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Thursday, 26 November 2009
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Thankfulness (update)
thank|ful: adjective
It's been A year. A year ago this month, the Lord told me He has a job for me in Israel. Seven months later, I found myself in Jerusalem.
Now I'm in Wales. This year has been one of lessons, new experiences, new friends and new items on the list of why I'll be eternally grateful to my God.
One thing am most thankful at this moment is direction. After much waiting, I believe I'm making out a shape in the misty distance of where I'm headed. No details now, but I do see myself back in Jerusalem in February. That piece of knowledge has given me some peace as I continue to wait.
The Lord has blessed me with a handful of true, eternal friendships... and He added to that select number this year. There are acquaintances... there are friends... there are sisters... and there are best (for eternity) friends.
Both Richard and Necia have been amazing conduits of God's grace, love and provision as I learn deeper lessons of how to live by faith and serve God in different capacities. In my time here, Necia has proven to be the close friend I needed in this moment... a confidant and encourager. I can see, though, that this friendship will go beyond this moment. Those are the friendships that I've sought from God (with tears sometimes). They only come once in a while... but there is a peace in knowing that there will be a tomorrow, even if time ends tonight. What amazing peace and joy in knowing we serve the same God and have the same hope of the age to come.
I am also most grateful for a supportive family. They've been patient and understanding as I wait on the Lord. Sometimes I don't have answers for the "when are you coming home?" question, but they've been gracious in waiting for me to hear from the Lord.
I've introduced my lovely hosts to pumpkin pie. I do believe they liked it.
Necia made us a proper, if different, Thanksgiving feast: jerk chicken, plantains, green beans, butternut squash and garlic-cheddar mashed potatoes (not shown).
Next on the what-do-Americans-eat-and-drink menu: egg nog. Yeah. Found some nice recipes online. I'll share if they work out. It's amazing the lengths one will go to get at least a taste home. But I do love to learn. Shalom.
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Perseverance of the Chinese Christians
News with a side of .... photographyJust a few items today... a wonderful, surprising piece on the underground church in China... a look at Sarah Palin's thoughts on having a special-needs child... and -- for the photo geeks -- a GIANT camera on wheels.
I highly recommend that you click through on the first two to read them in their entirety.
In the northeast part of Bejing, not far from the old Friendship Hotel, stands a boxy little cinema specializing in anime. A nondescript building on a nondescript thoroughfare, it's hardly a place a tourist would notice, much less a visiting president. Yet had Barack Obama wanted to understand something of the real China, his time would have been better spent there. At 10 a.m. Sunday, more than 500 members of Shouwang church gathered at the cinema for a service. Shouwang, founded in 1993 by pastor Jin Tianming, is one of the city's largest unregistered churches and counts around 800 regular members. But until last weekend, they had never once been able to meet in such large numbers in an indoor space in Beijing. Shouwang is what is known in China as a "house" church, meaning that it is an unregistered entity in a country where all religious groups are supposed to report to the State Administration for Religious Affairs. Chinese and foreign observers alike believe the number of Chinese belonging to underground churches may now exceed 100 million people. That figure has grown rapidly as more and more Chinese, particularly well-educated city dwellers, turn away from Communist Party atheism. - WALL STREET JOURNAL
[tags: news, obama, china, christianity]
Excerpt from "Going Rogue": I just wasn't ready; my sisters were the ones who could handle this, not me. Did I have enough love and compassion in me to do this? Don't you have to be wired a little differently to be gifted with the ability to raise a special-needs child, a child who isn't “perfect” in the eyes of society? I didn't know if I should be ashamed of myself for even thinking these things. I read that almost 90% of Down syndrome babies are aborted — so wasn't that a message that this is not only a less-than-ideal circumstance, but also one that it is virtually impossible to deal with? Now, just a couple of hours into this new world, I could not get my arms or heart around it. That fleeting thought descended on me again, not a consideration so much as a sudden understanding of why people would grasp at a quick “solution”, a way to make the “problem” just go away. But again, I had to hold on to that seed of faith. - LIFE NEWS.com
It's not often that a photographer can literally stand inside of his camera. But Shaun Irving, who has transformed a truck into a giant, mobile camera obscura, does it all the time. And he says it's the largest, mobile camera in the world. It's a simple construction: There's a small hole with a lens on one side of the truck's lightproof interior. This lens projects an upside-down and backward image on the opposite wall. On that wall, Irving hangs 4-by-8-foot sheets of photo paper, which, when exposed to 5-30 second exposures, serve as giant negatives. He then takes his jumbo negatives to a darkroom, or just a room that's dark, and processes them. The whole process, he says, takes anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours. - NPR.org
[tags: news, blogs, photography]
Visitors to South Africa's premier holiday destination who are worried about becoming victims of the country's high crime rate could find themselves instead robbed by a more furry kind of felon: baboons. The cheeky primates have learned how to open car doors and jump through windows in pursuit of tasty sandwiches and snacks. City officials are battling to control the increasingly aggressive troupes and there are fears the problem will only worsen with the influx of visitors to Cape Town during the World Cup next year. -- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
[tags: food, wildlife, south africa]
Friday, 20 November 2009
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EU has president; Dangers of journalism
I'm behind on a news posts. Just a two quick topics.
