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What's in a Name

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 I'm here to tell you that Sheila, Mark's car of 20 years, has died [more precisely, has been donated to public radio, but the fact remains that she no longer runs]. Mark was starting his drive home from St. Louis when Sheila just...stopped. He started her up again, and she reasserted her stationary status. He did a manual override to get her off the road [ie put her in neutral and rolled off to the side down the hill], and then called a tow.  And thus began the search for the ideal car . [Unfortunately, I don't think cars, or people, have achieved perfection on earth, but the pressure to find the closest-to-perfect still exists]. It needed to have safety features like a backup camera, curtain airbags, and superb crash test results. I stipulated that it needed to have air vents to the rear seat, as I had noticed that Nathan can get warm sitting back there in his carseat. We preferred a hybrid, for environmental and gas-price reasons. The car also needed room for his strolle...
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Take a Second for First Aid

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 You may recall that I was an Activity Days person for  kids aged 8-11 for our congregation back in DC. Well, I may never completely escape it. Mark was asked to be the Activity Days person for boys aged 8-11 for our congregation here in Illinois, and he wanted me to help teach a First Aid lesson to them. Which I did. Okay, mostly Mark did the teaching--because he's good interacting with kids--but I prepared the lessons. Not sure the kids actually enjoyed  it (one of them asked at the end of the night "Are we doing anything fun today?"), but the parents must have thought it was useful, because we got asked to teach First Aid to the older boys [aged 12-17]. And by golly, I thought up some good activities, so we're documenting it. Heimlich Maneuver : I pinched off small pieces of bread and rolled them into balls that could fit in a bunch of straws, then lodged a bread ball into the end of each straw that I handed out to each boy to then blow into a tub. The idea is the ...
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God is With Us in Adversity

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  I was asked recently to give a talk on Joseph of Egypt. I'm sharing an expanded version here because I want everyone to see it and draw strength from it. Everybody has trials. Every single person. But the universality of it hasn't yet provided a satisfactory answer on the necessity behind each of those hard times. Sure, we have theories. Maybe the difficulties stem from agency--either we or someone else made a poor choice, and now we get to learn from the consequences. Maybe the struggles are because we live in a fallen world (aka "mortality") and we need the trials to become better people worthy of living with God. Maybe we are suffering because God made a bet with Satan [I'm thinking Job here] and we just need to hang on long enough to have full vindication and double the blessings we had before.  We've come up with phrases to offer to those who are suffering-- "God is in the details." or  "You're going through a refiner's fire....
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