Journey into Forever

Some of you may want to stop reading right here. Really. Especially those of you who have had pretty 'even keel' lives. A few ups and downs along the way, but basically pretty sane. You'll know why in just a bit if you are still with me. I do some of my best time with God when I'm driving. I'm always listening to Christian music or teaching, and that's part of my story today. Later though. Anyway, it was during my drive to go to church with my daughter and her family that God gave me the subject for this post. I'm different in many ways, but one way is what happens when I get excited. Most people say their hearts "skip a beat". Not me. Mine tries to beat out of my chest. Very rapidly. Scary rapidly. My cries of "but that's too personal, I don't want to tell that story to the world" were met with silence. I know what that means. Kind of like when your mom was looking at you in silence after you had done or...

Turkeys. Today in kindergarten we made BIG turkeys. We read stories about turkeys, including my favorite written in the form of "The Night Before Christmas". In this story, children visit a farm and make friends with the turkeys. When they realize the farmer is going to butcher the turkeys for Thanksgiving, they rescue them by stuffing them under their shirts and smuggling them out of the farm and into their homes. The final scene contains silhouettes of the families sitting down to dinner with their honored guests. Each table includes a turkey as a Thanksgiving guest,not the main entree. Thus, the turkeys had much to be thankful for on the holiday. The story introduces or reinforces the idea of thankfulness. In public school, this is an acceptable discussion because thankfulness is a generic term. If you don't state who the recipient of those thanks is, you're good. It's politically correct. Public school has changed a great deal since...

Not been a great week. I had a TERRIFIC case of stomach flu (oxymoron, huh) which caused me to miss Women of Faith in Kansas City. I was really looking forward to that. And the uncertainty of the election and our future as a country has had me unsettled. A new thing for me, because I don't usually pay much attention to politics as a whole. But religious leaders I respect, such as Billy Graham, Dr. James Dobson, and Mike Huckabee have really gotten my attention. Unfortunately, it led me to really contemplate the possibilities in both scenarios. Some of those potential situations really scared me, and some were comforting. As human nature frequently does, I tend to gravitate toward the scary stuff. Pretty easy way to get yourself all worked up. There are many scary things in our world today. Finances, storms, wars, earthquakes,the list goes on and on. People could be terrified constantly , and rightfully so. The word "fear" is found in the...