Saturday, April 12, 2014

Home on Saturday

We had a very nice weekend. We went to Silver Dollar City yesterday morning, went to Olive Garden for lunch. . That evening after a rest, we went to a show on the strip. We get back to the motel about 10:00 and I got to bed about 11:00. This morning after visiting Panera Bread, we went to the Branson Landing. I bought a couple of pair of earrings. Then came on back to Joplin where we ate lunch at (I am so tired I can't remember the name of the restaurant) ...later maybe.

We got back home about 3:00. Bob said he got a nap but I just sat in the recliner with Missy Kitty  in my lap. She seemed very glad to see me again. 

Bob dropped by this evening and brought some more wine..again the Moscatto.  We each had a small glass and watched some TV but then we both were very tired and he went home to get ready for bed. I took a shower and washed my hair and tried to do something with it. I worked on this blog and read my e-mail but then I really needed to get to bed. I am so tired. I drove half the way home. Bob drove the first half.

Tomorrow I will post some photos from Silver Dollar City.

Here they are. 

The first is a photo of Bob while we were resting at the end of our day The second is us watching an Ecuadorian bad we saw when we first came into the park. The third is an Irish band and then I found  I meant to take a photo for the fourth  but instead mistakenly took a video.



Thursday, April 10, 2014

Thursday Again

I didn't sleep as well last night. I awoke at 1:00 and could not get back to sleep. Finally at 2:30, I got up and drank some warm milk. The next time I awoke it was 5:30.

I ate a biscuit for breakfast and we will have leftover chicken and potato pie for lunch with a veggie and a coleslaw which my brother-in-law will bring.

I began packing for our trip to Branson. My eldest son sent me $150....bless his heart... and that will help with the expense. This is the last year Bob and I will buy season tickets. Now we need to use them at least twice this year to get our money's worth out of them. After the rent goes up in June, it will be more difficult to find the money for such extras.  I am very healthy and I am afraid I am going to outlive my savings.

I made an appointment yesterday to have my right eyelid lifted. Four years ago, I had the left one done when it interfered with my contact. Now the right one (which is my good eye) is drooping terribly. I am not returning to the doctor that did the first one. I did not care for him. For one thing, I drove to Wichita from Coffeyville to get there in time for my 10:00 appointment.  He didn't show until 2:30 in the afternoon...without even an apology for his tardiness. There were three or more ahead of me so we did not get home until quite late. That's nonsense. That's a two and a half hour drive  Some of these doctors think they are god.  I received a referral from a friend who had hers done by this Joplin doctor.

We had a sunny morning and Miss Kitty really enjoyed the chair in the dining room. As you can see.



I need to set the table for lunch so I will return to this later......

Here she covers her eyes. She does this quite a bit and I find it so endearing!


More later....

I napped and read all afternoon and now I'm having to charge my Kindle. The nap felt good after last night. Bob will be over after a while and we will see what's on TV. I just took my paper over to him. He is probably reading it and watching the news now.
  

Wednesday, April 9, 2014

Exercise Wednesday

I slept very well again last night. I awoke at 2:00 and went to the bathroom and took my thyroid pill. Then I went back to bed and back to sleep.  I slept to almost 5:00 AM.

This morning I am thawing the spaghetti for our lunch today. I had frozen it last week so we could eat the rest of it later. We will have some more of the garlic bread and a veggie with it. I will thaw some fruit for our dessert. I need to bake some cookies but I'll wait now until we get back from Branson.

I see Pepsi is making a new Pepsi with real sugar. I will change my soda to Pepsi then. I avoid high fructose corn syrup any time I can. I don't drink much soda anymore. I read several years ago about two studies that show that the pancreas and liver cannot process high fructose corn syrup and it just pours the raw corn syrup directly into the blood stream.  I gave up much of my soda then.  That could cause a number of health problems including  heart disease, obesity, cancer, dementia , liver failure, tooth decay, and more.

We will go to exercise class this morning and later I will heat up the spaghetti for lunch.

More later...

Read this excellent article about the HFCS problem.

http://drhyman.com/blog/2011/05/13/5-reasons-high-fructose-corn-syrup-will-kill-you/#comment-221876

Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Windy Tuesday

Another windy day. It's beautiful.. yet the wind is awful!

