Salty Zebra

  As for you, you meant to harm me, but God intended it for a good purpose, so he could preserve the lives of many people, as you can see this day. Genesis 50:20  Black smoke fills the skyline. The civilian population has been evacuated for miles around, but there are so many people on the ground still actively coordinating and fighting the fire that rages just over the ridge. The first responders fought valiantly to contain the blaze, but it was quickly determined that this was a much bigger situation than they could handle alone. In addition to local suppression, the Fire Manager called for hot shot teams to infiltrate the forest to the site of the fire. If things continue, he may need to request smoke jumpers, helitack crews that rappel out of helicopters to a fire, or skydiving firefighters. The scene is intense, the danger is real, but surprisingly, after the initial response, the decision is made to let the fire burn!   Forest fires have become a common part of ...

  Then God said to him, “I am the Sovereign God. Be fruitful and multiply! A nation – even a company or nations – will descend from you; kings will be among your descendants! The land I gave to Abraham and Isaac I will give to you. To your descendants I will also give this land.”   Genesis 35:11-12  Today, as we consider the patriarchs of Genesis, we look at Jacob. He was his mother, Rebekah’s, favorite, though his father, Isaac, gave preference to his brother. I wonder if Rebekah preferred Jacob because in Genesis 25:23 God told her that the older of her sons would serve the younger? The Bible tells us in Genesis 25:28 that Isaac preferred Esau, the older brother, because he had a taste for wild game and Esau was a skillful hunter, a man of the open country. Either way this family was set up for division and strife because the parents so openly displayed their favoritism.   When it came time for Isaac to proclaim his blessing over his firstborn son (in Genesis...

   Abraham looked up and saw behind him a ram caught in the bushes by its horns. So he went over and got the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.   Genesis 22:13  This story of Abraham being called to sacrifice Isaac, his only son whom he loved, has always been a difficult one for me. Abraham longed and prayed for this son for decades. He was a gift to him in his old age, and one that could not be replaced. Could God provide another child for Abraham? Yes of course, but it would not replace this special son he had in Isaac.   The story is only a few paragraphs long, but it plays out like an epic movie. You can feel along with all of the characters. The shock and horror Abraham must have felt when he received the command to sacrifice his son. The submission and resolution he demonstrated as they set out right away. The tension between him and Isaac as they left the servants behind and went on to sacrifice, but they had no animal with ...

  He took him outside and said, “Look up at the sky and count the stars – if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Abram believed the Lord, and he credited it to him as righteousness.   Genesis 15:5-6   When we look back at Abram (later Abraham)’s life, there’s a clear pattern of consistency. God told Abram to leave his home and extended family and go “somewhere else.” He didn’t even know where he was going, but did that stop him? No! God told him to go, so he went. Then, once he’d gotten to that land, God told Abram that he would have so many descendants that they would outnumber the stars. At this point in time, Abram didn’t have any children and he and his wife were in their 70s. Despite that, God could tell that in his heart Abram truly believed Him. God could see Abram’s heart and knew it better than Abram himself did, so Abram couldn’t have fooled God, saying one thing and thinking another. Later in this same passage, God ...

 Our week-long cruise in the MSC Yacht Club on the Seascape was absolutely incredible, and much of that is due to what most would consider little things. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the little things make all the difference! In this post I'm going to break down some of the most memorable touches, and as long as I'm sure it will get, I'm barely scratching the surface! From the moment you arrive at the cruise terminal you will see signs and be greeted by staff from the Yacht Club. They escort you to the front of lines and guide you to a special waiting area where the staff are excited to see you and ready to begin spoiling you! They have a variety of drinks available while you wait from still or sparkling water (both of which are pretty much always available), lemonade, or even champagne or a mimosa! Once they have a group together and a butler to escort you, they walk you all the way onto the ship and up to the Yacht Club Top Sail Lounge. Here we were ...

  Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go out from your country, your relatives, and your father’s household to the land that I will show you. Then I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, so that you will exemplify divine blessing.   How do you feel about puzzles? Me, I love them! And not just jigsaw puzzles, either. I love logic puzzles and math puzzles and sudoku and picture puzzles. I have an app, Puzzle Pages, that I use on my phone almost every day. In fact, it’s the only game I’ve had a paid subscription to for years. At bed time, this is how I wind down, how I start to shut down my brain, I break out a puzzle!   I do, also, enjoy doing jigsaw puzzles. I often do them with my daughter, in fact I’m hoping to do that this week when she visits. We’ll clear everything off the coffee table and put the puzzle felt * on it. I set up the box in such a way that we can both see the picture easily and then we break out the puzzle...

  So the LORD scattered them from there across the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was named Babel – because there the LORD confused the language of the entire world, and from there the LORD scattered them across the face of the earth. Genesis 11:8-9  Have your children, or ones you’ve known, ever set about building something in the back yard, or in the woods, that is of questionable stability? Lacking in architectural principles and geometry skills, their creativity and drive to build outpace their abilities. I remember when my youngest son would embark upon construction projects with his best friend. Sometimes it would be a “fort,” other times they tried their hand at designing weaponry like blow guns and trebuchets (actually the trebuchet was with his grandmother 😂 ).  Left to their own devices, sometimes these projects can have harmful, even disastrous consequences though.   A few generations after the flood, people deci...

  But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and domestic animals that were with him in the ark. God caused a wind to blow over the earth and the waters receded. Genesis 8:1  When you are having trouble with one of your electronic devices, your phone or maybe your computer, and you call tech support, what is the first thing they have you do? Turn it off and turn it back on again! This is called power cycling and it purges the cache of memory of all the little processes and things that were bogging down the system. Your brain does something similar when you sleep. Do you ever feel bogged down by thoughts, worries, ideas, to-do lists when you go to bed, and then when you wake up things are fresher and cleaner in your mind? Sleep actually helps with memory consolidation and emotional regulation according to this site . I think this happens in much the same way it does with computers. The longer we are thinking on something, the more those things build up and bog down the...

  And I will put hostility between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring; he will strike your head and you will strike his heel.   Genesis 3:15  I have a precious loved one from whom I’ve often heard the phrase, “I thought it would be fine.” Needless to say, this is usually spoken once it turns out not to be fine at all. But I believe their heart and intentions in this. I don’t think they set out to be bad typically, we all have moments in our lives where we are seeking to be intentionally rebellious, but for the most part I don’t think this person has a heart for evil. What they have is a truly active thought life. I think this was likely the same for Eve.   Much of scripture is told in snippets. We see the Facebook posts of history. There are frequently years, or even decades between verses that we are told nothing about. Who knows if the serpent made these suggestions to Eve and she immediately grabbed the fruit off the tree, or if the...

  This is CoPilot's interpretation of God forming Adam from the dirt and breathing life into him. Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move on the earth.” God created humankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. Genesis 1:26-27  People often consider humans to be animals. You learn this in high school science class, that we belong to the mammal class, in the primate order with the family of Hominidae. This gives the impression that we are very similar to apes, and it is true that we share some characteristics with them. But then, we share characteristics with dogs too, and birds, and even fish. Yes, we share more characteristics with primates, but when it comes to organ transplants do you know what they are most likely to use after other humans? Pigs...

  The heavens and the earth were completed with everything that was in them. By the seventh day God finished the work that he had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh day all the work that he had been doing. Genesis 2:1-2  With the benefit of hindsight, we, as humans, can see all that had to go into making creation possible. God knew exactly what had to be done, and in what order, to make it work. He couldn’t create the elephants before the land or the trees before the sun. Each thing had to be done in a particular order so that it could succeed. This is the greatest argument I’ve ever heard against spontaneous evolution. So many things had to come together all at once in order for life to happen. A creature would have had to develop lungs to breathe, vessels to move blood and a heart to pump it, not to mention a brain that could control all of those functions, simultaneously. That just can’t happen friends. I’ve heard some embrace an idea that God created the world throug...