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Posted on 06/30/2011 10:09:07 PM PDT by JustAmy
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How sweet that is, yorkie!
Thank you. Been a long time since I've hunted those seashells.
"Scientists believe that people born in the next 20 years could live to be 1,000 years old.
How many times would you have to get up to go to the bathroom at that age?"
Jay Leno
"It is no secret that our economy is in the dumpster,
because our economy knows the dumpster is where you can sometimes find old muffins."
–Stephen Colbert
Once my divorce was final, I went to the local Department of Motor Vehicles and asked to have my maiden name reinstated on my driver’s license.
“Will there be any change of address?” the clerk inquired.
“No,” I replied.
“Oh, good,” she said, clearly delighted. “You got the house.”
A lady goes into the butcher shop and as she is walking around the store, she spies a beef tongue in the butcher’s counter. The lady asks, “What in the world is that?”
“Beef tongue,” replies the butcher.
The lady gives a little involuntary shudder, “Ewww! Gross! No way would I put anything in my mouth that came out of an animal’s mouth!”
The butcher nods sympathetically while peeking into the woman’s shopping cart, “I see you’re buying a dozen eggs.”
Real Faith: What It Is—What It’s Not
“Therefore being justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.” Romans 5:1
It’s faith that enables us to live the Christian life. In order to know what faith is, let me tell you what faith is not.
Faith is not a hunch.
Faith is not positive thinking.
Faith is not responding to emotions, feelings, or icicles up and down your spine or miracles, signs and wonders.
Faith is not believing that God can do something.
Faith is knowing that God will. Faith is taking God at His word. Real faith dies to doubt. It is deaf to discouragement. It is blind to impossibilities. Now this is the kind of faith we need.
What kind of faith do you have? Do you have the faith that is small as a mustard seed, but can move a mountain? Ask God for it today.
TRANSFORMATION BEGINS WITH CONFESSION
Transformation begins with confession. The need to confess has customarily been associated with wrong-doing. But that association is incomplete. Confession is good for more than the soul. Confession is one of the most life-affirming actions a human being can take, and it can lead to the formation of a new and often quite different personality.
The need for transformation is obvious. Our country, its organizations and its people are in need of an overhaul. Children are entering kindergarten acting like three-year olds, with a level of violence previously observed only in junior high school. Over fifty percent of marriages now fail, with many partners expecting a future divorce on their wedding day. The gap between the haves and have nots continues to widen. Many are saying that our country has lost its bearings and that our position on the world stage is in jeopardy.
There’s hope in transforming this dismal condition. That hope is found first in personal confession owning or admitting material that was previously hidden from sight, unburdening of our conscience or a cleansing of our souls. When we’ve done something that we are less than pleased with, confession relieves us of the burden either consciously or unconsciously carried. The so-called guilty conscience has been rehabilitated. When we’ve confessed to a person we may have harmed or misled, and offer a remedy, our personal integrity is reestablished.
However, confession does more than uncover incidents about which we feel guilt. A complete confession also reveals the sources of our actions that may have become so automatic that we no longer notice them. Uncovering and discarding the origin of these actions sets us free to create our life anew. Our psyches are like school “blackboards” that collected chalk dust on their surfaces from repeated erasures and can only be read clearly after being wiped with a damp cloth. Confession is the damp cloth for our psyches. Confession is the first step in transforming ourselves, our relationships and our society and is often called by different names: gaining integrity, becoming responsible, enlightenment.
At the level of organization and government taking a group inventory and risking the implementation of this confession may terrify those of us accustomed to “covering our own asses.” But relax. While those may be beneficial, this process does not offer a panacea for all the world’s ills, nor advocate stripping off our clothes and running through the streets, shouting, “Hallelujah, we’re free.” More measured steps on each level will be required, and they all begin with the personal.
A complete confession, one that looks inside at depth and uncovers and discards previously unconscious or unaddressed material, produces a lasting change in our lives and our world, making us available to possibilities in ourselves and our lives that were not previously accessible. It is a private in-depth confession bringing all the clutter in our psyches to the surface, owning it and letting it go, sharing the distilled results of this self-examination with another person and, with some maintenance work, creating a clutter-free life and then sharing the whole experience with our fellows.
Roger that.
We’re gone.
Thank you, teenie!
Celebrating my 60th birthday really changed my perspective on life— I used to think people in their sixties were “old.” Then I started counting the number of productive years I might have left and set the number at 10. I went along with this dead-end kind of thinking until I remembered a very productive co-worker who was 85. So I sought him out to ask what life after 60 was like. He told me of some of the wonderful ministry opportunities the Lord had given him over the last 25 years.
The apostle Paul, referring to himself as “aged” in Philemon 1:9, really resonates with my own sense of aging: “Being such a one as Paul, the aged, . . . I appeal to you for my son Onesimus” (vv.9-10). Paul was asking Philemon to take back his runaway servant Onesimus. Some scholars believe Paul was in his late forties or early fifties when he wrote this—certainly not a senior citizen by today’s standards. But life expectancy in those days was much shorter. Yet despite awareness of his mature years, Paul went on to serve the Lord for several more years.
While we may experience physical or other kinds of limitations, what really matters is that we continue doing what we can for the Lord until He calls us Home.
Read: Philemon 1:1-9
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Adorable, Meg.
By the way, I had those posts removed. He used the ‘f’ word and another bad word referring to the male anatomy! I was furious early this morning.
Thank you Rus, for another good message this morning!
Thank you, jaycee.I did not see them..Glad you had them removed..Someone has serious “issues”...or needs to lay off the booze.
Love it!
He was supposed to start a new job yesterday as a tele-marketer...LOL! Wonder how long that will last. He has serious issues, Meg.
Meg, I’ve been trying to post stuff from my Photobucket graphics and when I try to get the URL I want, it won’t highlight and I can’t get them unless I copy to my computer.
They did a little changing since I was there last. Can you help me out, please?
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