I went to Independence this morning to have my hair done.  I also stopped and washed my dirty car. I called my daughter about lunch but she is fighting a terrible cold and has a sore throat. Then I came back home and cooked lunch. I made a potato/chicken casserole.  It was very good. I served it with frozen broccoli, and Bob's salad and for dessert we had the rest of the pudding.

I called the Medicine Shoppe to ask about the names of the antibiotics I took last year for the erysipelas on my face. I saw a program on TV last week about a woman  who took an antibiotic and was left with sore muscles and tendonitis.  I went through a battery of tests last year to find out why my arms hurt so much. Everything was negative.  I looked up those antibiotics on the internet and checked out the side effects. One of them called minocycline can cause muscle and tendon aches. Now I know! 

This afternoon, I sat in the recliner with Missy on my lap and read my Kindle. I fell asleep for awhile. Afterward I went to town and had a small Sonic Blast. Now I won't need a smoothie for supper.

This evening we will watch TV. Most evenings Bob comes over to watch TV with me and we have a small glass of wine. We have discovered another new wine. It's a white wine. It's called Moscato and it's kind of carbonated.  It will be good for a change.

More later....

Bob came over and we watched some reruns of the Big Bang Theory and then we discovered that a special about the Dave Clark Five was on PBS so we watched that too. Bob didn't quite make it through the entire program. He went home to go to bed early. 

Monday, April 7, 2014

Rainy Monday

It's a little rainy today and we are forecast for some ore rain today and tonight.   We need the rain but I hope it is finished before we leave for Branson on Friday. I do not like to drive in rain.  It's supposed to be finished by Wednesday.

The money for this coming weekend came from my friends Ron and Joyce.  I have read and critiqued Ron's autobiography and he insisted on paying me for my time. Dear Ron and Joyce..over the years they have sent me money. Ron and I have worked together on a book for the past eight years or more . I have done the scanning of documents and he has done most of the actual writing.  When I went to Hawaii last November at my daughter's expense, they sent me my spending money.  They are wonderful people with hearts of gold.

I slept well last night. I did wake up with a very sore back but once I got off of it, it is fine.  My right arm is a little sore but I slept on it most of the night so that explains it.

This morning  I will go to exercise class alone. Bob has a dental appointment. He has several dental problems that must be dealt with before we leave Friday. We are not sure what he will be able to eat so I will not fix lunch today. If he is up to it, we will go somewhere and eat lunch out.  

Tonight we will put the trash out to the curb for the fourplex.  I hope it will not be raining then.

More later....

They mowed today...at least a young man did. He blew off my patio afterward but left the leaves. I went out and raked the rest of them and put them in a bag and in the trash. 

I went to Caney to get my new contact. It's a sample. Doctor thinks he can improve my small print vision. So far...so good!

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Sunday's Sermon



“Raised to New Life”
April 6, 2014


Background: The Gospel of John is one of the four canonical gospels  in the Bible. This particular gospel begins with the witness and affirmation of John the Baptist and concludes with the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus.

Scholars have proposed the development of a tradition from which the gospel arose. The discourses seem to be concerned with issues of the church-and-synagogue debate present at the time when this gospel was written around 90 – 100 AD.  It is notable that, in this gospel, the community appears to define itself primarily in contrast to Judaism, rather than as part of a wider Christian community. Though Christianity started as a movement within Judaism, Christians and Jews gradually became bitterly opposed.  That was the situation when this gospel was written. 

And the gospel is unique. Only in John does Jesus talk at length about himself and his divine role, often sharing such information with the disciples only. Against the background of the synoptic gospels, Mark, Mathew and Luke, John focuses largely on entirely different miracles (including the resurrection of Lazarus), which are given as signs which were meant to engender faith. Synoptic gospel elements such as parables and exorcisms are not found in John. 

Since it was such a late record, the vast majority of scholars do not believe that John or even one of the original apostles wrote this gospel, and trace it instead to a "Johannine community" which traced its traditions back to John. The gospel itself shows signs of having been composed in three "layers", reaching its final form about 100 AD. 

Many of the stories found in this gospel point toward Jesus as the Logos, God’s supreme gift to humanity.  By this time in history, Gentiles had entered the early community and we see signs of the compromises that the early Christian community was making to accommodate them. The story of Lazarus’ resurrection, therefore, in this story, seems to point toward Jesus’ resurrection.  

