I Have a Super Power (John 10:28-29)

This is going to be a different kind of blog post. 

As some of you know, I like to spend my morning hours with my nose in my Greek Bible, trying to expand my skills in translating from Greek to English.

Every now and then I come across something that sticks out to me and I get an epiphany, and then I can't get it out of my mind.  I have been thinking about John 10:28-29 for a really long time now, and I just want to share this and get it off my chest.

Here is the text in Greek:

So, translated in English, it says pretty much the same, so there's no revelation here of anything different than what your Bible says.  It means the same thing in Greek as it does in English.  But a lot of time when I am translating a verse word for word, I am focusing on one word at a time, which makes me think about each word and its meaning individually.  You know how you can see the same thing over and and over and over again a million times, and you don't really think about it?  I have read this verse a million times, and didn't really stop to think about it, until I examined each word one at a time.

I am focusing on the word "snatch" in both of these verses.

In the context, Jesus is talking about his sheep (He is our Shepherd, you know!)  Anyone who follows Him would be His sheep.  And He knows who His sheep are, and He keeps them in his hand.

And no one can snatch His sheep out of His hand.

The word for snatch in the Greek means to snatch, seize, or take away by force.

I envision Jesus keeping us all in His hand, not in a closed fist, but in an open hand.

Nothing can take us by force against our will out of His hand.

And that is what has me so intrigued!

The verse doesn't say His hand is open, but this is way I like to envision this scene.  Imagine finding a cricket and putting it in your hand.  If you close your hand and make a fist, you are not letting it go. You are keeping it prisoner, and taking away it's free will to leave.

Now open up your hand and let it decide what it wants to do.

Will it stay in your hand?  or will it jump out?

Will you let it decide for itself?

I guarantee you, it will jump out, but that is beside my point.

My point is, that when we follow Christ, he keeps us in His hand, but He also gives us free will.  And this is where our super power comes in.

Did you know that your will is the only thing that will allow you to leave His hand?  No one can force  us to jump out of His hand.  Some people are tempted to jump out, and they do, which is both foolish and sad, (why would anyone want to leave the protection of His hand where nothing can "get" you?) but in every case, it is their decision to jump out.  They are not snatched out, or taken out by force, they jump out according to their own will.

Romans 8:38-39 says that nothing, NOTHING! can separate us from the love of God, but from what I gather from to John 10:28-29 there is one thing that can separate us from God.  Our own will.

He gave us our own free will, but He has a will too.

It is His will that we stay in His hand, but He doesn't keep us in a tight fist.  He gives us a way out if we want it.

So it comes down to our will against His.

Of course we are not stronger than God, but think about it!  Our will has enough power to break all the barriers and separate us from God, even though Romans 8 says nothing can separate us.  Our will is the only thing that can separate us!  And that, to me, is mind boggling.

If He wanted to keep us in a closed fist, we would be prisoners with no will of our own.  But He wants us to choose to stay in His hand. 

And as someone put it so well in a sermon I heard -  He loves us so much, that He gave us the freedom to choose to be with Him, or apart from Him.  It is our own choice - no one can force us either way.  If we choose to be separated from Him for eternity, He will let us do that - over His dead body. Literally.

If we want Him to let us go, He will let us go.    Out there where there's no protection.  Out there where we can be snatched by the bogeyman.
That is a sad and scary thought.

Our whole lifetime is a battle between our will against His, and He will always let us have our own way, but is that really what we want?

So anyhoo, I hope this didn't sound like a sermon.  I didn't mean for it to be that way.  It's just something that's been on my mind for a long time.

I have another thought I'd like to post about soon too, but that's for another day.

Here are a few other things I've been up to:

A lady from church does this charity thing every year where she sends boxes out to needy kids in poor third-world countries.  She needed someone to sew some pencil pouches.  I never made pencil pouches before, so I told her I would learn how to make them.  She needed 20 pouches, and I managed to pump out 24 of them.  The first one took me 2 hours to make cuz I never made one before and had to learn how to do it, but by the time I was done making them, it only took me about half an hour for each one.  Anyhoo, now that I know how to make them, I might make a few just for fun.  They are fun and easy to make, and it's a good way to use up some scraps!

And now that I'm done making those, I am getting busy with my Christmas cards.  I want to get them done early this year because

I AM GOING TO ALASKA FOR CHRISTMAS!  YAYAYAYAYAYA!!!!

