Ornothorincus Anatina. {Ornithorhynchus anatinus}

 

THose vengeful "Ants"

 This was the day that the ants bit Ben's bottom about a hundred of them bit him terribly just because he accidently sat on their anthill.

Think of that?

The Geese were flapping their wings very fervently to get south!

I woke to a delightful surprise of a white suit jacket, bought for me by my Benjamin.

It was very cold when we finally got outside.  It wasn't surprising that the haste had cost us the battery of his car.  It had died because the lights were left on all night.   After having gotten Ezra from his friend's house they were rushing inside and the oversight was costing us time.   We had to take my car.  My car needs a fresh gallon of water to make it that distance, But what an amazing providence to have a spare car to get to church.   We haven't always had such a precious alternative.  We did this morning.   One of those mornings that the pressing our way was a precursor to the expectation that God would meet us in our worship.  He did meet us.   God was there the fellowship was delightful and the worship was refreshing, but God's word was the salve and the motivation to take us through the week.   We were instructed and encouraged to expect more from God than we do from the devil.

Genesis 48!

Not fiction.  Jacob blessed both of his grandsons from Joseph.

This was a verse that was my meditation when I was working at Allstate.   I remember sitting on the bench on my lunch hour and it was as though Jacob was sitting right there telling me jokes in my sad moments there.   I missed my children.   Ethan and Christina were most in my minds, although Ezra was just a toddler.  I wanted to bring them with me and show them what I was learning, but there were other things for them and for me.  All of the children are grown now and my meditation of that moment when I realized that Jacob had learned from God that there was more than one blessing from God for his children and that God intended to use his life to bless each and everyone of them in His own way.  

I see God's blessings.  I see God's weaving my prayers and expectations into his answers to my prayers and overruling my shortcomings in his omnipotence.   His word is a light and a lamp and our prayers are the threads in his hand, combining and making one new man out of broken pieces and nuanced threads.  He has been faithful and continues to be faithful.  Halleluia!

Are we following his plans like the geese were, this morning?

Is this Honey Halal?

Judges 14

Samson takes some unkosher honey and creates a war out of it?   A simple question from the parents might have made him think twice.  Is this honey clean?  I wouldn't want honey taken out of a dead carcass, that had been sitting for days.  

I am thinking that he might have sickened his family and that was a problem that a doctor might have been able to assist them with.  I am not sure how many of our intensities might be cured with new medicine or old medicines.  God knows and he uses them anyhow.  I love how God shows Samson's crazes and where they got him as an example of everyone doing what was right in their own eyes.  This seems as if to say.  The laws that they received were all that they could handle at the time.  

Imagine if they really knew how many germs and things could have killed them?  Learning to live in the light of the cleanliness of the time that we live in and search for greater clarity to protect our young from the germs that can kill.

For the love of diaper rash!

 I carried ointment with me today because yesterday somebody's mommy forgot to put diaper rash ointment on the little lady and her shorts were showing the diaper rash as she ran up for a snack.

As a long-term infant care person, I had an instant impulse to get diaper cream on that exposed bottom immediately.

Only, this wasn't the infant room and this was a college woman walking in obvious pain.  What do you do as a concerned mother, when you see that self-care was not experienced and that at least covering the rash with a longer short might have been appropriate?  I was surprised she wasnt scratching it obviously, because it was so enflamed.

I truly love the fact that it is no longer my responsibility to apply ointment to the irritants of these nearly grown people.  Just get their tummies happy and set them on track for the beauty of the day.

Food is a ministry.  Eating is a beautiful enjoyment that God sent to us.  I am still learning how to really enjoy food and eating.  College is the place to begin.  When I was in college I was always hungry.  I had a 1$ food budget and then I would have to walk home.  "From Hunger" I lived on the sugar high's of candy, because it was cheap and quick.  I crashed from high to high.  Walking 5 or 6 miles home from school seemed a small price to pay for eating your travel money.  I love the feeling of reminiscing those easy days and carefree moments of life.  

The warmup is always lighter than the match.

I am soooo grateful for Pastor Martin saying that to us in his preaching.  He said look at how God dealt with you in your youth and expect him to raise the bar for you to jump higher.  He is a coach like that!

He has over and over and over; raised the bar of jumping.  I must decrease!  He must increase!  Can you serve?   Serve this!  Serve this!  Serve this!

And now?

The Joy of Merlin!

Is it mythology to believe that God has magical plans for your relationship with a child?  Is it mythological to aim your future?

