I don’t know if you read Jessica Patch’s blog, but you totally should.  She has this wonderfully quirky way of looking at life that I just love.  And when she gets into the spiritual side of things, look out.  The way God works in her mind will blow yours.  I got the privilege of “meeting” her when we were in a “Clash of the Titles” battle together.  We’ve been internet buddies ever since.  Do yourself a favor and check her out.

At any rate, she issued an “answer some random questions” kind of challenge, so I thought, “Why not?”  It’s been a while since we had a “Fun Friday.”  The deal is I answer her questions, then come up with 11 of my own.  I’m SUPPOSED to make 11 other people answer my questions, but I’m going to challenge all of you to do it, like she did.  Ready for some randomness about me?  I haven’t read the questions yet, so I’m about to be as surprised by this as you are.

My 11 Questions:
1. Chocolate or Vanilla and why?

(Jess, this is a waste of a question.  Really?  There’s a debate here?)  Chocolate.  All the way.  Dark chocolate.  Or, oh my goodness, once I had chocolate with sea salt.  Holy cow.  Unreal.

2. Have you ever shoplifted? Ever thought about it?

No and no, at least not that I remember.  It’s possible I contemplated it as a kid, but I don’t remember thinking it.

3. Colored polish or French manicure?

Colored.  What’s the point of a French manicure?  It’s just your nails jazzed up.  Right now, I prefer orange.  Or blue.  Or silver.  Yay.

4. Where’s the last place on earth you’d want to visit and why?
Well, there could be a lot of answers to that question, huh?  Probably too many to name.  There’s a whole lot of places I never want to set foot.

5. What’s your least favorite food?
Brussels sprouts.  Period.

6. How many licks do you think it really does take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Pop?
For me?  One.  It’s straight to biting the things.  Oh, and I LOVE orange ones.  Yummo.  I ate so many Tootsie Roll pops and cherry Blow Pops in college that I had cavities when I graduated.  I had to have one whenever I wrote a paper.  Since I was an English major and a writing major, I wrote a LOT  of papers.  A LOT.  A lot of THIRTY PAGE papers.

7. Hotels or camping?
Hm.  Where am I going?  I don’t like hotels.  We have gotten to where we rent condos wherever we go.  It’s cheaper.  And there’s more room.

8. Which celebrity that is alive (there is no Jesus loop-hole here, people) would you like to meet and why?
I’d dearly love to meet George Bush, especially after reading his autobiography.  Does he count as a celebrity?  If it has to be a “celebrity,” then I have to say TobyMac.  Otherwise, my daughter will somehow KNOW I didn’t type him as an answer and come after me.

9. Do you have a smart phone? Can you live without it? Be honest…okay you can. Would you want to? Be honest.
I did not think I wanted one.  Then I got an iPhone.  And now I’m about as in love with a device as you can get.  I don’t even use it for everything you can use it for, but it’s fun beyond belief.

10. If you could be any animal which one would you be and why?  I kind of like being me.  But being a cat would be fun.  If I could figure out how to work a laptop and still write…
11. Home cooked or 5 star meal?

Who’s cooking?  Can I have a 5-star meal at home?  Honestly, give me a good steak on the grill.  With a baked potato.  And a great big salad with creamy Italian dressing.  And maybe a cheesecake for dessert.  Yeah.  That works.

Okay, now I have to come up with 11 questions.  You can answer in the comments if you don’t have a blog of your own.  Ready?

1. If you could have a vacation house anywhere in the world, where would it be?

2.  The lottery is up to over half a billion (BILLION) dollars.  Have you ever played?

3. Uhm, what ever happened to good TV that I wouldn’t mind my daughter seeing commercials for? (Just wondering.)

4.  What’s your dream job?

5.  What was your favorite subject in school?  And, bonus question, if you could go back to school, would you?  (I used to say if I ever got rich, I’d become a professional student.  Yes, I loved college classes that much.  Hey, I never said I wasn’t a geek.)

6.  What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?

7.  It’s a rainy Saturday and you have nothing on your to-do list.  What are you going to do?

8. What’s your favorite store?

9.  Who is your hero?

10.  What’s your dream car?

11.  What’s one random fact about you that you wish I’d asked?

-JB

I wonder sometimes if we realize how relative truth has become in our nation.  In many ways, we have come to the point of “if I believe it, it must be true.”  Sadly, we’ve also come to the point of, “if the TV says it, it must be true.”  I have been appalled by about five different items/comments I’ve heard on the news just in the past two days.  Items meant to discourage or inflame.  It seems that we are spiraling faster toward an unwillingness to accept real truth, especially when it is “inconvenient.”  I told my husband at breakfast this morning, “Maybe I’m just feeling cynical today.”  Honestly?  It’s hard not to.  But when I read Genesis 11, one verse jumped out at me in light of all of the above.

