my floor is? Do they really have my best interests at heart--I doubt it.

They are appealing to me on some basic levels. First, everyone really does appreciate a clean environment, but, secondly, most people do not know where to start and do not want to have to put too much effort into the whole process. In short, we want immediate, effortless results, and we have been led to believe that any problem can be solved by buying something for it.

But I grew up long before these devices, and I have been cleaning house for many, many years. I love cleaning house. I love dusting and polishing and mopping my floors ( I prefer to do it on my hands and knees--much more clean that way). There is a huge satisfaction for me when I turn something funky into something glorious!

But cleaning doesn't take expensive plastic contraptions, it takes a few simple tools and a little attention and effort.

For example, when I want to do a quick dusting (I live in a dry climate--dusting is a daily exercise), I simply take a dollar store duster, spritz it lightly with some sort of general cleaner, and go at it. The slight dampness of the duster picks up the dust so that it doesn't fly into the air. No refills, no expensive packaging, just the simplicity of doing a job quickly and well.

I could share how every area of my homemaking is based on these principles:

• Simplicity

and

• Diligence

From cooking dinner to discipling my children, these are basic to our lives. Nothing good comes from slothfulness. No matter how much one spends on cleaning supplies, or child-training books and tapes, or anything else, the simple and diligent will always win out.

It is not how complicated or sophisticated our tools, it is the investment of the heart that matters.

Do I really want to have a clean, neat environment? Do I really value the capturing of my children's hearts for Jesus? Do I really want my husband to feel like a king in his home? Then I must be willing to put a lot of myself into it--I must be willing to give in order to receive.

Of course, it must always come back to the loaves and fishes. I can only give the little I have, God must multiply it.

When I was little I used to love to twirl round and round until, all of a sudden, the floor would come up and kiss my face! Sometimes, when I begin to take things on in my own strength, the floor still comes up to kiss my face, as I am laying flat there. I cannot do it on my own--my weakness must be traded in. I need to feel His life in my veins, His leading in my mind.

But it is so wonderful to know that, no matter what the magazines and the commercials scream out, God's ways do not change, and His principles will last long after the Swiffers go the way of the dinosaurs.

Revamping research

Since we have been going through some great changes in our home, I have spent a little time researching and gleaning encouragement and information from the world wide web. I thought it would be fun to share a few links with you.

I found a neat site with advice on eating cheaply but well, and although I don't agree with everything, I do practice most of what they advocate. You can find it here.

Whether you are a new or an old mom--reading the material on this site would be a great way to begin a new year of mothering--I was blessed by it.

This site is chock-full of advice and ideas for organizing a homeschooling home. I also found an interesting perspective on organizing a homeschooling day at this site.

When considering modesty, I have yet to read a better post than this one from Kim C. of Life In a Shoe fame over at Feelin' Feminine. She has a very Biblical, balanced approach to the whole issue. Along that vein I found some neato links to making cheap and easy skirts here and here.

In honor of Mother's Day, I enjoyed reading here how very over-protective I am as a mom--I think I am in good company!

Since I have been dealing with the aftermaths of antibiotics along with the later days of pregnancy, I went to the health food store and found some wonderful products. One was GoodBelly juice drinks (non-dairy)--I need probiotics to replenish my system, but the yogurt and kefir types just do not taste good to me. The juice made by this company tastes so delicious that I want to drink the whole carton in one sitting, and it instantly settles my stomach. They claim to have 10 billion good bugs in every 8 ounce serving--I wonder how many in the whole carton?

I am also tending towards the anemic side of things, as we all do towards the end of pregnancy, but iron supplements make me sick. I found Every Woman's Iron Support from New Chapter Organics the other day and am looking forward to having a bit more energy--so far it has not affected my digestive system at all. I could have chosen something like Floradix, but since I already take a full-blown liquid vitamin complex we buy at Sam's Club, I did not need to have a lot of the other added vitamins, etc. doubled up. The New Chapter tabs are almost pre-digested, are whole-food and utilize the iron in spinach.

To end everything up, here and here are two wonderful posts for meditation and encouragement from Above Rubies.

Have a blessed Mother's Day!

A week in the life...

This week has been a flurry of activity!

My dear husband started his new job on Monday. I sent him off with mixed emotions--so happy for him, so sad to see him leave--I cried a bit at first.

But everyone there loves him--they have continued to tell him that, out of 300 resumes, they knew he was the perfect one for the job, through prayer and everything. Now, after just 3 days, they are telling him how glad they are he is there. My husband jumps right in and takes charge, but always with the heart of a servant. I am so glad for him, but I am also realizing how very spoiled I have been. For the last four years he has been home, I have enjoyed how he took care of all of the nasty little business of our lives--the phone calls, etc. And since I have been pregnant, he has only served me more. Now it is in my lap once again--I have been so well cared for by him that it seems like a huge load.

But I have made it may goal to take every load off of Daddy that I can, so that when he comes home he can have some time to rest, and then we can still enjoy our "family church" time before bed. This is especially important since he has quite a commute. So far it was worked quite well.

How very wonderful it is to be in a relationship patterned after the Bible--where both people, no matter how very imperfect and flawed, try and give 100%, not the paltry 50% everyone speaks of. God's ways are always best.

I have been able to accomplish quite a lot. Here is a partial list:

• We super-cleaned the garage--you could almost do surgery in there! I even painted the garage steps and stapled a rug on them (with my son's help).
• We super-cleaned most of the kitchen and did our major monthly grocery shopping.
• I took care of numerous financial things on the internet and phone--my least favorite (and I didn't even procrastinate--there is hope for me yet!)
• We super-cleaned the basement areas.
  
• We went through the junk drawer.
• We shampooed most of the carpets upstairs.
• We have been concentrating on becoming more efficient in our morning cleaning routine, which is enormously important for the rest of our day--I will try and have some pictures of what we have been trying lately.
• We had one of our cars in the shop--meaning a little extra running around.
• I got caught up with a few of my grown children--heart-to-hearts that warmed me and encouraged me!

Right now I am so wiped out--but I think it is due to some antibiotics I was on last week (I haven't been on antibiotics for about 18 years--but I have an absessed tooth, and even though I protested, they insisted for the safety of my baby--they know how to get to me!).

By the way, we are naming our little girl, "Isabella"--doesn't that sound fun? I chuckle when I hear it--and I can tell this suits her well by the ways she communicates to me--have you ever experienced this? I usually know if a name "fits" before the baby is born.

And since I am of "advanced maternal age", I am required to go in once a week for a non-stress test--the one where you sit and are monitored for a half hour or so. I have passed every other test with flying colors--no diabetes, etc. I don't believe in these crazy statistics, anyways. People are too unique to fit on a chart somewhere. Oh well, what else did I have planned? I schedule them for Fridays, which will become my designated errand-day once we get more into the new flow of our lives. God works everything for our good, even silly doc's appointments, right? --do everything without grumbling or complaining, rejoice always, etc....

Well, that's a quick peek.