I see so many beautiful things, when I look into the well preserved culture of the English.  I always start with Merlin.

I think Merlin believed in the God who created this world and the science that holds it together.  I think God gave Merlin a birds-eye view of his purpose in rearing a child who would become king in a superstitiously blind moment of history or hysterity as I like to call it.

A tiny hummingbird came to visit me, yesterday.  This wasn't the first visit I had from this tiny friend.  Yesterday he was warning me that I hadnt brought my umbrella and that the sky was about to open up.  She knew that I rarely anticipate these changes in the weather and I havent told my little friends about my newfound technological connection to the weather.  The birds help me know that my fledglings are okay.  this young agent brought important intelligence about my Ethan, who has precious little experience with the forces of nature.   The hummingbirds think that I am one of them.  I am sensitive and ever concerned about my younguns, like them.  They can relate to me and often have a message.  It started some years ago.  They have an initiation and they accept and reject their friends much based on emotional status.  They are not concerned about everyone and are very focused, when they become friends with you.

Merlin,  (I return to my subject) had many such relationships with the wildlife that he was blessed to become acquainted with.  He had a religious faith and a scientific experience and it gave him a perspective that God in his providence meant to use for the development of a culture that would affect the world.  The stereotypes of them follow a long way.   I am by no means a Euro-centric worshipper, nor a blind capitalistic believer in all of the folklore of Eurocentricity.   I see God's purposes in His preservations of certain cultures and compare the results to what scripture says and that is why it has long been my study of the Euro folklore that I have been exposed to.

It seems that Lewis Carroll saw the blessings and the forfeiture of the blessing in "Alice".  He seemed to say, "you will stay right in one spot at the tea-party until this hideous blot on your reputation is cleansed.  Child labor laws and pirating and slavery, keep us all one minute to midnight in our cultural experience.

Why, oh why can't we untangle the dilemmas that plague us?  Why go we from one worldwide self inflicted wound to another.   Until we stop expecting the change to come from the state or the regal or the goodness of ourselves we remain in the complete darkness with the foolish virgins.  The impending doom of our own demise right over the horizon of darkness that we are engulfed in.  Let's wake up from this dark dream that we have placed upon ourselves.  What does that mean?

The weaving that Merlin began in his craze or in his genius does not belong to the wise or to the wealthy, it belongs to the church!  "what you bind, what you loose on earth..."  We know it belongs to the church, but we would rather hoard our own resources and claim a family dominion.  So we sit in the dark of our own midnight and refuse to walk into the light of our faith.  We self medicate at the tea-party with the other foolish virgins looking into the darkness, with the light right behind us, within our grasp, if we decide to renounce our own understandings.  God give us grace to learn from the Merlin Alice, Wonderland that we have created.

My point with Merlin, specifically, is that He walked a young fellow from the foolishness of the darkness of his age into an enlightenment that remains with us today.   We all have that privilege who embrace faith and the power of God's Church.  We can walk our children into the light of the faith that we possess.  Not just faith, "Great Expectations" from God that comes with repentance and faith.  

The Silent Set into Sixty!

 Greater than the swish of the net in basketball is the sound of a silent set in volleyball to me.   Some contact with the ball is supposed to make noise. Not the silent set!  Silence,  when the hands carefully caress the ball to prepare for the perfect spike.  It is the perfect setup for the sound of the ball hitting the ground after the spike has been completed.  It is one of my favorite silences, if carefully and successfully completed, breathtaking.

So What? About Wormwood...

 Amos 5:7

Ye who turn judgment to wormwood, and leave off righteousness in the earth,

Revelation 8:11 

And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.

Let X= CS Lewis’ Wormwood = the educations system

Let X+1=Roald Dahl’s Wormwood= the educated in the 1/3 education system Matilde?

Let conclusion be erasing the poisonous wormwood of reciprocating people for the sins of the fathers, perhaps encapsulated in “Cancel Culture”

Prayer and Activism to infuse God back into our knowledge!  this is Not Rocket science?

Reverse Osmosis cleansing of the waters of learning?

The Lord delivered Daniel from an education system that was frought with superstition and taught him to “believe the science” but he didn’t lose his faith in God to learn to believe the science.  God enabled him to preserve the scriptures and the spiritual foundations and advance the culture that God had placed him in and preserve to some extent the lives of the people of God as well.

Where did the Birdies go?

 I saw no birds at the park or outside my home.  I thought I saw a swift hummingbird at Church.  But I am in such grief that they are not around here over this weekend.  Where did they go?

