Fall hit us hard last week and Taza is now obsessed with blankets. As I enter the room with one, she lights up. She hunts them, monopolizes them, and moves to find them when I take them away from her. It's truly fascinating (to me... probably not to you).
I'm back doing homework with the my neighborhood ladies. Every day I hear more bizarre stories. Yesterday we had a discussion about the possible theological problems with cremation (I don't think there are any). Over the weekend, my wheelchair-bound illiterate friend talked about how she tries to use all the resources available to her to learn about God's ways even though she can't read the Bible. I was struck by how much I take for granted-- the ability to read and two functional legs, for sure.
Ellie and my housekeeper's daughter got hit by cars in unrelated incidents in the last couple of weeks. Both emerged more or less unscathed. My housekeeper was more shaken up by her family's event, but I must say, I was talking about my poor Ellie for days. Good thing she's such a tank.
The heart of our church's teaching recently has been on how to read and/or study the Bible. I'm teaching a very simple method for studying a passage from the Bible in our weekly women's Bible study. We are basically answering the following questions:
- What stuck out to you in the passage?
- What are the key words in the passage and what do they mean?
- What is the main idea of the passage?
- How can you apply something you learned here to your life?
The biggest problem so far is defining the words. I realized last week that I probably need to define the word "define." For example, last week I asked them how they would explain "soul" to a 4-year-old. One woman said, "My soul longs for God." Two weeks ago I asked them to define "forgiveness," and I got "to forgive someone." Hopefully we can make some progress on this tomorrow with a little clarification.
We're continuing to read all those books on marriage that I mentioned earlier, finding ourselves this week with videos from the Love & Respect conference and listening some to the Mars Hill sermon series on the Song of Solomon . I'd highly recommend both and expect to write more about them later.
For now I fear I'm getting long-winded without solving the "boring" problem. Oh dear. I think "interesting" will come back to my life and blog soon enough, but today you'll have to settle for "wordy."
(Another post by H. Apparently I need to start checking to see who's signed in!)
hey, life IS boring sometimes. Or is it mundane? Tedious? But I know what you mean.
There are always things to say, but not always things that should be said publicly. This, my battle. Or skirmish.