So I want to get my cards sent out before I leave.

Did you all have a good Halloween?

My Halloween festivities were scaled down quite a bit from what I normally do, but I am planning to get back into it next year.  We even already asked a couple people over to be our next "victims".

BWAAAHHAHAHAAAA!

I know this picture is blurry, I don't know why it's blurry, but for some reason I didn't get a clear picture of our jack-o-lanterns.  Me and Chuck both carved one this year.

Too bad we don't have any moose around here to eat them for us.

I wanted to deck out the whole front porch, but since I wasn't doing the restaurant this year, I didn't have a whole lot of decor ready at my convenience, and I didn't wanna go up and down the stairs digging stuff out, just to put it all back again after one short day.  So this is all I did:

Pretty lame, I know.  

But at least I didn't have a lot of stuff to put away after Halloween was over.

We caught Peeka sitting next to the skeleton after we put it back downstairs.

The skeleton is still waiting to be put back in his box.

I don't know what Peeka was waiting for.

Well, this was a long post.

Bye.

October Already?

It's been about two months since I've posted.  I wanted to post a month ago, but I had to wait for my procrastinating husband to download some pictures from his phone.  Why is it that husbands are so slow about these sorts of things?  I suppose if it's not important to him, then it's just not important at all.

Anyhoo, about a month and a half ago, we took another trip to WI.  This time Chuck took a whole week off so we could take our time and do more stuff, which was a nice change from a quick weekend whirlwind.  This time Chuck had more time to spend with his brother and a high school friend, and I had more time to spend with Ma and an extra bonus, my brother.

One of the biggest highlights of this trip was going to a Brewers game in Milwaukee.  We took my brother along, and none of us has ever been to a game before, so it was really neat for all of us to experience that.

We sat two sections up behind 1st base.  Kinda far away, but we had a good view.  At the bottom of the 9th inning, the Brewers and the Astros were tied, so we got to stay for a 10th inning.  We ended up losing the game, but it was still fun to be there.

Another little trip we took this past month was to a little town on the coast of Lake Michigan called Benton Harbor.  It was a nice place to walk around.  I forgot the name of the park, and Chuck apparently missed the picture of the sign when he was downloading the pictures from his phone.

.....sigh......I hate it when I have to rely on him for pictures!

He procrastinates.

And then he doesn't get them all downloaded.

Also this month, I had a birthday.

I always have mixed feelings about birthdays.  I don't like being reminded that I'm getting old; and I don't like the extra attention.  However, I do like getting surprises, and the little reminders that I do have friends and family out there that are thinking of me.  

Another fun thing I did this month was go to a Ladies' Retreat at the church in Goshen.  My friend Tammie spent the night at my house, so that was really fun, and then Saturday morning we went to the Ladies' Retreat together.

Then last week, I got to spend the night at HER house.  It was our scheduled day for our monthly stamping day together anyhow, but her granddaughter was starring in a play, so she invited me to go to it.  It was a cute play about the Ugly Duckling.  Her granddaughter was the mother duck and sang a lot of solos.  She was really good.

Then last weekend me and Chuck and Justin all went to another play in Elkhart because the guy playing the lead role in that play was a guy we know from church. The play was about Red Skelton, and I can't even express in words how good this guy was.  He was SO funny and did an excellent job impersonating Red Skelton.  We were very very very very impressed with his talent!  It was weird seeing him in church on Sunday back to his normal self again.  I can't wait to see him in more plays.

Let's see,.....what else happened this month........?

Oh yeah - I got "booed".

A lady at church gave me this little Halloween treat bag.  She said it was sitting on the table in the foyer with my name on it.  I don't know who started this; I don't think they were doing this last year.  But if you get "booed", you're supposed to enjoy the treats, fill it up again with different treats and pass it on to "boo" someone else.  It's actually pretty fun.  There were some goodies in there that I didn't want, so I just left them in the bag and passed it on (I'm sure it happens a lot).  There were also a couple of caramel suckers in there that I liked, but decided to pass them on because it gave me an excuse to play with my Halloween stamps.  So I made some jackets for them and stuffed them back in the bag, along with some other goodies to replace the stuff that I ate.

I think it might be kinda fun to have a "boo-by" prize for the person who's holding the bag on Halloween.  I guess the "boo-by" prize now is that you don't get to pass it on - you're stuck with it.