Usually, Mr. and Mrs.  Bluejay come to the courts to emphasize to me the importance of putting my entire effort into my tennis in the eyes of my children that they would learn to develop their wingspans.  

Woefully limp wing muscles on your youngest fledgling, they point out.  You have to show them how to develop this muscle, or they never will fly.  I know.  I confess to Mr. Bluejay, but he wasn't there to tell me that.  

Instead, It was the butterflies that came to coach me.  They said it is the cooling down time.  Why so hard?  Why do you hit it so hard?  Try to find a light touch serve.  They implored.  I must confess that I absolutely have never tried to hit a soft serve in my life.  I may have hit it soft by accident.  But the butterflies said try to find out how softly you can hit the ball and still get the ball across the net.  I tried and it was like being in slow motion.  I did 10 and then when I went back to my hard ball I had such a greater accuracy.  I was appreciative of their inserting their 2 cents.

Butterfly serves would be my practice in regularity and then work up to the hard balls.   I love to slam the ball and I go to the courts to get out some of my anger on the ball.  But there was some merit in finding the lighter alternative.

There were also some lessons about directing my limpwinged and highly tech minded young one.  It is not the same game with him.  He is used to light touches and a heavy hand could crush his spirit.  Lighten up and keep your racquet on the ball for a longer period of time.  Go back to the time of 18 and unders and become a "pusher" again.  That is really hard!

Devotional providential lesson?

2 Kings 1:13 

And he sent again a captain of the third fifty with his fifty. And the third captain of fifty went up, and came and fell on his knees before Elijah, and besought him, and said unto him, O man of God, I pray thee, let my life, and the life of these fifty thy servants, be precious in thy sight.

Jesus met with Elijah in the mountain.  Could it be that Jesus was discussing with him the parts of his soul that were engaged when he called fire down from heaven on those troops?  Was fear a motivating factor?  Were there things that Elijah still could have learned from John the Baptist’s response in impending doom?  Jesus was truly the greatest example of not calling down fire from heaven, with all authority under heaven.  He went the final mile of the journey with no animosity against the entire earth because He could see that He was saving souls and not destroying.

Mercury and I broke my fridge thermometer

How many generations took their temperatures using a mercury thermometer?

Are we all mad hatters?

The way we learn is different.  the way we retain is different.  We are all as an earlier generation one moment close to losing it.  Some had fevers more and some had less fevers.  More or less mercury under the tongue and or in the rectum?  Why are we so unstable?  We know why

Goals for using this generation and socializing thsi generation of madness properly.  Perhaps God will allow us to inherit the earth in our resurrected bodies, because of the horrific reality of the racism and polution from the industrial revolution that we inherited.  

I think we did pretty good at cleaning some of the mess up that we inherited and we are mad hatters.  Perhaps we will be allowed to live into eternity with only part of our brains in tact.  i believe we will have all of our faculties restored when we find the tree of life.

I believe that our partiality allows us to see the puzzle that we are trying to put together.  If we weren’t mad we couldn’t see it.

Once God has used our crazed perceptions to find the impossible and then he will put our mercury poised brains back in our heads.  We are reaping generations of wrong thinking and we are also heaping data upon data, some useful information and some useless.  Our less mercurial children often help us sift out the unnecessary in their detail oriented perspectives.  

But I do believe that God has for us the answer for the puzzle right before our eyes and when we repent and turn he will hand it to us as a free gift.  Sometimes I see it as clear as if it is in front of me and then it vanishes in my darkened tunnel of unbelief!

Not fiction at all!

The Story of My Baby Brothers 

Usually falls on glazed over eyes as the children look at me like why were you so happy to have another mouth in your house.  Another person to fight with and for, could not be related to by most of the children in DAYCARE.  Everything is all about them, my turn, my turn, my turn is what they are learning.

This crew was all ears to my story.  A very first!  When I got to the part where Aunt Karla came out and told us it was a boy, they were a little quizzical, but could relate.

But...when I told the story about mommy sending us into the room to quiet baby, we all started a chant, which was so cathartic, I can't even tell you how much.  They started Howling and I with them.  It was a low and gravelly cry that I heard everyday of my childhood, but I never hear it in daycare.

It was the gravelly cry of the baby of the family being comforted by the other children as we all cried together, my heart was lifted, like never before.  I knew them and they knew me.  We were one together in the cry of interdependent children.  We were one in the primal scream of children who love each other and have learned to enter into eachother's dire need for maternal attention.  The Where is Mommy cry and we can't comfort you, but we can cry with you cry!

