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Showing posts from January, 2023

More Than a Rolling Stop (Ps. 25; James 4:4)

Rest is a lack of motion In the body this looks like a stopping, a ceasing from any kind of physical action; in the mind this looks like an absence of mental exertion or gymnastics.  No disruption. No agitation.  Ironically, reading this post about rest will temporarily cause you to suspend resting either your mind or your body—limited as the physical motion of scrolling upward with your index finger may be and the focusing of your eyes on the text and their moving left to right and downward to follow it—because reading this post requires movement, limited in physical and mental exertion as it may be.  Take a minute and really think about the last time you truly rested intentionally that was not just a collapsing of your body in sleep due to exhaustion. Sobering, isn't it? No noise. No distractions. No exertion. Nothing.  More than likely, you haven’t experienced too awful much of that in this busy, loud world in which we pass through on our way to another better place that is pro

Comparison Kills (Galatians 5:16-17)

Comparison kills. I have been thinking about this a lot this past week, and it all started with pecans. This year, I took a different approach to picking them up, and over a period of about six weeks, each time I walked Ella Jay (my dog), I filled my pockets with pecans I thought looked good and then dumped them into containers by the back door. Each time the wind had a big blow, more pecans fell until last week, I finally asked my husband to go get them cracked and blown because I felt we had passed the time to have any good ones remaining on the ground. When I returned from a short trip to visit my parents, I walked in and saw the bag he left for me, I thought we had a pretty good harvest for a not-so-good year for pecans. And then I started picking out the pecans. Many were obviously shriveled and blackened, rather shockingly so; others were rather dry; some were less than wonderful; several partially blemished, but many were good. However, you would never have known what the she