partsofspeaking

Pane--something to see through.  Pain: no definition needed.  Royal: Aristocracy, monarchy, kings and queens and princes and princesses. Royal: extreme (colloquial) Megan Markle interviewed by Oprah. Didn't watch it. Don't care. Have been inundated with messages ever since. Get her off my feed, off my screen. Talk about a royal pain! What's worse, we're told to feel sorry for her! Oprah gave us "pane" to see into this woman's soul. It was very clear.

  But if you’re going to create, you’re going to find out that the way you work will not look a whole lot like the way your accountant works. Logically, this makes a whole lot of sense. But it can be threatening in practice, because creativity often thrives as a result of the very behaviors that others label as lazy or self-indulgent or some other horrid judgment that might be appropriate were you a cog in a wheel that cannot turn without your constant and unimaginative presence. from Elizabeth Percer, https://lithub.com/the-first-rule-of-novel-writing-is-dont-write-a-novel/ 

 I love this clip of R.C Sproul: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHQq46wv6_E The question he asks, in frustration, has caused people to put those words on a mug (to make money!) and to compare him to Larry David or Bernie Sanders. He kind of reminds me of Howard Beale in Network: I'm mad as ....." His frustration with the question is real, especially considering who is in the audience. And Vodie Baucham's head shaking is funny. The rest of the clip is very good, too. You can learn a lot on YouTube. I just learned David Platt is telling us how racist we are.

Every day or so, I look at how my books on Amazon are doing. Not well. Not at all. I haven't sold on in a month. Sigh.  Of course, one of the ones that is out of print is listed for $904.16.  I don't know what that seller is thinking. I would have to do something really amazing and fame-inducing to sell a book for that much! However, most of them are less than $10.  Please give them a look: Barbara G. Tucker and Barbara Graham Tucker. 

 I go from a quasi, squishy defense of the Georgia Election bill to using a term like "cultural appropriation." I hope readers are confused.  I was in a writers group meeting in the last year (therefore it was virtual) where something interesting happened. Two born and bred Protestants started "splaining" to the one Jewish member about the Old Testament and Judaism. Yeah.  I'm still perplexed, and the Jewish member was gracious but, I think, confused. Their information (I don't remember the specifics, but it had to do with Jewish customs in the first century) came not from Judaistic sources but what they had been taught second hand through Bible studies. And these are smart people, so it's not an issue that they were wrong, so much as, I would say, out of their lane.  Can you imagine a Muslim telling a Baptist what the meaning of baptism is? There are any number of examples. Now, one can argue that religionists don't always know everything about thei

 We've had a lot of rain and storms here in the Tennessee Valley/North Georgia region. The ground is saturated and since there is a lot of variation in the elevations, we have high water and flooding.  This Sunday I taught the Bible study, and I did it around how we picture faith. I asked the women to draw a picture of what faith looked like to them, then showed some photos/art. This was one of them: It's not exactly what I was looking for, but it suffices. Someone is being rescued from his rooftop by a helicopter. We'll assume it's a flood.  There's an old joke about a man floating on his roof during a flood. He prays, "God, rescue me!" A man in a boat comes by. "I'm here to rescue you." "No, I'm waiting for God to rescue me!" The man rows on. Then a man on a jet ski comes by. "I'm here to rescue you--jump on!"  "No, God will rescue me!"  Then a helicopter comes by and drops a basket with a first respond

 I'm seeing on Twitter (why I go to that cesspool of uninformed dramatic outrage I don't know) that Delta is trending because it made an official statement that it supports the Georgia Election Bill passed this week. Leftist Twitter is freaking out that they will never drink a Coke or fly on Delta again. I doubt many of those people even fly.  That is their right, of course. But I decided to get some information on this "racist" bill. I got it from Public Broadcasting, which I feel is a safe source.  https://www.gpb.org/news/2021/03/27/what-does-georgias-new-voting-law-sb-202-do Note: "One of the biggest changes in the bill would expand early voting access for most counties, adding an additional mandatory Saturday and formally codifying Sunday voting hours as optional. Counties can have early voting open as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at minimum. If you live in a larger metropolitan county, you might not notice a change. For most other coun

