Thursday, June 26, 2003

Birth Control and Hard Cases

It is inevitable that whenever the topic of birth control is broached, the issue of the hard case where a mother or baby's life could be in danger by pregnancy is raised. I'm not gonna comment on that directly. Instead I just want to share the story of Ida Mae Fisher.

In 1918, Ida Mae Fisher found herself ill with breast cancer and pregnant at age 43. What to do? She carried the baby but both died when she was eight months pregnant. It was a terrible tragedy and loss, not only for her husband, but for her four motherless children.

Two of her children grew up to have children and currently the number of her descendants stands at 132. Miost of these descendants are professing believers in Christ.

I am one of them. Ida Mae was my great grandmother.

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Spiritual Birth Control

I am just wondering how many Christians out there who read this blog would consider practicing spiritual birth control of their children in order to prevent them entering heaven?

Friday, June 13, 2003

Full and Partial Preterism Bites the Dust...
...and the key verse that does it is Luke 21:37.

Thursday, June 12, 2003

Encouraged to Pray

I find it amazing how God looks after little details for His children, and how His doing so is an encouragement to ask for bigger and better things.

The other day I drove myself and my eldest son, Nathanael, to the gym and skateboard park. Nathanael had his BMX bike with him for doing tricks at the skate park. Instead of working out in the gym, I decided to do a few laps around the outdoor track. When I was finished, I wandered over to watch Nathanael take some jumps. He did a spectacular 360 out of the bowl and then tragedy struck: he landed wrong on his foot and toppled over. I could tell something was up by the way he got up and wouldn't put any weight on his foot. He rode his bike over to me, pushing with the one good foot.

"What's up?" I asked.

"I think I broke something. I heard it snap and it really hurts!" he replied.

I helped him over to the car, and then drove to the health food store and bought some arnica homeopathic pills and then bought some ice at the 7 Eleven. From there we proceeded to the emergency department at the local hospital to be met with a full waiting room. Nathanael hopped to a chair after giving his name and we sat down to read the signs that said that the hospital was full and if people needed admitting, they would likely end up in a different hospital out of town. We also were informed that we had at least a 3 hour wait ahead of us before he could be seen.

"Oh great!" I thought, considering the fact that I had left son Ben (aged 15) in charge of his younger siblings, including 1 year old Princess Punkadunk. I called to apprise them of the current state of things and then sat and wondered what I should do. A few moments reflection led me to call my second daughter and ask that they consider going out to the house to stay with the kids until I could get home.

I guess Nathanael's foot looked bad enough that we got in to see a doctor fairly quickly. She was a tiny little woman who was bird-like in her movements. His ankle looked pretty deformed and she said that it looked pretty much like it was broken on both sides and possibly on the back, but not to worry, we had a really good orthopedic surgeon on call and she didn't think it would take much hardware to repair.

My jaw nearly hit the floor. Nathanael began to think that maybe BMX wasn't such a great sport after all as he prepared to kiss his summer job doing yard maintenance good-bye. I, in the meantime, began to feverishly make plans in my head for getting the various supplements and herbs together that he would need to prevent infection and to speed healing, and also to figure out ways of getting him some decent food.

They got him into a bed, dressed him in a horrid hospital gown, propped his leg up and stuck an IV in his arm with some demerol and gravol to help ease the pain. We sat there for a while, a thin curtain all that stood between us and the injured biker gang members who were cursing and swearing about the fight they had with the cops before being brought in to be patched up.

Before long, a technician from radiography came and we wheeled him down to the X-ray department. While he was in there, I began to lift up petitions to the Heavenly Father that somehow He would give us a miracle and have there only be a sprain and not a break.

We barely made it back to the cubicle and the doctor already had the X rays in her hands. She came into our "bedroom" with an amazed look on her face and told me to follow her. She led me over to where his X rays were and there I saw a picture of bones in perfect condition! You could see a great deal of soft tissue damage as well, but the bones were all sound. [big smile]

I couldn't contain myself. "Praise God! What an answer to prayer!" I exclaimed as I came around the corner with a huge grin on my face. The bikers, who moments before were filling the air with their profanities, stopped and grinned back at me. I helped Nathanael get dressed and we left the hospital less than 2 1/2 hours after we had arrived.

There is some serious stuff going on in my church family right now. When God answered my prayer about Nathanael's foot -- a foot that definitely looked broken -- I immediately thought, "God is encouraging me to pray with faith over this other situation." I am beginning to understand what Christ meant when talked about faith that moves mountains. I am encouraged to pray.


Tuesday, June 10, 2003

I would despair...

...if I thought that baptism was so critical to the salvation of my children, that without it they were lost. Is baptism a means of grace? Yes. Is it necessary means for grace to be conveyed? No. Thank God!

Monday, June 09, 2003

Nothing Much....

...to say these days. Mostly because I can't find the time to sit down and blog great and wondrously deep things. I am finding it a full time job just to keep up with the laundry, especially since my husband bought the children a pool. I do a load of just towels daily now.

Current reading -- "Ditch that Jerk" - I have a friend who is going through divorce from an abusive professing Christian, and the insights this book and another like it (Why Does He DO That: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft) have given me into abusive marriages and partnerships has been very enlightening. As I read Bancroft's book, I realized that I actually knew men in the church who would qualify in being abusive because of their tyrannical methods of ruling their homes.

"Infectious Diabetes" -- this is a very intriguing book about the role of fungus in causing not only diabetes, but also certain forms of cancer and other diseases. What is interesting to me is that my type II diabetic dh was told by a kinesionics practitioner that he had a long standing fungal infection in his body. Hmmm... I think this is very interesting and will be pursuing my own investigations into this. At any rate, t his book explains the *why* of another book I own called "Dangerous Grains." Grains all contain fungi and their mycotoxins which can then take over the body. Basically, people who walk around with systemic candida or other fungi, are the walking dead. I imagine they would tend to decompose very fast compared to people who don't have fungal infections...

Anyhow that is it for tonight.