Salty Zebra

   By this time, my husband had the opportunity to see the house. In fact, the previous owners were very gracious and allowed us to have a fence installed before closing. This made it so much simpler to have kids and a dog down there! Our first visit to the house as its official owners was a quick one. It was just the kids and I since, again, my husband was busy with work. He was very possibly still on his trip to India. We went down for less than 24 hours to do a quick inventory. You see, the house had been sold to us with all its accoutrements: all the furniture, the dishes, the linens, even the paper towels and toilet paper! I wasn't sure exactly what was there, so we went down to take stock and see what we might need to bring down with us to make our first official trip comfortable.  That was a quick, but exhausting trip. I was up late going through drawers, cupboards and closets and writing it all down. How many towels? Sheets? Spoons? It was a beautiful gift as ...

  The Lord had said to Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you.”   Genesis 12:1  This study is focusing on obedience, and Abram, later Abraham, is one of the cornerstone stories of obedience in the Bible. Chapter11 of Hebrews is referred to as the “Hall of Faith.” In it, the author catalogs highlights from the past of people who followed God in extreme situations. Obedience is the result of faith. You won’t obey someone you don’t trust. And, interestingly, obedience leads to deeper faith. When we trust God enough to do what He tells us to, and things work out in incredible ways we couldn’t have imagined, we trust God even more.   I had always remembered the story of Abraham as him being called to leave Ur, his ancestral home, but as I was reading today in Genesis 11, it was actually his father, Terah, that initially picked up his family and moved. He left Ur with the intention of going to Canaan ( Genesis...

  Our lives are lived in seasons. Some long, some short, but all of them matter and affect us in different ways. And in each of these seasons, God is present. He leads, He guides and He uses them to change and influence us. Today, I'd like to tell you about our season with the Beach House.   It started more than a quarter century ago, when we were a young family. We didn't have a lot of disposable income. I wouldn't say we were living paycheck to paycheck, but there wasn't much, if any, left over at the end of the month. Vacations weren't something we really considered. A friend from church had a house out by the Ocean and offered it to us as a place to stay for a week during the summer. I cannot tell you what a blessing this was! I LOVE being by the water. It brings me peace and joy. And being able to take my husband and son out to the beach, dig in the sand, ride in a boat, play a little putt putt golf was such a blessing. Just to relax as a family.  A dream was b...

  On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.  Genesis 7:13  Today’s study focuses on Noah’s wife, though I’m not sure why. The SOAP verse above is one of only a few mentions we have of her, along with her sons’ wives. The Bible says in chapter 7 that they went into the ark, and then in a couple of verses in chapter 8 that they came out of the ark. That’s it. It doesn’t seem as though there is any more significance to it other than that the people went into the ark in pairs, male and female, as the animals did.  So, what can we learn from Noah’s wife? Odds are she didn’t say or do anything wildly against her husband’s mission, because that would likely have been recorded as it was in Job 2:9-10 . We can guess, from the lack of information otherwise, that Noah’s wife and sons supported him in his mission from God to build an ark. That must have been difficult. Noah had heard f...

  Noah did everything just as God commanded him. Genesis 6:22  Peer pressure is a powerful thing. It’s hard to be different, set apart as the Bible calls it. It’s so much easier to just go with the flow, following along with the flow of traffic and going “about” the speed limit. Being that one guy following the rules and going 60 in a 60mph zone is rough. People keep zooming around you. Sometimes they honk. Sometimes you can see the anger and assume the nasty words coming out of their mouths as they slow down next to you to let you know how much they don’t appreciate your choices. Really, they’d so much prefer if you did what they did and kept the freeway smoother and freer flowing. The irony is that the opposite is also true, if they just slowed down and went the speed limit with you it would be just as smooth and free flowing!   Now, the intention of this post is not to preach against speeding. Our vehicle definitely doesn’t stay below 60 on the freeway. The point i...

   The coolest things in my life have often started with a little idea and rolled from there. Back when I was first diagnosed with a brain tumor and had to undergo multiple surgeries, my sister-in-law sent me a couple of shirts in the mail. It was a sweet and thoughtful thing to do, and I bet she had no idea what it would lead to!   I wore the shirts she gave me to appointments with the intention of keeping life a little lighter. I knew it would brighten my spirit and hoped it would give the nurse, technicians and doctors I interact with a smile as well. And it did! I bought a few more shirts along the way. Sometimes they had to do with brain tumors, sometimes EDS (Ehlers-Danlos Syndromes), sometimes they just expressed how I was feeling.  It got to the point that when we hit a roadblock or a new challenge in my health journey, my husband would say, "It's time for a new shirt!" I had collected shirts about MRIs, shirts about brain tumors, shirts about EDS, shir...

  God saw how corrupt the earth had become, for all the people on earth had corrupted their ways.   Genesis 6:12  Sometimes God tells you something you don’t want to hear, something that seems so difficult, so counter to the way things look or “should be” that it’s tough to believe. This happened several times in the Bible: He told Gideon that they would defeat the armies of Midian with a small rebel band, He told Mary that she would have a child even though she was a virgin, and He told Noah that He would destroy the entire earth with a flood.   Noah probably knew that the earth was corrupt and violent, he lived in it. He saw it every day. But, just like we see and are used to the sin and corruption around us, I bet he was too. It was normal for him, expected. Yes, he may have seen it as wrong, but it also probably just was . How accustomed have we become to the sin around us, normalizing it, accepting it? What do you watch on TV, that you know is wrong, but you...