From the House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. A searing depiction of existential ennui; the person described is Lily Bart, whom I'm beginning to see as one of the most fascinating characters in modern lit. "These thoughts so engaged her that she fell into a gait hardly likely to carry her to church before the sermon, and at length, having passed from the gardens to the wood-path beyond, so far forgot her intention as to sink into a rustic seat at a bend of the walk. The spot was charming, and Lily was not insensible to the charm, or to the fact that her presence enhanced it; but she was not accustomed to taste the joys of solitude except in company, and the combination of a handsome girl and a romantic scene struck her as too good to be wasted. No one, however, appeared to profit by the opportunity; and after a half hour of fruitless waiting she rose and wandered on. She felt a stealing sense of fatigue as she walked; the sparkle had died out of her, and the ta

  I’m reading Shirley Jackson's We Always Lived in the Castle. So subtly chilling. This paragraph strikes me as the soul of the book I found a nest of baby snakes near the creek and killed them all; I dislike snakes and Constance had never asked me not to. I was on my way back to the house when I found a very bad omen, one of the worst. My book nailed to a tree in the pine woods had fallen down. I decided that the nail had rusted away and the book -- it was a little notebook of our father's, where he used to record the names of people who owed him money, and people who ought, he thought,to do favors for him -- was useless now as protection. I had wrapped it very thoroughly in heavy paper before nailing itto the tree, but the nail had rusted and it had fallen. I thought I had better destroy it, in case it was now actively bad, and bring something else out to the tree, perhaps a scarf of our mother's, or a glove. It was really too late, although I did not know it then; he w

 https://youtu.be/h2ld1wI2hT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMWrAqMWhWs or this version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJl8mBzcPeM   (stick around for the whole thing) and this one, from Keith and Kristin Getty, which our choir sang this morning gloriously:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWFFKxIw3HM  

In Mark 2 we have the enigmatic story of four friends breaking up the roof of a home where Jesus is teaching in order to lower their paralyzed companion down before Jesus for healing. Jesus says, because He can and because He knows what he’s doing and what will happen, “Your sins are forgiven.” We could get into the weeds here, as they say. Jesus taught elsewhere that, in contrast to the Pharisees, infirmity was not (necessarily) a result of sin “either of this man or his parents.” (John 9) But this man, like all of us, needed forgiveness, and perhaps he lived under the fear that his paralysis was due to a sin in his life (and perhaps it was, somehow; we can’t know). The Pharisees take the bait, and accuse Him of taking God’s place in forgiving sins. Jesus answered, “What is easier, to say sins are forgiven” (of which there is no outward proof, but the priests in the temple did it all the time) or “you are healed and get up and walk? So to prove to you I have th

  So learn to “speak the Gospel” to one’s heart. For example, when the law creeps into your conscience, learn to be a cunning logician—learn to use arguments of the Gospel against it. Say: O law! You would climb up into the kingdom of my conscience, and there reign and condemn me for sin, and would take from me the joy of my heart which I have by faith in Christ, and drive me to desperation, that I might be without hope. You have overstepped your bounds. Know your place! You are a guide for my behavior, but you are not Savior and Lord of my heart. For I am baptized, and through the Gospel am called to receive righteousness and eternal life...So trouble me not! For I will not allow you, so intolerable a tyrant and tormentor, to reign in my heart and conscience—for they are the seat and temple of Christ the Son of God, who is the king of righteousness and peace, and my most sweet savior and mediator. He shall keep my conscience joyful and quiet in the sound and pure doctrine of the Gos

The Gottman Institute studies what makes marriages work. This article is one of many that cites their work. https://www.sciencealert.com/7-things-that-predict-divorce-according-to-science   See #4: Showing contempt for your partner John Gottman, a psychologist at the University of Washington and the founder of the Gottman Institute, calls certain relationship behaviors the " four horsemen of the apocalypse ". That's because they predict divorce with scary-high accuracy: Contempt: Seeing your partner as beneath you. (Gottman calls this behavior the "kiss of death" for a relationship.) Criticism: Turning a behavior into a statement about your partner's character. Defensiveness: Playing the victim during difficult situations. Stonewalling: Blocking off conversation. As Business Insider's Erin Brodwin reported , these conclusions are based on a 14-year study of 79 couples living across the US Midwest, whic

I am reading the minor prophets, or as the saying goes, they are reading me as I struggle with them. Mainly with their relevance today. Perhaps a book will come of this; I equally struggle with my writing because I can continue to use Amazon as the free vanity press it is, or I can try to be "discovered" by a real publishing house, or better, I can find a way to get readers. Or I can just let God take care of it and write what I write.  Anyway, this is today's installment. It will look like I've skipped a lot of the minor prophets since my last such post, but that is only appearance.  March 18, 2021, Zechariah 4. For this one I depend on the notes in the Believers’ Study Bible, which is an SBC production. In Zechariah’s fifth vision he sees and talks about a lampstand with two trees, olive probably, and oil drips into the receptacles continually so that the lights do not go out.   The message is very particular to the governor and priest at that ti