First, one for prayer warriors and government watchers. The European Union has named its president: Herman van Rompuy, the prime minister of Belgium.
The last obstacle to the reorganizing of the EU government fell Tuesday when the president of the Czech Republic signed the Lisbon Treaty while still stating his objections.
Coverage is a bit quiet. Here in the UK, people had been paying some attention because former prime minister Tony Blair was gunning for the job. There were no elections. The heads of the 27 member-nations chose in what some called "a series of backroom cabals worthy of a Soviet politburo at its worst. There are no hustings, no candidates' manifestos. No public confirmation hearings are planned."
In response to such criticism, the new EU president said the selection was made by leaders "who were all democratically chosen. I was chosen on the basis of a treaty. The treaty stipulates the procedure. The treaty was democratically approved by 27 member states."Source: www.cnn.comLucio Soria is a recorder of the dead in Ciudad Juarez's drug cartel war. "El Sorias," as he is called by his colleagues, is a photojournalist for the Mexican city's two main daily newspapers, El Diario and El PM. For the last 10 years, his job has been to photograph the bodies and crime scenes left behind after cartel hit men completed their work.
Some people think I'm crazy because I am called to work in Israel as a journalist. I know I am safe as long as I'm in the Lord's will. Also, it seems it's safer in the Middle East than in the city across the river from my hometown. These quotes fascinated me:"The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists reports that 26 journalists have been killed since 2005 in Mexico -- most of them while covering the crime or corruption beats. By comparison, 10 journalists were killed in the same time period while covering the war in Afghanistan."
"Tim Crockett, head of the security firm Pioneer Consulting and security adviser for CNN, described Ciudad Juarez as 'probably more dangerous for journalists than the Middle East.'"
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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Human jumbotron
Something light today, as my brain is a bit overloaded.
The quote on the YouTube page says: "Can you guys stop playing soccer? You're distracting the audience." Also seen at collegehumor.com
Friday, 13 November 2009
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Stoking the heat into a fire
I'm sitting here tending to the remains of a fire in the fireplace. A charred, smoldering log was all that remained, so I broke it up. Inside it was black already, and some places were glowing orange. The fragments were glowing with internal heat, but there was no flame.
So I gathered the fragments with the tongs. I made a sort of pile that had spaces in between. Soon, these merely glowing piece flamed up into a bright, hot tongue of fire.
We believers all have the Holy Spirit within, the fire of God glowing with in. It is good. It is warm. But each piece glows alone in solitude. When we gather ourselves into groups, with room to breathe, but close together nonetheless, God's Mighty Rushing Wind will blow our collective internal heat into a bright, hot tongue of fire.
Revival starts in the individual as an orange glow. The individuals must unite to form families, close enough to share each other's heat but with space enough to let the Spirit flow among the individuals. Then, the glow will become an external flame, bright and hot, calling all who are in darkness and in the cold."Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching." Hebrews 10:24-25
roamingchile
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- Name: Cariño
- Gender: Female
- Member Since: 2/12/2007
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