Genesis 11:6 (GWT)–The Lord said, “They are one people with one language.  This is only the beginning of what they will do!  Now nothing they plan to do will be too difficult for them.”

Voices in unison can be loud, can’t they?  What exactly happens when a mob mentality takes control?  Look at the near-rioting that happens on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill after a serious ACC win… or loss.  People do things in a group that they would never do as individuals.  That group vibe sweeps over and WHAM!  Mayhem ensues.

And now, thanks to social media and 24/7 television coverage, we are beginning to believe that anyone who speaks en mass is speaking the truth.  “If enough people say it…”  Oh, my heart hurts for us.

Why do we do that?  In a way, it is a little bit comforting to know that God witnessed it thousands of years before I came along.  And do you know what?  He did something about it.  He sees how humans can be.  And here’s the crazy thing… He loves us anyway.  Notice the people in Genesis 11 tried to reach heaven, essentially started trying to be their own gods.  But God didn’t destroy them.  He’d done that in the flood and promised not to do it again, so He scattered them.

Makes you wonder why He puts up with us, doesn’t it?  It’s all because He loves us.  That’s incredible.  And it takes that cynicism that’s been shoving in and squashes it.  No matter what the crowd may say or do, my God is alive and well and on His throne.  Amen!

-JB

So, the writing life got put on hold for a month or so.  It’s good to be back.  I think it was also good for me to “miss” my story for a bit, because I was seriously getting tired of revising it and the ending had me stuck.  With a little time away, the knots have unraveled and the problem has revealed itself.  Now to work that puppy through the last half or revision and to sub it!

So, why have I been silent?  Well, my amazing husband retired from the Army in June.  In November, we were given the opportunity to purchase my grandmother’s house.  She died nearly three years ago, and her home is the home I pretty much grew up in.  To be able to live in it was an amazing blessing to both my husband and to me.  After much, much, much dealing with banks and painters and plumbers and various other contractors, we moved in this month.  Let me tell you… there in a very big difference in having the Army pack and move you and in packing and moving yourself.  While you’re working.  And you’re in charge of your school’s spelling bee.  And grades are due.  And you have eighty poetry projects to get back to kids.  And you have to live in the middle of all of that.

But, glory to God alone, we did it!  The house is nearly unpacked.  As soon as I’m happy with how things look, there will be pictures because, let me tell you, I’m in love with my new office.  There’s a multi-layered story behind it that I can’t wait to share, but that can wait until another day.  First, I have to buy a rug to cover the hardwood floor we have yet to refinish.

Until then, hope all is well with you.  I’m over at Winning the War at Home today, blogging about the crazy “addictions” that get wives through deployment if you want to visit!

-JB

Crazy busy Wednesday in my neck of the woods!  But our move is pretty much finished (just a few odds and ends left to gather up), and we are settling in.  So happy!  Sat on our porch last night and stared out at the dark behind our house.  Suh-weet…

Genesis 10:32 (NIV)–These are the clans of Noah’s sons, according to their lines of descent, within their nations.  From these the nations spread out over the earth after the flood.

God is AMAZING.  No sooner had he destroyed the earth because of the wickedness of people… No sooner had the righteous Noah passed out in his tent in a drunken stupor… No sooner had two sons totally disrespected their father…  And God started all over again.

That’s grace.  Love.  The unexplained mystery of our Almighty.  He doesn’t hold a grudge.  No, really.  I want you to stop and think about that one for a second.  He. Doesn’t. Hold. A. Grudge.  He didn’t give up when Adam and Eve fell.  He didn’t give up when the whole world fell to pieces and only Noah’s family was left.  He didn’t give up when even Noah tripped and smashed his face in the mud.

So what makes you think you’re the one who’s going to reach the end of His patience and mercy?  Can’t we be pretty arrogant sometimes in our self-condemnation?  We start to think surely He can’t forgive us… Surely we’re the ones who are going to cause Him to throw His hands in the air and give up.

