Lessons for Living

Two Men

First, from today’s reading:

Sanduk Ruit is a Nepalese doctor who has used his scalpel, microscope, and simplified cataract surgery technique to give sight to almost 70,000 people over the past 23 years. The poorest patients who visit his nonprofit eye center in Katmandu pay with just their gratitude.

Source: Our Daily Bread: Restoring Spiritual Sight

And next, from yesterday’s selection:

Philip Pullman is a gifted writer of fantasy books. His Dark Materials trilogy includes The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass and is very popular among young readers. But below the surface of these sympathetic characters and compelling subplots is a sinister purpose. The story culminates in a great war against God.

In these books, Pullman views the fall of Satan as a righteous cause for personal independence from God’s “tyrannical” control. He implies that Satan’s attempt to usurp the throne of God was the right thing to do!

Dandelion Eradication

Dandelion
Eradication
And
Destruction

Because I want them DEAD.

This year we’re doing something different. We’re picking off the tops. That ought to do it.

This morning I picked the ones that were visible. And took them on a walk. Down our driveway to the highway below. Now they’re DEAD.

I even took some photos with my cellphone. Because of image quality issues, I didn’t make the images below Clickable-Into-A-Bigger-Size.

Read it all

Coming to a…Near You

Yeah, I didn’t want to use Church in the title. Maybe because I didn’t want to lose you. So please read on a little further, at least. 🙂

So, yes, (likely) coming to a church near you:

Harmony in the Home
Ephesians 5:21 – 6:4
May 24, 2009

That’s to be next Sunday’s lesson in many churches.

And I’m supposed to send out something on that subject to over 4000 subscribers.

Earlier this morning I decided to just use something I wrote back in 1999:

A Glorious Home Life

Using something I wrote long ago seems safest at this point. 😯

Psalm 88 Fits

I got to Psalm 88 in my Spanish Bible reading this morning.

Wow! Talk about a shoe that fits!

Here are just the first three verses:

1 O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee:

2 Let my prayer come before thee: incline thine ear unto my cry;

3 For my soul is full of troubles: and my life draweth nigh unto the grave.

As usual, I made a wallpaper to go with it:

Llegue mi oración -- Salmo 88.2 -- Psalm 88:2

Ringing Quote

Ringing in my ears, that is. (Does that mean I have tinnitus?!) 😆

“He’s healthier than you are.” 😯

About someone half my age. 🙄

😀

Nevertheless, a good reminder to go from sedimentary to sedentary to healthier.

Now…if he’s twice as healthy as I am (being half as old as I), could I possibly be twice as discerning, wise, considerate, spiritual, and balanced as he?

Sigh — alas, such things just don’t hold true. 😆

Seriously, though, what do I have to show for all my years lived and all the aging I’ve done?

What about you?

Did You Know?

Three words spoke to my heart this morning. May they continue to echo there:

Father, forgive them

No, you didn’t know that. But now you do. And that fits in with this:

Are you a twit if you don’t want to Twitter?

Last month, Alex Slater took it a step farther. He dumped his Twitter account and stripped the information on his Facebook page to a minimum. Though he has more than 600 “friends” on Facebook, he checks it much less often.

“Being exposed to details, from someone’s painful breakup to what they had for breakfast – and much more sordid details than that – feels like voyeurism,” says the 31-year-old public relations executive in Washington, D.C. “I’m less concerned with protecting my privacy, and more concerned at the ethics of a ‘human zoo’ where others’ lives, and often serious problems, are treated as entertainment.”

Yes, I have a Twitter account. No, I don’t have a raft-load of Facebook Friends. Yes, I think the above article is worth reading in full. No, I don’t plan to announce on Twitter that I had two cups of coffee and two Tylenol so far this morning.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook:

Fast-growing Facebook’s user base hits 200 million

Facebook also updated its display of site statistics.

According to these, more than half of its users log in to the site at least once a day, and the fastest-growing demographic is people over 35. About 70 percent of Facebook users are outside the United States (MySpace still claims to be the nation’s largest social network).

For those itching to know if they are popular enough: the average user has 120 “friends” on the site.

And speaking of friends, do friends let friends over-text?

Hammer time for cell phone used to run up $5K billA cell phone used by a Wyoming 13-year-old to run up a nearly $5,000 phone bill will text no more thanks to her angry father and his hammer. Dena Christoffersen of Cheyenne sent or received about 20,000 text messages over about a month, and her parents’ phone plan didn’t cover texting.

🙄

Meanwhile, some other “friends” are waking up around the globe:

Huge worm stirring to life

The dreaded Conficker computer worm is stirring. Security experts say the worm’s authors appear to be trying to build a big moneymaker, but not a cyber weapon of mass destruction as many people feared.

As many as 12 million computers have been infected by Conficker. Security firm Trend Micro says some of the machines have been updated over the past few days with fake antivirus software – the first attempt by Conficker’s authors to profit from their massive “botnet.”

So, this post begins by featuring a Friend. (And what a Friend we have in Jesus!)

Now it ends featuring someone else’s friend:

Woman finds cashiers check and returns it

But just as she was about to do her part for a cleaner planet and deliver the paper from the parking lot to a trash can, she noticed it was a real cashier’s check with a real signature.

“I couldn’t believe it. I almost passed out,” Curtis, who works as a loan negotiator, told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “I have never seen a check that big. Not in my possession, anyway.”

She immediately set out to find its rightful recipient….

Good day?!

Above all, love God!