We comforted each other, that others can talk about you and would have killed you, if they had their way, through abortion and other means of killing your dreams and wonderment.  And they continue to kill you, daily but you have eachother's cries to comfort you and to lean on, when no one ever understands and can see, your crib and the hand that pats your back!   UGGGGGGGHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAGHHHHHHHH!

totally fiction: sharpening of the human mind! What skills are we practicing and developing...

How come my tennis rep mind can't do math, but it can see a spot moving just outside of the specific realm of eyesight? I will never know. I can read and walk and bounce a ball at the same time, but throw a math equation in there and all the balls fall on the ground! That is my personal question for my mind.

Everytime I see Beethoven I see Daniel. I have no reason to believe this. But I believe that dogs were started on their dominions from the time of the fall. I believe that earlier civilizations programmed species to do and be certain things for them. The fact that Jacob was able to trick fate, somewhat as it were to breed certain colors of animals, so that he could have an investment to take home with him, means that there was knowledge of such things very far back in history. I believe that Daniel and the Hebrew boys took some of the knowledge that was in the possession of the early Semites and incorporated it with the dominions of Medo-Persian civilization.

I think that we are at a crossroads of education where people have the ability to allow the human brain to atrophy or not. Practice is no longer included as part of the process. Hand skills are minimized as menial and unnecessary. We are in trouble. We are in danger of becoming single element species. We can and must take dominion of the education process and aim our humanity in a renaissance movement or suffer a worse dark ages. The Church must take the wheel and stop telling Jesus to take the wheel for the things we must do. The hands must be made to start early being incorporated in the learning process. Analyzation of early specializations must be accompanied with unsympathetic training and not using school as a socialization experiment. My opinion!

Jane Eyre was shamed into a self abasement, which was dehumanizing...

in my opinion...

So now, we let children do as they like, for the most part in schools.

That is not the answer! Finding their handle is a hard job. We don't want to do it. We knock their handle off and give them a fake one, which is fear based.

I see children who are art motivated, letter motivated, building motivated, tactile motivated, taste motivated, etc., etc. They like certain things, but only certain things make them do their best.

My Dad had no other motivator, other than the whip or the "suzie Q". We spent our childhood running from the whip into the suzie q and back again. When that quiver of fear comes over me, I am not able to function at all. He absolutely overplayed the fear factor.

If you don't or do this or that...I will beat you within an inch of your life! etc.

We all had a ruler measuring our bodies to try to calculate how much an inch of our lives were. I still measure, whether I am within an inch of my life or not. Is this an inch away from death? etc. Do we want our children measuring their closeness to death for the rest of their lives? Our words have impact.

Lets teach them to run toward LIFE!

ie. I will kiss you until you find the tree of life!

I think that will work

A prayer for the souls of the dearly misunderstood head masters whom I know and don't know. May God great them true repentance and faith in their great task.

IJane eyre's serious blows to the sins of self righteousness.

The juxtaposition of Conventiality and self righteousness to morality and religion was Charlotte Bronte s great and well accomplished task.  The righteous need no physician and the self righteous seek no physician.  On the other hand, as parents of well reared children we fear for Theodore being taken advantage of by ill meaning soul thieves who would hang on their coat tails and vanquish their well intentioned neivite.  A life spent caring for a soul of someone who refuses the faith of Christ and doesn't allow you to pursue your faith is a torment which should and must be warned against.  I believe that Charlotte Bronte does both, warning and wooing people to a real and genuine profession of Christ.

{https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm.   }Link

Recently an obscure character has captured my imagination and I have considered how we express so little mercy for the Headmaster of the school in that story.  He has become a person of prayer consideration in my soul.  How many many well meaning instructors of righteousness may have missed the mark, as Talkative in "Pilgrims".  May God give me grace to follow the example of Charlotte Bronte and express my concern for their souls in some written form.  Amen.

September 2008. Repeat...

The bunnies were having devotions and they were reiterating for the most numerous of times, how God had delivered their species from destruction.  
As the bunnies tell it, an angel (and she doesn't know which) came and told all of the bunnies that it was going to rain and so many of them didn't believe, but their great....grand bunnies hopped directly to Mr and Mrs. Noah's house and waited for their brothers and sisters to follow. When God shut the door was when they knew that they would never see those bunnies again. Thank God for His preservative grace even to the creatures of the field!

Learning to Lean, when God calls you into a conference.

