9/10/12 - WORTH REPEATING

The purpose, by the way, I think, of scripture is to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.

~ Brett Meador from Athey Creek Christian Fellowship (9/5/12)


********


I don’t care how you birth your baby.

No one needs to defend their choice to use the services of a hospital or get an epidural or elect to have a cesarean in these posts. Please don’t feel threatened by my story. If we meet some day and it comes out that you didn’t give birth at home, I won’t care one thing about it. Promise.

Because, let’s get real here. How you push a baby out really doesn’t make a lick of difference in the grand scheme of things. Neither does if you breastfed your baby, or co-slept with your baby, or gave your baby pacifier or how you got your baby to sleep through the night. And anyone who cares about these things so much as to threaten a relationship really needs to get a hobby or spend some time considering mothers around the world who don’t have the luxury of time to think of anything but survival.

~ Angela at Frugal Living NW


********


"There's a big difference between bringing your attention to something that's awry and a complaint," Blake says. "Typically, people who are complaining don't want a solution; they just want you to join in the indignity of the whole thing. You can almost hear brains clink when six people get together and start saying, 'Isn't it terrible?' This will damage your brain even if you're just passively listening. And if you try to change their behavior, you'll become the target of the complaint."

~ Minda Zetlin at Inc.


********


I had this idea in my mind that BECAUSE I was homeschooling, and expending all of that effort, time, and money, that it would be an equation that would look like this: Kore's effort + good books = spiritually onfire kids who change the world.  I'm pretty sure I even said OUTLOUD that I was doing this to produce the above.

< snip >

So I was sitting by this gal at church one day who has more energy in her left pinky than I have in my entire body, and when she learned that I was a 'homeschooler' (but before I was able to interject that we weren't any more) wanted to talk shop.  And it was in this conversation that I realized how wrong I had been about the whole thing and didn't even know it.  I was sitting there, looking at MYSELF 5 years ago, seeing the Kore that believed that I had wrangled some guarantee out of God because of my noble sacrifices as a homeschool Mom.

See, folks.  God made our kids to follow HIM, not us.  He made them and created them with a will and a nature all their own, so they could follow HIS ways, not ours.  I had this confused.  I am not selfish person, but I for sure had mixed up who is God and who is NOT.

Yes.  We should train up our children in the way they should go.  But HE directs it.  I feel such a relief to not be carrying this burden anymore.  It frees me up to just plain love my girls.

~ Kore at There and Back Again.


********


It’s fun to pick on the Pharisees right up until the moment I become one at the supermarket. This happened the other day when I was in the 10 items or less check out line.

I respect that line. I don’t casually stand in it. If I have 11 items in my basket I either go to a different line or I vote off one item Survivor style. “OK ketchup, why don’t you feel like the bread deserves to be in this line with us? Why should it be sent back home to the bread aisle?”

And last week, when I had but one item in my hands, the lady in front of me had 21. How do I know? Because I counted them. With my crazy fast Pharisee eyesight. I then started to think the following:

< snip ... but you really should go read his funny list >

And then she left.

I asked the two people who were running the cash register if they ever noticed people had more than 10 items in this line. They laughed and said, “All the time, but we have to let them in. That’s our policy.”

Then they said, “But we have more grace than you since Christ died for us.”

OK, they didn’t say that, but I felt like they probably could have.

~ Jon Acuff at Stuff Christians Like