PREPARATION

Preparation

Many people are dying from Covid-19 during this season, and during the pandemic. Death is part of life. This pandemic is different because it is unknown; and because it makes us feel responsible for others. We are all tense, and are all, at least through end of April, hearing about the horrors of the bad cases of covid-19 and of the overwhelmed and anxious workers having to deal with the Ill or with the stress of unknown about being infected and /or infecting others, especially loved ones, and long hours.  Also, we are  stressed because other nations are experiencing a nightmare; and we expect expect that we, too, will go  through that. Our minds are so filled with those thoughts that the thoughts that God wants us to think and the things He wants us to do are totally squeezed out of our minds and lives.

What would God want us to do if we are getting sick and suspect that it is covid-19 and that we might die soon, and that we will be made unconscious and no longer an active agent of earth even sooner that that, very shortly, in fact?

I think God would want us to express thanks towards Him that He made us and this Earth. I think God would want us to humbly receive His gift of eternal life by humbly acknowledging Him and His right to judge us and our lives as He wants, since He is the Creator and we are His creation, both individually and as this whole universe.

So please, my friends,  be ready. Please speak to our Creator and "walk humbly with your God". Receive Jesus (Yeshua is Jesus' true name, Hebrew name. Yeshua, which means Yahweh, the God introduced and followed by the Jewish people and told about in the Bible,-this same Yahweh saves. Yeshua saves ALL.)

And dear friend, if and when  you know our Lord and Savior, Our Creator, Jesus, please include some words about your faith in Him to those around you in that short window of opportunity that you may have. And speak to the air if you must, if no one's there that you can see. (Remember God is there!) Or if those around you are so intent on trying to save your life or keep from getting sick themselves that they aren't listening, just say something good to God, while you're here in Earth.

Dear ones, please think about this ahead of time so you will be ready when your time comes. Love to you.

RESPONSE TO . . . CAVEATS

Response to . . . Caveats

In that other post, I expressed that we need to warn those who come after us- either in reading a book after us or in whatever other way you might encounter- when we have come to the understanding in the midst of reading the book that we disagree with some of what has been established in that book by the author and publisher. We owe it to a subsequent reader to warn them (especially if they are young) of (what we believe to be) an untruth and/or unhelpful direction that the author (with the support of the publisher) has proposed.

This post is slightly different. The theme that connects these two posts is the principle of carefully observing and analyzing a new proposition rather than accepting it as OK or wonderful or having received a cultural stamp of approval because it's been published. (Also, I'm sorry folks, but I DO have to include here the truth that just because something has been accepted and promoted by the culture does not mean that that something is in agreement with what our Creator God wants for us.)

Anyway, this post is simply about the time a magazine came into the house with a large photo of someone's face on the cover who had painted their face or agreed to being painted, including goulish contact lenses for Halloween themed "fun" -this was on the front cover! As a mother, wife and homemaker, I took the initiative to paint over that pic to make it less horrific. I am sure I censored pics in like manner on other occasions. I think that is GOOD! not bad! Why should someone who happens to have the backing of a publisher or other with money- why should that one have more influence over my children and household than I do? That's all I have to say right now. Bless you, friends.

FROZEN

Frozen

I originally thought about this 25 or so years ago. The "frozen" I mention is the concept of "the chilling effect" taken to MORE of an extreme. The original "chilling effect" I noted was Stephen King's (book and) movie CARRIE. In that movie, the mother was not loving, and saw the world around her, including her daughter, Carrie, as evil. The mother was portrayed as cold and unloving; and her religious beliefs (nominally Christian) were part of what made her so cold and unloving.
That portrayal which equated Christian religious zeal with an ignorant inflexibility which made the mother a failure as a parent (cold and unloving) -that portrayal, in my opinion, inhibited some people (such as myself?) from trying to raise their children by strong religious standards, for fear that they would be thought of by their children and onlookers as cold and unloving.
Now 30 plus years later, that distorted image of devoted Christians has persisted and maybe become even more exaggerated.
However, I may be wrong, but I think perhaps current (late 2019) views have become so (ridiculously?) exaggerated- championing gender identity rights and right to whatever "sexual  lifestyle" one feels drawn to as well as insistence that those values be accepted as normal by all members of society- that some people now are starting to see that that extreme view is not really intellectually honest.
Just today, I read Wei-huan Chen's (of the HOUSTON CHRONICLE, Nov 29, 2019, maybe) review of BABY  SCREAMS MIRACLE , the play by Barron. I was thankful for Chen's thoughtful review, considering the possibility that Christians could seriously and truly look to our God and the standards and guidance put forth in His Bible and try to live their lives that way with loving others as part of that.