The term “this illness does not lead to death” refers to the final resolution, not to the immediate result of Lazarus’ illness. In the same way, a deeper meaning lies behind the words “so that the God may be glorified through it”.  The weeping of Jesus illustrate sto the Gentile community a  knowledge of a God whose heart is broken with anguish for his people. Unlike the Greek gods, and even those of the Romans, who were without passion, compassion or emotion, Jesus brought the news of a God who cares, loves and is compassionate.    

This lays a responsibility for exhibiting the power of God on the believer. God designs that every one of us should be a living proof of God’s power with the believer. Our task is to demonstrate in the most amazing way what God can do in all of us as individuals, even the most sinful of us. For us, every crisis should be an opportunity.  

This power was illustrated in many of the stories shared at our recent women’s retreat.
We not only discussed our blessings in our small groups, we also shared our brokenness. Most of us are broken in some way. To many of those 45 women, sharing confidentially their brokenness seemed to initiate healing.  But that took courage many of them did not know they even had.  They confessed they felt they had been given new life and the power to overcome that brokenness.  

When we are raised to new life, as was Lazarus, we are called to be courageous. Real courage means being perfectly aware of the worst that can happen, many times being sickeningly afraid of it and yet going ahead and doing the right thing. We then are living proof of the power of God that resides within each of us.
Think of what wonders we might experience if we ceased acting for just ourselves and instead made discovering God’s will for our lives and ways to bring ministry to others our central focus. 

An important question is what part of the Community of Christ  theology can build on this Christ-centered theology of peace and justice? Let me start by quoting Burton L. Mack, “The excitement created by talk of the Kingdom of God [by Jesus and his disciples] may be difficult for some modern readers to grasp. This is because the Christian religion is often thought to be solely about personal salvation, not the vision of a "sane society.”   We all have this vision as a part of our heritage, but we also have the baggage of old ideas. In many churches today, congregations have muted their proclamation that the good news of the gospel was  God’s kingdom of peace and justice and instead have substituted preaching that the good news is that “Jesus died for our sins.”

On the positive side, we have the Doctrine and Covenants.  We need to recognize the insight of those in our past who changed its title from the Book of Commandments, and include this concept of ‘covenant’ in our search to define peace and justice….in other words God’s Kingdom.  The book is rich in insights about this gospel of the kingdom. Within it’s pages, the stated reason for our being as an organization is to restore this gospel of the kingdom to the earth. In our past, we have suggested that the church should become this kingdom, and our attempts were not too successful. But maybe the church’s responsibility is not to be the kingdom but to promote this gospel of a sane society based on a righteous theology of peace and justice.

We need to read once again the advice for church members to be in the forefront of those organizations committed to bringing the ministry of Jesus into the lives of others.

Possibly the writer of Acts stated our task in the order of priority “ . . . proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching the facts about Jesus. .”. This was no small undertaking in 1830 when our church was begun and may be an even greater challenge in the twenty-first century when Christianity seems to be failing many people and the churches are mostly empty. …ours included.  

Andrew Kirk wrote, “It is the churches which visibly demonstrate the righteousness [justice] and peace of the kingdom which will make the greatest evangelistic and social impact on the world.” So let us each ask ourselves: “What binds us?”  Who are we called to unbind and release into freedom?   With whom do we share God’s message of peace and justice? How do we raise society and ourselves to “new life”?



Rainy Sunday

It is supposed to rain today and tomorrow and perhaps Wednesday too. I have the sermon this morning and will also preside. My daughter and her husband and Karan and Bobby went over to the reunion grounds (camp grounds) .to work to help get the camp ready for camping season.  I believe they will be back this evening.  We will probably have a very small congregation again today.

After church some of us will be eating out together as we always do. I'm not sure where just yet.

I did not sleep as well last night. I awoke at 12:30 and couldn't get back to sleep. At 2:00 I got up and took a melatonin tablet. Then I got back to sleep for a couple more hours and got up about 5:20 and dressed and made up my face. I got the paper and have read it. Now I will do the crossword puzzle and then take the paper over to Bob.

More later.... .

The sermon went well.  Those that attended  were complimentary. I had worried some about it because I had done some research about the book of John and was afraid that some of our more conservative Christian members might not appreciate the results. But they didn't seem to have a problem with it.

Afterwards we ate at El Publiteo's in  Independence so John and Sue could eat with us.   It was good and I brought some of it home with me. I have been reading Ron's book and have finished it now.  It was not only entertaining but also educational.