Salty Zebra

Note: This is the first in a series of posts focusing on the illegal immigrant situation in the US. While much of this is informed by my personal feelings and opinions, I do not claim to be unbiased, I have tried to share sources whenever possible. Please feel free to share with me your thoughts, but I ask that you would do so in love. Any comments given that are hurtful will be deleted, though they cannot be deleted from my mind, so consider our relationship when posting please.    I've heard from a lot of people that they believe illegal immigrants are mostly criminals, and not just for committing the crime of coming in illegally, I mean that is obvious. They are concerned about rape and murder, drugs and trafficking. "they're coming from prisons and jails, mental institutions, and insane asylums," Trump said at a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia last year, "millions and millions of people that are coming from prisons." (1) People I know believed him outright...

  The Lord responded to his people, “Look! I am about to restore your grain as well as fresh wine and olive oil. You will be fully satisfied. I will never again make you an object of mockery among the nations.    First off, I need to address the elephant in the room. God’s sense of time is very different from ours. In this verse He says he is about to. In Revelation 22 verses 7, 12 and 20 Jesus says that He is coming soon. But remember that to God a day is like 1,000 years and 1,000 years are like a day ( 2 Peter 3:8 ). God is outside of time and is not governed by it. He may have done the thing right when it was written thousands of years ago, but He placed it in our timeline for thousands of years from now. Only He know and His timing is perfect, that is what we have to trust in!   Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, I’m excited to write today about restoration. This is a concept near and dear to my heart as I’ve experienced some level of calamity...

“Come now, and let us reason together,” says the LORD, Isaiah 1:18a   I am an empath. I feel things others feel, deeply. I have learned to use this gift from God to connect with people and I have had to learn how to create healthy boundaries around myself to keep myself safe and sane. Often this has come in the form of avoiding the news, and sometimes social media, especially during election cycles. I feel intensely the things that are spoken by others, and it affects me in more ways that you could imagine.   With the change in administration on January 20th, there has been a flood of news. On the first day of his term alone, President Trump signed 26 executive orders that significantly affect our country. I didn't want to read 26 executive orders. I didn't want to puzzle through their meaning or the implications they might have on the future of our country. I wanted to hide in a hole. I wanted my husband to filter things for me and just tell me what I needed to know. I s...

“Yes even now,” the Lord says, “return to me with all your heart – with fasting, weeping, and mourning. Tear your hearts, not just your garments.” Return to the Lord your God for he is merciful and compassionate, slow to anger and boundless in loyal love – often relenting from calamitous punishment.   Joel 2:12-13  My mom tells a story about when she was a young girl. She and her brother often got into trouble together. When they were caught, they were sent to their rooms to await punishment. When her father came in to talk with her about what she had done wrong and met out her discipline, typically in the form of spankings, she was stoic. Whether or not she said she was sorry I’m not sure, but she did not demonstrate a heart of repentance. When he had finished with her, her father would move on to her brother’s room. Before he even opened the door, he could hear her brother crying in there. Was he crying because he got caught? Was he crying because he was afraid of t...

This mural, called "Tragic Prelude" by it's artist, John Steuart Curry, depicts firebrand Kansas abolitionist John Brown. Behind him are the devastations to come to the state. Get dressed and lament, you priests. Wail, you who minister at the altar. Come, spend the night in sackcloth, you servants of my God, because no one brings grain offerings or drink offerings to the temple of your God anymore. Announce a holy fast; proclaim a sacred assembly. Gather the elders and all the inhabitants of the land to the temple of the Lord your God, and cry out to the Lord.   Joel 1:13-14  National sin. This is a concept that I was mostly unfamiliar with and gave very little thought to until recently. It’s not a new concept though, it goes back to Genesis, back to the beginning of nations.   What is National sin? According to the Bible Hub it is, “the collective transgressions of a nation or people group against God's commandments and moral laws.” Basically, it is t...

Warning: I get a little outside of my standard writing style in this post. As my husband says, I am usually "flowery" and subtle in the way I present things. Today I'm being brutally real.     I've mentioned lots of times on this blog the fact that I have Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes (EDS), but I thought that today I would share a little of what that means to me. It's hard to know how to communicate this to people who don't share my experience. For example:  I am never not in pain. Do I take pain meds? Yes. I take a great deal of pain meds. But no, they don't take my pain away. What they do is (sometimes) take my pain down to a level where I am able to function. My daily functioning pain level is more than many people will experience in a year. Is it easier for me to deal with pain because I am so used to it? No. No, it is not. In fact, the ongoing, constant, chronic pain builds on top of itself over and over and makes it MORE difficult to deal with. I just do...