THE RIGHT AMOUNT OF CARE AND CAUTION

The right amount of caution:
My father being an electrical engineer caused me to consider what engineering means. I learned that you have to make sure the material and the construction create a finished item that can withstand the use it will be put to. (Sorry for stilted wording.) I don't know if Dad told me this, but I have the thought from very young of the testing of material and the prototypes, planes and wings, etc vibrating in wind  tunnels in flight speed conditions for testing.
Also, my father-in-law was a bricklaying  contractor and builder; and my husband told of Papaw's regular decision to do his work extremely well using very strongly formulated mortar, wetting the bricks before starting and otherwise doing the BEST work (and organizing the work and leading his employees in this, also.)
I even remember fussing at my son when he was a child and playing too hard with a toy one time, telling him "you don't have to break a toy (or other) to find out how strong it is or is not."  Actually, I guess I was also influenced by working for a foundation engineering company, testing  samples for strength by putting them under a load and recording how much load that sample could carry before it would fail and noting that after sample started to break, it could never be as strong as before, unless it had no original cohesion to begin with.
I compare my father-in-law's building ethics to the business decisions that were made concerning the crucial parts of the monstrous offshore oil platform (Deep water Horizon) and drilling machines that failed in 2010 causing ** deaths and the ruination of a large area of Gulf of Mexico and the  Gulf coast.  Who all were the decision makers? Are there still trials going on? Do those ones yet realize that they made bad (sinful, even) decisions that caused the catastrophe? What was the risk that they decided was ok that turned out to not be ok? Why did they think it was ok to make the decision they did? I guess they never thought that they would encounter a situ where blowout preventers would be needed. Was that realistic? I think I heard that one aspect of that catastrophe was that the drilling mud was not heavy enough. Was that a combination of two or more mistakes (or sinful decisions) that did not take into account that other imperfections would make the whole array totally insufficient?
So now I think about secret poor decisions. The people  responsible for choosing those insufficient blowout preventers, or the people who manufactured, misrepresented and sold them thought their decision would remain a secret. They thought it would be ok.

KURT VONNEGUT INTERVIEWED BY CHARLIE ROSE

Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by Charlie Rose, probably near the end of his life. The interview was kind of sad, also poignant. Especially poignant was the moment, near the end of the aired interview, where Vonnegut pulled a folded up piece of paper out of his pocket (I'm crying as I remember this moment) and after introducing it started reading it. It was some famous words of Jesus, maybe the beatitudes (Matt 6). And after he read them, Vonnegut commented on them. Maybe he said something like, "if only all those who call themselves by Jesus' name would really follow these words."
To me, that dramatic moment by Vonnegut was a plea on his part after he felt he and others have tried to encourage "goodness" and kindness in people and seen their efforts fail. Long after I saw that interview (it still lingers in my mind.) I read some of a biography of Vonnegut and learned that he was raised in a "free thinker" branch of Christianity and maybe had not even studied Christianity very much.

Bonfires, book bannings, caveats and reservations

Bonfires, book bannings, caveats and reservations

I was recently reading Kurt Vonnegut's collection of talks and writings called FATES WORSE THAN DEATH, as well as some of the authorized biography of him by Charles j. Shields. Vonnegut was sensitive to and had a strong and particular view about censorship because one or more of his books were banned from school libraries.

What I want to speak of here is the need for those that have read books and have opinions about them -the need to express those opinions, hopefully IN the book itself, rather than allow that book to continue to exist and influence others without the one who has read it and is passing it along to others including his or her beliefs that disagree with the book itself.

In the history of civilization, books have previously been considered somewhat "sacred" because of the difficulty in the past of manufacturing them; and because they are a public forum. People were not supposed to write in books.

It is interesting to contemplate the value that we unconsciously or consciously put on books because someone thought the information or wisdom or entertainment value of a created work was enough that enough people would purchase the book to pay back the costs of publishing it and pay the author also. Also, . . . the assumption we make (I'm speaking for myself, personally) that because someone owns a book, that one had read the book and endorses the values put forth in that book. Can I tell you what book specifically I'm referring to? It is Gloria Steinem's book *****. I was young then - not yet twenty. I thought I was supposed to learn from it. That book led me in the wrong direction for a number of years. (As an aside, let us also acknowledge that Gloria was beautiful, glamorous and intelligent- looking. She was a good representative for the values she was promoting. Too bad that the values were not good. I do want explore here, now, however, that Gloria and her cohorts were in part extending a belief system that is native to the United States of America: that personal freedom and the pursuit of it are noble good things. That belief system carries with it the implication that "limits" are bad, especially man-made limits.

My perspective on books is that I personally was influenced negatively by some ideas in a book that was owned and displayed by someone whose opinions I valued. In my naive youth, I thought that since this person owned *****, that she endorsed everything in there. I didn't think to ask her if she, in fact, did endorse the thoughts .

MOON: FULL CIRCLE

Moon: Full Circle

This post is about the moon being the first thing I identified as God telling us about Himself.

As a young person, I loved to see the beauty of the Moon. It looked like a luminous pearl up in the sky.

At some point , I started to understand and appreciate how wonderful it is that the moon, which is smaller than the Earth,  can look to us to be the same size as the sun, which is so far and so huge. It didn't have to be that way. It could have been that the moon was smaller or, or the sun could have been larger. But No! They appear delightfully and transcendently equal in size.

Also, when Earth's scientific community sent out machine explorers to learn of other planets and their moons- and the exploring machines sent back pictures- we all saw the pictures of Uranus' moons, which were not uniform and beautiful like our moon. I said to myself (and God, and others, I hope) "it didn't have to be this way! We could have had a moon that did it's job as tide- maker, etc. without being beautiful. But God made it exceedingly beautiful!" -Such a contrast to the other moons in our solar system.

And then this year we had, in Texas and other places, an extended complete "blood moon" lunar eclipse. When I saw the moon without its stunning pure, intense, white illumination from the sun, lit only by the scattered light reaching it from earth and space dust, that moon looked so earth-bound and plain (like a wad of chewed up chewing gum?) with all its pinkish gray color and the nonuniformities visible in the subdued light of that eclipse, I said to myself, "hurry back sun illumination. I don't like this less beautiful picture of the moon." So I learned then that part of the moon's beauty was its brilliant lighting by the sun. God is good! Thanks be to God! Glory to God!