When we took the bag back to church, I set it on the table in the foyer and waited for my victim to find it.  But after services were over, Chuck saw that some kids were hanging around and they were interested in what was in that bag, so he took the bag and gave it to it's next owner.  She doesn't know it's from me though.  Chuck told her exactly the truth - the bag had her name on it and some kids were interested in it.  He wanted to make sure she got it.

It's nice that temperatures are cooling off, but it still looks green and summery around here.  The squirrels seem to know that winter is coming though.  This stinker was hanging around our bird feeders and steeling our seeds.

Other than that, I started putting some Halloween decorations out.

A guy from church gave us a whole bunch of pumpkins, which is nice cuz I won't have to buy any.

However, the last one he gave us was rotten inside, even though it looked fine on the outside.  So I am hoping that these are all good.

I am not doing my usual Halloween thing this year.  I decided it was too overwhelming doing it all with no help.  I think I was kinda feeling intimidated trying to do it in a different house than what I'm used to.  A different room, with different furniture - will it work with the decor that I got?

I am disappointed that I'm not doing it because I had a fun theme picked out, and even had half of my menu planned out.  But I got cold feet when I began to doubt myself, and now it's too late.  So next year for sure I will go ahead with it because I already invited my "victims" for next year, and also my friend Tammie said she might be willing to help.

So this year I'm just putting out a few decorations on the front porch.

So sad and disappointing, but that's the way it's gonna be this year.

I sure do miss my house in Alaska.

So that's about all for now.

Washington D.C. (Day 4)

This was to be my last day in D.C., so I knew had to make it count!  I still had not seen the inside of the Capitol Building, or the Library of Congress, so that is what was on my agenda for that morning.

As usual, I got up with Chuck at 6:15 and had oatmeal and coffee at Starbucks.  He went to "work" and I got ready to start my last day.

I walked over toward the Capitol Building, but this time ended up behind it somehow.  It is just as magnificent on the back side as it is on the front side, so I wasn't exactly sure where I was.  As I was approaching the steps, a guard asked me if I wanted to go inside.  I told him, "yes, I was hoping to go in there and look around."  He told me I had to go to the front of the building.  I felt kinda dumb, but that's how I knew for sure that I was in the back of the building.

So I go all the way to the front side and the steps are all roped off, even though I knew enough time had passed for it to be well into open hours.

So I walked to the Visitor Center, which by the way is also pretty big and fancy, and I looked for some information there, specifically, how does one get inside the Capitol Building?

I don't know why the guard behind the building didn't tell me this, but apparently you can't just walk into the Capitol Building.  You first have to go to the Visitor Center and get a pass so you can join a tour group.  Yay, .....another tour group..........

But if that was the only way to get in, then that's what I had to do.

I ended up with an interesting guide.  He was cross-eyed and spoke with a funny accent, separating his syllables and putting a lot of emphasis on his consonant sounds when he spoke.

Anyway, he seemed knowledgable and was very nice.

First, he took us into a theater where we watched a video about the history of the Capitol Building.  It was interesting, but I just wanted to get inside the Capitol Building.  After all, this was my last day, and I was burning daylight!

When that was over, we were escorted to the Capitol Building, led up some stairs and down a few fancy hallways, and entered this big spacious room.  The guide talked mostly about the paintings in this room, but also mentioned that the room was used for speeches by famous people like Daniel Webster, and Henry Clay, and if I remember right,  he said the presidents walk through this room and down a hallway to be inaugurated.

Supposedly, the star on the floor marks the spot where President John Quincy Adams collapsed and died of a stroke.

Then we went into the Statuary Hall, where a statue of a prominent figure from each state was lined up around the perimeter of the room.  The statues are not in any particular order, and when I had a chance to look around I couldn't find Alaska or Wisconsin.  The guide only pointed out the ones that represented the states where people in our group was from (before the tour started he asked where each of uswere from).  He did point out the Indiana statue, but I have to admit that I didn't really care about the Indiana statue.  I was more interested in the Alaska or Wisconsin statues, which I never found.  And of course being part of a tour group, you kinda have to stay with your group and you have to move on when your group moves on.

After the guide rambled on about the statues, he escorted us back to the Visitor Center, made some closing statements and said "thank you for coming".  I'm thinking, "that's it?  That's all we get to see?  Just two rooms?"

I was disappointed cuz I thought we were gonna see a lot more than that.