 A year ago today we got the news that the world was shutting down. No March Madness, no NBA, no school, no baseball, no movies. Soon, businesses were put under pressure to close for a while. My college and almost all others went to online/distance instruction. (I would say we went to online/distance delivery; how much instruction and learning happened is another matter.) Students were sent home and sometimes given refunds for dormitory payments.  I went out to eat breakfast with some missionary friends a year ago today (it would have been March 11) at Cracker Barrel and already the servers were spraying down tables with disinfectant. That was my last meal out for a couple of months. At that time, we were promised a few weeks of this extra caution to flatten the curve. No one knew what would happen. Perhaps a few did, and they lied to us nobly to keep the public from panicking, which they did anyway in regard to toilet paper (a mystery forever as to why toilet paper was the product of

 “What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn’t happen much, though.”  This is a quote from JD Salinger, not exactly one of my favorites (or all that prolific as a writer), but it's a good quote. 

In the aftermath of the horrible truths about Ravi Zacharias, I have scoured my memory of his sermons for indications of what was going on.  One stands out. He said once that unbelievers should judge a religious system by its founder, not its adherents. HUMMM. #1, that's not really what Jesus said. "They will know you are my disciples by your love for each other," and similar verses (that would be a good study). Our lifestyles do matter. Granted, a lot of evil people have claimed the name of Christ (which was his point), which gives individuals today all the more reason to live above reproach, as we are clearly commanded.  #2: Was that a tell? Was he in that statement thinking of his own deviations and deviancies?  I wonder when pondering on this matter when it actually started. I think we can start well but an accumulation of factors can lead us to begin to believe our own press. Christian celebrities have a greater temptation here, which is why there should be no such t

 I really don't. I really should just keep my opinions to myself. But I teach the Bible, I attend a Southern Baptist Church, and I've read her books and watched a few of her studies.  First, she has every right to leave the convention and I can't say I blame her. I don't know what her real reasons are. One might think she could stay and fight the evils she sees (and that are there, I'm not mocking), but that's easy for someone else.  Second, will she take a bunch of women with her? Not if their churches are doing what they should in discipleship, mission, care, and fellowship. I think most are, so I don't see a mass exodus. I don't know of any women who would leave their church just because she's going to be Presbyterian or nondenominational. Third, I do admire her for speaking truth to powerful people about Trump and sexual abuse. White evangelicals need to "come to Jesus" about Trump, but that's another subject. Fourth, she is a chari

 Last night I attended a church event for women. It was inspiring and emotional and heart felt. There is not criticism in this piece, only reflection on my own experience.  A panel of women spoke meaningfully of God’s faithfulness in their lives. But a voice said to me, that voice of debate and questioning I can't seem to quell, "Were they really talking about their own faithfulness? That they kept believing and praying and living in the “Christian way” even when their immediate situations were hopeless or crumbling around them?" I'm not proud of that voice, but I'm going to interrogate it.  A young woman who lost her baby—unthinkable, and she didn’t say what had happened to him, only that he was unresponsive and in the hospital for a month—told that two family members were converted and one brought back from estrangement. And they had more children, not replacements but gifts. Gifts to make up for the baby’s loss? Gifts for being faithful and not dismissing God f

  Brilliant post from a pastor friend

 I originally wrote this last June. It begins with the scraping of plates with forks. She knows from this sound that the next step, what comes after us sitting at the table and largely ignoring her, is about to take place. She gets to lick plates. She gets to lick pots and pans, sometimes.   Then the shorter one, the one with the higher voice, the one who leaves and comes back over and over, puts the white shoes on her feet. “Go” “Car” “Walk” “Nala.” Those are the signals. Almost every night of my life since spring of 2011, we have followed this ritual. Some nights it is raining or threatening rain, so the walk is unlikely or impossible. Early on the other shorter dogs, males, Buddy and then Bumper, came with us. But Buddy had to be put to sleep and Bumper was given away, a story we do not need to recount. Most of the nights after dinner we climb into the Volvo station wagon. She is put in the back but it’s pointless; she comes to the front immediately to get a full view of whe