The Battle Belongs to the Lord

The Dial Tone. We take it for granted, but when it goes away, you appreciate all it represents. Yesterday we lost our dial tone. That means we couldn’t use our phone. We also couldn’t use the internet. Losing one or the other is not so bad. You can still get to the outside world one way or the other. (Or the outside world can get to you.) But to lose both… Let’s see, to report the phone failure, I could call the phone company. Oops. That won’t work. Ah, but they do allow you to report a problem at their website. Wait a minute, that won’t work either. It was an isolating feeling. If someone needed to get in touch with us they couldn’t. Fortunately we recently got cell phones so we had a means to call the phone company to report the problem. It was fixed this morning. The first call we received was a telemarketer wanting to give me a deal on my credit card interest rates. Oh well. I guess that’s the price you pay for access to the outside world.

I am a pack-rat. I admit it. You just never know when you might need something. You want the instruction booklet for that clock radio we bought 5 years ago? I’ve got it. Instructions for that clock radio we got rid of 7 years ago? Well, um, I probably have that too.

This week, however, I have been decidedly un-pack-ratty. The school my daughter attends is having its annual garage sale. Tomorrow I will take my fourth car-load of stuff to donate. Such bold measures are not without consequences. Car-load number two included a car booster seat. Just after unloading, I went to get my daughter and two friends to take to gymnastics. One of the friends still needs to use a booster seat but didn’t have hers with her. Well, I went right back to the pile of stuff I just dropped off, retrieved the booster seat and away we went. (I did re-donate it with car-load number three.) It’s enough to send me back into pack-rattiness.

Why do I keep things? Part of it is prudence. The Bible commends such storing up. Saving up during times of plenty to see you through times of want is wise.

Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. Proverbs 6:6-8

However, part of it is also selfishness and lack of trust in God’s provision. It is selfish because I let my stuff sit around gathering dust in my crawl space, or worse, deteriorating to the point where it is of no use to anyone, “just in case,” rather than letting it be of use to someone else. It is a lack of trust in God’s provision because by keeping stuff, I am telling God “I don’t believe you can provide for me in the future so I am hanging on to this stuff so I can provide for myself.”

 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? Matthew 6:25-27

Where is the balance? If any of you figure it out, please let me know. In the meantime, “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” and that’s a good place to start.

“Hello. Where are you?” seems to be a common telephone greeting nowadays. It used to be that when you called a telephone number and someone answered, you knew exactly where that person was. Today, if you call someone on a cell phone, they could be anywhere in the world. I wonder what Alexander Graham Bell would think of what we’ve done with his invention?

First, I want to wish everyone a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We spent Christmas in Tacoma visiting my mother-in-law and other family, far from easy internet access. We came home to a message waiting for us that the new iMac we had ordered before Christmas had arrived. Since Monday I have been working on migrating over to the new machine. It is our third computer in 16 years. It is amazing to look back at the specs of what seemed to be pretty high-powered machines at the time.

Aragorn¹, 1994: a PowerMac 7100, one of the first macs with PowerPC architecture, clocking in at 66 MHz (yes, that is mega-Hertz), 250 MB Hard Drive, ?? RAM, 33 MHz bus speed, and a floppy drive. Over time we added RAM, upgraded the processor to about 300 MHz, and added 1 GB external hard drive.

Isidore², 2003: Aragorn was limping along by the time Apple finally hit the 1 GHz clock speed, 9 years later. For a little less than Aragorn, we got an iMac G4. The design was slick. It is still my favorite looking machine to date. It clocked in at a whopping 800 MHz, 80 GB hard drive, 1GB RAM, 133 MHz bus speed, a built-in modem, and NO floppy. It served us well but was just not up to the rigors of a power user like myself. So along comes …

Jubal³, 2010: For about the same price as Isidore, we now have Jubal. It was hard waiting for Apple to announce a Nehalem-based architecture chip in their iMac line, but it finally came. It has been worth the wait. It has 4 processors on the chip, running at 2.8 GHz, up to 16 GB RAM, 2 TB (Terabyte) Hard Drive, no front-side bus, no modem, bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and built-in WiFi and camera. Maybe, just maybe, we won’t fill up this hard drive before it is time to retire Jubal. But, that’s what I said for just about every machine I’ve used. Time will tell.

1. We like to give our computers unique names. Aragorn is named after the character from The Lord of the Rings. We named the additional external hard drive Shadowfax, from the same book.
2. Named after the patron saint of computers.
3. Named after the biblical “father of all who play the harp and flute”

This week marked the start of season 9 for Dancing With the Stars on ABC. Last spring I tuned in out of curiosity to see Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple. My daughter saw that Shawn Johnson, the Olympic gymnastic gold medalist, was on the show and the rest, as they say, was history. We do not watch much TV in general, but every week our family tuned in to watch the show together. My daughter, people-person that she is, soon knew all the dancing couples by name and had her favorites. You might not think of Dancing With the Stars as educational TV, but watching it sparked many profitable discussions on topics such as modesty; body image; drugs and alcohol; and perseverance, especially at something that does not come naturally. I can only hope that as she hits her teenage years she will still not wish she had a body like the women dancers. But I can smile at her emphatic insistence now that she absolutely would not want me or her to look like one of them. I am looking forward to a new season with new dancers and watching my daughter’s excitement as she roots for her favorites.

Before I started a blog, I had all sorts of blog posts percolating in my head with no where to put them. Now that I’ve started a blog with grand hopes of updating it about twice a week, the blog muse seems to have gone to sleep. It’s been three and a half weeks since my last post. Blogging and procrastination just don’t mix. It is like the news, once the “story” is a few days old, it is not worth posting. It is good discipline for me.
So, what have I been doing instead of blogging? Recording my LPs into the computer; cleaning up iTunes to make it easier to find and listen to music; sprucing up the yard; picking and canning cherries, raspberries, and strawberries; camping a second time in Yellowstone; getting ready for the school year; and getting back into shape after 6 months of not being able to be as active due to my surgeries.
People keep asking my how I feel. I feel well. Life is returning to normal, though I pray it is a new normal, with greater trust in God, greater empathy for others, and less stress.

I got a bee in my bonnet last week and started cleaning out my bedroom walk-in closet. Tonight while watching TV (I know, I know it’s supposed to be screen-free week), I started going through a box of recipes that I had collected over the years. And recipes my grandmother and others had collected over the years that got handed down to me. There are some interesting things found among the recipes for Macaroni Fig Pudding and Salmon Loaf.

Part of a 1941 Chevrolet ad touting “Thrilling new bigness in all major dimensions.”

A “Hint from Heloise” touting the virtues of 1/2 cup kerosene and 1 quart warm water as a streak-free cleaner for windows. Heloise warns, “the kerosene will float on top of the water, so be careful about smoking.”

Finally, the most fascinating find so far was this letter from 1942. I do not know who Mr. McFall is. Scrawled on the back is a recipe for crullers, which you can see bleeding through on the scan.

We live in an era where for the most part we can get what we want when we want it. Strawberries in January? No problem, just head on down to the nearest grocery store. The latest electronic gadget? Just a mouse-click away. Heading on a road trip? Gas stations abound. It is good to be reminded that things were not always so. It is good to be reminded not to take for granted the abundance and the choices available to us. And it is very good that Macaroni Fig Pudding never caught on as a popular dish.