But we’re not.  If we understood His infinite love and His awesome grace, we’d know.  We’d know He’s not giving up.  He loves us too much to walk away before the final “The End.”

Aren’t we all glad He’s a God like that?

-JB

I have nothing deep today. (I’m also a day late, but we won’t discuss that.) Instead, I have a picture to go with the verse that spoke to me in Genesis 9.

Genesis 9: 12-16 (GWT)–And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

Where I live, rainbows are not rare occurrences.  They are not daily occurrences by any means, but to see two or three dim ones a year is not unheard of.  Still, to see something like this photo makes my knees weak with awe at God:

Last April, that was the view from my back deck.  If you walked onto my front porch, you saw the other end, clear as could be, visible even through the trees.  You can see it if you look on this photo as well.  It was so close we could touch it.  It lasted half an hour.  Little girl and I could not stop looking at it.  Even better, it was visible to our friends fifteen miles away and possibly even further than that.  A perfectly arced, clearly visible, incredibly lasting double rainbow.

A double rainbow a week before my husband came home from deployment.

A double rainbow one year after large chunks of Middle Tennessee lay under unprecedented floodwaters.

A double rainbow after months of crazy snow and even stranger tornado warnings.

A double rainbow after the storm of a very long deployment.

Oh, how I needed–how so many on our military base needed–to know that God is God and is still and always there.  His promise, His reminder.  It was like a love letter painted across the sky.  Even now, it brings tears to my eyes.

Every time I read Genesis 9 and every time I see a rainbow, I am struck by God’s truth and His promises, His existence and His eternity, His faithfulness and His love.

Oh, He is so good.  So, so very good.

-JB

One chapter at a time.  It forces you to really focus, doesn’t it?  Eight weeks in and I’ve already seen more in Genesis than I ever noticed before.  God amazes me.  It’s not a cliche’; you can read the Bible a hundred times and see something different every single time.  I love those moments when I read a familiar verse and God drops something relevant to my life at the moment, something that has been hidden from me until needed.  God’s cool like that, isn’t He?

Genesis 8:1 (GWT)–God remembered Noah and all the wild and domestic animals with him in the ship. So God made a wind blow over the earth, and the water started to go down.

“God remembered Noah.”  (Want to hear something cool, in the Amplified Bible, it says “God earnestly remembered Noah.”  LOVE that!)  It’s not that God ever forgot Noah.  To me, the word here is about how, in the midst of the destruction of humanity and its depravity, he never forgot Noah.  He always remembered Noah and his family were there, floating in that boat, likely bewildered and perhaps a little frightened, even in the midst of their extreme faith.

We all know deliverance is a big issue to me, and this week I read something I’d never realized before.  I don’t usually go to a concordance for Word Wednesday, but I was looking for something and was in Matthew Henry’s Bible Commentary.  He said something interesting about Genesis 8:1:  “…God’s remembering Noah, was the return of his mercy to mankind, of whom he would not make a full end. The demands of Divine justice had been answered by the ruin of sinners. God sent his wind to dry the earth, and seal up his waters. The same hand that brings the desolation, must bring the deliverance; to that hand, therefore, we must ever look. When afflictions have done the work for which they are sent, whether killing work or curing work, they will be taken away.”

I love that!  I’m not even sure I can add to that.   To be honest, I’m not even sure I want to add to that.  As someone who was afflicted and delivered, Henry’s commentary blows my mind.  And there it was tucked into Noah’s story in a way I’d never really considered before.  Deliverance is everywhere in the Bible.  In fact, doesn’t the whole Word point to our ultimate deliverance in Christ?  Since so much of God is wrapped up in deliverance, shouldn’t we live lives expecting it and celebrating it?  Hm.  Something to think about when we’re tossed by storms that seem to have no end.

Even though it’s not Monday, that brings a song to mind.  In fact, one of the teachers here played it for devotions this morning.  No such thing as a coincidence, is there?  God’s fingerprints are all over this one:

-JB

There is nothing particularly deep to today’s song choice.  It’s just been in my head a whole lot lately.  It’s another one running across this campus like wildfire.  Even we teachers can’t stop singing it.  (You do know you have to be slightly out of your head to be a teacher–especially a middle school teacher–right?  At any rate, this one is amazing, and it’s one we should be shouting to the world at the top of our lungs, especially now.

Newsboys – God’s Not Dead (Official Music Video) from emimusic on GodTube.