In Gennesaret

Unless you’re a parent of littles at the age where you're teaching them the basic Bible stories we all deem essential (bless your hearts, my exhausted friends) or you’re of the crowd that is really concerned with the question of evolution vs. creation (and I have many friends in that crowd, too), you may not have given much thought to the first three chapters of Genesis in a while. My Sunday School class discussed them yesterday morning. Our “quarterly”, which I read ahead of time to prepare for the lesson, encouraged us to re-read the story of the Creation and Fall with fresh grown-up eyes and with a Lenten focus: is there a sacrifice you need to make? A sin you need to grieve and repent of? An unproductive habit you need to abstain from? And I found one. So, the Garden of Eden was, of course, full of fruitful trees, and God gave Adam and Eve permission to partake of the abundance and enjoy it to the full . . . except for that one tree . Just one. So many blessings in that g...

The lost sheep and the lost coin in Luke 15: these are old news stories for a born-and-raised-Baptist girl like me. I've read them a few hundred times . . . heard them a few hundred times . . . probably even taught them -- well, less than a hundred times, but still a lot. Old news. Except that scripture is alive and active and sharp as the dickens, slicing you open right to where reparative surgery needs to be done in your spirit and heart and mind. I think it was in Sunday School a while back that these stories came up again. And as he is wont to do, God pointed out to me (probably through Jeni or Ray, our teachers, because that’s usually how he does things) something I hadn’t really noticed before. I’ve always read these stories as God seeking out the lost – that is, those who don’t know him yet. Unbelievers. God willing to go to extremes to find them and make them his. Bring that sheep into the fold. Add that coin to the precious stash. Except here’s the thing: that shee...

Stephanie, the Logic teacher on my middle school team, filled me with great delight the other day when I saw a reference to genus and species in her lesson plans. We did that! My girls and I – when I made a rather lame attempt at walking them through a beginning Logic curriculum while we homeschooled – we learned to define things by genus and species! Here’s the gist: one way of creating a definition for something is to state the group it belongs to (the genus) and   the things that distinguish it from the other members of that group (its species). Sadness : that’s an emotion [genus] in reaction to a loss [species]. Baseball : that’s a ball game [genus] where you hit a ball with a bat and run around bases to score points [species]. Rocky Road : that’s a flavor of ice cream [genus] with a chocolate base that has nuts and marshmallows folded in [species]. This appeals, I think, to both the organizing-fanatic side of my brain and the celebrate-uniqueness side of my brain. Gi...

On my flight to Atlanta last Saturday to visit the youngest, I pulled out my Sudoku book and realized . . . crap . I forgot a pencil. A while back when a friend and I were doing a word puzzle together, he pulled out a pen to write with. For. The. LOVE. A pen ?? Are you nuts? We can’t do puzzles with a pen! What if we make a mistake?? I tried to stifle my concern. Maybe he never makes mistakes . . . maybe he’s just that brilliant . . . or maybe he doesn’t write an answer down unless he’s absolutely certain about it. But no, he started inking things on that page all cocky and brave – answers that I knew we weren’t certain about yet, but now it’s written in permanent ink, help me Jesus. I struggled to control my racing heart. Because what if we make a mistake ?? I don’t think we ever did, but still . . . Now, I do realize that I’m talking about puzzles here. It really doesn't matter if I mess up. It’s not like I’m jumping out of a plane or getting married or risking my life saving...

A little while ago, I wrote a post about letting my hair grow gray that got lots of reaction. I apparently hit a nerve there with a lot of my female friends. I’m still going au natural on the top of my head. And I’m getting used to it – I might even venture to say I’m starting to like the new look. But here’s something I’m not liking about myself now: I am suddenly paying a ridiculous amount of attention to other women’s hair. I’m stalking to see whose hair is colored (by my best guess) and whose is not. Who’s letting the gray happen and how is it happening on their heads compared to my own. Who still has a thick head of hair and whose is thinning out like I fear mine will soon – and how are they styling that thinner hair? Here's another one: who my age still has hair to their shoulders, and how does it look? When I was little, I noticed that almost every “mature” woman I knew had short hair, and I thought I would be terribly sad when I reached the age that I had to cut my h...

I’ve been studying up on the Holy Spirit lately, so Jesus’ words in John 14-16 have been percolating in my thoughts a lot. Here’s the verse that jumped out at me recently: “Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (14:12) The works you've  been doing, Jesus? Really? Hmmm . . . In the verse immediately before this, Jesus refers specifically to his miracles. So, it’s really hard to read “the works” he mentions in verse 12 here as anything other than miracles. Yes, miracles.  Like, healing the sick and other such wild stuff. And the disciples he was speaking to did do miracles after Jesus went to the Father – at least some of them did, the book of Acts tells us. But this passage doesn’t say “you”, referring just to the people he was talking to at that moment; it says “whoever”, which is pretty wide-reaching. (And I looked up the Greek, y’all. The expla...

My rental house is tiny, but it has three bedrooms – two of them in the front of the house on either side of a short hallway with a bathroom. Well, wait . . . hallway? I don’t think you can even call it that. I mean, they all kind of feel like they’re on top of each other up there. So, when I heard the BEEP of a smoke detector coming from that direction the other morning, I didn’t know which of the three devices living in that part of the house needed its battery replaced. And I didn’t think about it again until around dinnertime when I heard a second  BEEP while I was washing dishes – and immediately forgot about it again. It wasn’t until 4am – 4am, people! – when the BEEP ing roused me to a solidly awakened state that I remembered that unfinished chore. Dang. The smoke detector. I need to do that in the morning. But apparently, in the morning was now not soon enough. The BEEPs started coming in every sixty seconds or so for the next hour. Insistent. BEEP. Unrelenting...