When I was a youngun, I complained and cackled before the Lord for every providential dissuasion from my plans. Why? Lord, don't you know that I had plans for that time that was lost to a flat tire. Oh so often, some great revelation of my children's lives would come out of the hours spent waiting for the tow truck or the help for our automotive distresses. We were privy to each other's every thought in the midst of a small car with 6 to 9 little people trapped inside on a highway or a major thoroughfare. I learned to see it as an opportunity to get to know the people that I was with, but yesterday it was a getting to know God in the sky. He has amazing moving pictures that are wondrous. I am grateful that the God of the universe entertains us in His mind and paints and designs ways to get our attention that are sometimes inconvenient, but always in His great love. Thank you Lord.

Heaven seems to celebrate with us...

The Sunday morning drive to church was filled with amazing cloud celebrations. I knew Heaven had heard my pray-do's of the day before and several portions of the sky seemed to dot stars and stripes in celebration of faith that God can clean us up.

Mr. Day and Mrs. Day seemed in charge of this celebration. Mr Day was holding up a plug and reminding me that he was anti electricity in his day. Beware of being the backward type of parent, he reminded me. The fact that I met him on the steps and he met me on the steps was an incredible occurrence. "These steps must be the cleanest on 5th Avenue, this is the way Mr. Day wants them kept." From the movie... We obstinate types have to stick together, he said to me. Spiritual obstinance and Bossyboots must stay on our knees in prayer, because we have a tendency to overdo them. He is grateful for the spiritual life that keeps him cleaning the steps to heaven. He wouldn't have it any other way. God is more meticulous than I could ever be and still more merciful.

My conversation with them was short and sweet. We have so much to talk about and they have so much to teach me having successfully made in into Heaven with 4 boy souls in an earlier generation. Mrs. Day is my heavenly godmother, so to speak. She understands what can make you miss heaven completely as a mother of so many children. There is a time for nursing them and there is a time to stop nursing them, she always reminds me. She never says to think about yourself, as is the theme of today's woman's movement, she always says try a new approach. I used scripture in measured doses, to the boys, she reminds me. You can't pour it all in there at one time. I know, but I just can't help it, I always keep pouring the scripture until I think they've gotten it. You aren't the Holy Spirit, Jayne. Just give the Holy Spirit something to use in their souls, that is all we are doing.

The flags were way above the clouds that were making me think of the Day family. There were faces, dotting here and there, through out the lower portion of the sky and I felt that there was a purposeful and settled comradery between the saints in Heaven and the saints on earth as we pursue the effort to make it to worship. There is never a more concerted labor between Heaven and Earth than when we are on our way to Worship. They seem to stick their hands out of the clouds to pop five at the beauty of people worshipping God for who He is on the Lord's Day.

The one's that I know, I have lengthy conversations in the celebration and the ones that I don't we just say is this a sacrifice of praise or a victorious day for you. They don't have sacrificial praise days, when their race is won, but they sympathize with our labor not being completed yet and they have so many encouraging exhortations that it picks you up from where ever you are. When we get to know the few people from the great cloud of witnesses that are encouraging us to keep on going and to do the labor that is set before us, we have greater tools to fight the good fight of faith.

Why is faith a fight?

I think that NC must have the cleanest steps in the country. I haven't been to every state, by any means. All I know is that Heaven seemed a lot further away in NY than it seems here. The seeds sown by Billy Graham of souls won for Christ all over the world seems to make it the pulley whereby God is pulling the earth to a greater knowledge of Himself. We can either work together with Him, or work against Him. I wouldn't want to be the person dirtying the steps of the Lord.

More than just a glimpse of heaven is the fruit of celebrating the Lord's Day. That isn't fiction!

Chapter 10 of Pilgrim's Progress is a wonderful expression of the earthly expectation of the Christian, when so much of suffering has past. There are seasons of refreshing and Derrick Thomas exposes this so very aptly, in his series on the Pilgrim's Progress, which I found on Prime Video's. I have been so blessed to hear these wonderful spiritual observations of a classic.

It is amazing and soul strengthening!

The Wonder of Sisterhood and Motherhood and how they mesh came clear in the new Little Women!

I guess that was where all my emotions went at celebrating the accomplishment of graduating from college. I hadn't thought that I would cry at the graduation. I thought I might have cried at the Markle wedding. The eyes were dry.

Surprise! there I am watching the Little Women series and I thought it was wonderfully done. The scene of the mother coming into the room and her extra giddy girls were whirling and twirling. I had been the girls, at one time. I had been the mother at one time and now my girls are fully women and past any of that whirly twirly stuff. How did I miss that passing? Where did it go to?