The guide told us that Congress was in session that day, so if we wanted to, we could get a pass and go into the Chamber of Congress, but he didn't explain very well how to get passes.  I thought it would've been kinda neat to just peek in and see it, but according to the brochure that I picked up form the Visitor Center, you have to get a pass from your state's representative, or something like that.  I didn't think it was worth the trouble and I didn't wanna waste any more time.

So when we got back to the Visitor Center I looked around in there for a bit cuz that place was pretty impressive too.  And I found some neat things in there that I wasn't expecting to find.

Like this table that Abraham Lincoln used for his 2nd inauguration:

According to the brochure that I had, somewhere there was supposed to be a gavel used by George Washington during the ceremony to lay the cornerstone of the Capitol, but I couldn't find it.  I asked one of the workers there where it was, and he said it was moved.  He said it's either behind that wall, or that wall (pointing in two opposite directions), he wasn't sure.  So I looked in both areas, but never found it.  (.......sigh......!)

The Visitor Center has an AWESOME cafeteria with all kinds of different buffets, so before I did anything else, I had a delicious spinach salad!

And then I pursued my next goal:  the Library of Congress, which can be easily accessed from the Visitor Center.

I followed the tunnel and walked right into it, which was nice because if you go to the Library of Congress from the Visitor Center, you've already been screened, so you don't have to go through the screening process again.

The Library of Congress was amazing!  

Not only was it pretty to look at, but they had some museum exhibits in there as well.

Like some ancient artifacts:

Some rare books:

This one is an illustrated copy of the book of Revelation:

And the most exciting thing for me was finding Thomas Jefferson's personal library collection!

However, not all of them in this collection were original:

I paid special attention to the books with the green ribbons in them:

They also had another special area dedicated to Bob Hope:

They had a lot of stuff in there about Bob Hope, it took me a while to look at all of it.

I could've spent a lot more time at the Library of Congress, but time was ticking and I knew I wanted to get back to the Museum of American History, and I told Chuck to meet me there after he got off "work", so I headed over that way.  But it was SO HOT out, so on the way I stopped in the one of the Art Museums.  I still had some time to spare, so why not look at some art while I'm cooling off in an air conditioned building?

The inside of the building was big and spacious.  There were a lot of interesting paintings in there, but I didn't take very many pictures in there.    I actually enjoy looking at paintings and wouldn't mind spending more time in there, but I really wanted to get back in that American History Museum!  So after I felt cooled off enough I finished walking over there.

And I'm glad I went back there cuz there was so much more to see!

Mary Todd Lincoln's dress:

Notice Joe DiMaggio's signature:

There was a lot to see there and time was going by fast.  Chuck was supposed to get off at 4:00 and meet me there, but for some reason he had to stay at work late that day.  The museum closes at 5:30 and he didn't get there until just after 5:00, so he had less than half an hour to look around.  He told me to take him to the section where he would be most interested, so I showed him where the Wars section was.  It had exhibits starting with the Revolutionary War up to the present, but we didn't get to see the whole thing.  Chuck was just starting to enjoy the exhibits when they started chasing people out.

Amputation kit.  Ew......!

I wish we could've stayed there longer cuz there was a LOT of neat military relics to see in there.  Next to the Ford Theater and Petersen House, the Museum of American History is one of my favorite places in D.C.

So after we were forced out of there, we got a bite to eat somewhere and then spent our last evening going into an area where we hadn't been yet, down by the waterfront.

There was a lot of "night life" going on there as we walked through and made our way down the sidewalk.  People sitting in outdoor cafes, live music here and there......

We kept walking to the end where there was this really big fish market.  They were selling every kind of fish and fish parts imaginable.  It stunk really bad.

Then we went to West Potomac Park where we followed a trail to the Jefferson Memorial.

It was a really nice walk and the temperature cooled off enough to feel perfect.  On the way back up the trail, it was getting dark so we were able to see the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument lit up.

So that is basically how the trip ended.

Overall, it was an awesome week!  I think every adult American should go there at least once in their lifetime.  I don't know if I will ever get back there again, but if I do, I hope to take my time in my favorite places and not rush through them (Ford Theater/Petersen House, American History Museum, Art Museum, Library of Congress, National Archives), and if there is a next time, I hope I will get to go to Georgetown - that is one area that I really wanted to explore but didn't get to.