Refractions and Reflections

I'm borrowing my mom's car temporarily, and it has a luxury I've never known before: I can hook my iPod up and play my music in it! I knew this technology existed for others, but it never has for me until now. I'm in love. And I've been hearing a lot of songs I forgot I had (because I haven't listened to my iPod in quite a while). Today on my way home from work, I heard this one: Today I also had an old friend call one of my Facebook posts blasphemous. This was the post: I shared the meme because I believe what it says. It's that simple. This is a theologically-inclined blog, but the last couple of years I haven't written much that has been theologically inclined, and what I have written probably didn't sound much like me to those who knew me previously. That's because what I believe has undergone a HUGE, slow change. I believe differently than I used to. Before I was ultra-conservative. Now I am pretty progressive. Before I was Pentec...

-1- Since August of 2002, when I moved to Joplin for college, I have lived in Missouri. Since this August or September, I have been considering moving back to Ohio...it just seems that besides jobs, I really have nothing holding me in Missouri anymore, except a handful of friends I never see anyway. I got some employment opportunities in order and decided to move on December 12 - pretty much finish out the school semester subbing, but still have time to get paperwork through for jobs in Ohio to start after the first of the year. But things worked out so I got to move a month early! My bosses were very understanding - I had great jobs in Springfield. -2- My brother Sam came to Missouri to visit, and so I moved back with him. On the way we stopped at Cahokia Mounds, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, near Collinsville, IL. We decided we should do YouTube videos of "tours" of popular tourist sites. For instance, as we approached the north end of the temple mound where I t...

The other night one of the children at the residential facility I work at got up in the middle of the night and tried everything under the...moon...to keep from going back to bed. At one point she was reading to my work partner from a children's story Bible. My coworker said to the child, "You're really good at reading. What is your favorite part of that story?" The child replied, "The part where Adam and Eve get kicked out for no reason." We laughed at this (not in front of the child). My first thought was, "Someone didn't listen very well when this passage was explained...she missed the whole point!" My second was more along the lines of...it probably does  seem to her that they were kicked out (of the Garden of Eden) for no reason. All they did was eat an apple. They disobeyed God in eating the forbidden fruit, yes; but from this child's perspective, disobedience is part of everyday life - especially this child, one who is in resid...

I am excited to join with the link-up this week, but I don't think I'm far enough in my worldbuilding to think about transportation yet. So I'm beginning here by submitting the work-in-progress creation story for my world. One of the larger difficulties I've run into is coming up with good names (for people AND places). Where do you get your inspiration for names? Are the names I've chosen here too complicated? (Other thoughts on the following submission are welcome, too.)  Here, too, is a rough, incomplete, and likely-to-be-changed map of my world: [Beginning still needs fleshed out, but: gods overcome with plague – last to survive are the Sebestri siblings. Dying grandfather gives them each a handful of seeds to plant so another race will grow and take over where the gods left off. Sebestris put the seeds in their pockets and run as fast as they can, thinking they can escape the plague and continue living as they always had. Maybe they could even pla...

This is not a writing/fiction blog. However, it is my personal blog, and one thing I am doing right now is attempting to write a fantasy novel. One blogger I follow is beginning a biweekly hop: There will be a prompt for each submission, but it is not necessary to follow it; more information for those interested here . I'm not sure I will participate every Wednesday, but I do plan to participate some. For example, the first week's theme is Transportation. I don't think I'm far enough in my planning to consider that just yet, but I may enter with another subject. (However, I may not participate at all this first week because there is a submission deadline and I just found out about the hop.)  Thought I'd let anyone interested know about the hop, and let any of my readers know that it's possible they'll be reading some fiction here biweekly. But no, my blog as a whole has not switched genres.  Hope some of you participate! I'm really looking...

Seems like I haven't had much to say for a while, but all of a sudden the last day or two I've felt like posting several times. And not bad/stressful stuff, either! Yay!! :) So...my last post. Yes, I know it may have been a little volatile. But I'm leaving it, because it's where I'm at. And the initial purpose of this blog was to be a place to discuss my theological thoughts, because I had MANY. All the time. I'm changing a lot. Discovering truth is a large part of who I am, and the lifetime JOURNEY to discovering that truth is something I treasure, even though at times I find it difficult being in an "in-between," less-certain place. So, I noticed I lost a follower. That's okay (though it just goes to prove the point of my last post). It's hard to face difficult questions or very opposing views to what we believe - it causes a very uncomfortable condition called cognitive dissonance. I've been there. It IS very uncomfortable, and that...

Through a friend's social media post this week I came into contact with this article on how atheists find meaning and purpose in life. This was actually always one of the questions I could never wrap my mind around when I thought Christian evangelism was the highest purpose/call one could pursue. And I didn't see how everyone else couldn't come to the same conclusion and seek that higher meaning which, in my opinion, was to love, serve, and recruit more lovers and servers for Jesus. (Side note: I highly recommend giving this article a read if you are a Christian.) But you know what isn't fair (besides pretty much most things)...? The hipster-culture, materialistic jump-up-and-down-in-the-smoke-and-lights, first-world Christians of today who think the rest of the world to be arrogant rejecters of Christ, and poor Christians to be lacking in faith and not living in the full potential of the "abundant life" available to them, and poor "unreached" pe...

It has been quite a while since I've posted! I wanted to stop in here and chat you up with something kind-of light, so I thought I'd join this link-up for the first time when two of the blogs in my feed reader featured the same title today! So... WHAT I'M INTO: JULY 2015 EDITION Music All things 70s. I, as the last person on the planet, bought two new albums via iTunes yesterday: Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Fleetwood Mac's Rumours . A friend and I went and saw Elton at the end of March, and I read a biography of him after that, and this is far-and-wide purported to be his best album ever. To think, six months ago I barely had any clue who the rocker was. I knew some of his songs, but had no idea he was the artist behind them. Even the Lion King , people!! My favorite songs on this album are "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (of course), and also "Sweet Painted Lady" and "Roy Rogers" (not necessarily in that or...

Ahh! My life is just completely stupidness right now. I don't think I'm going to do the challenge after all. Thank you for the support, though! And who knows, maybe I'll pop in from time to time and do something with it anyway....

Today I ran across a challenge that started YESTERDAY and runs through July 14th. It's called the 100 Day Project . Another blogger I follow is doing it with poetry. Last week my friend and I went to Las Vegas and, while we were there, saw Elton John in concert. Totally worth the ticket price!! It was definitely the best concert I've been to, and I've seen a few great acts, like the Avett Brothers, and Bob Dylan! Anyway...I'm now reading an Elton John biography and am just so completely inspired by his and his songwriting collaborator's (Bernie Taupin) creativity, I think I am going to do the challenge with poetry, too. It's a continual interest in my life. Do I think I will be the next (female) Elton John? Hahahahahahahahahahahaha no. But it's fun. And maybe I'll end up with a song from this! That would be cool, and something I've always wanted to do (not with a passion, but with an interest). So...on to #100DaysOfPomeletry! (I wanted a uni...

Having been deeply involved for most of my life in a religious tradition most people would probably classify as "hyperspiritual," I have made it a point these last few years to try to examine spiritual phenomena through as objective and reasonable a lens as possible. Now engaged in studying History, I found one of this week's lessons particularly interesting. It was an excerpt from Laurie Winn Carlson's book A Fever in Salem , in which she hypothesizes that the physical complaints prevalent during the Salem Witch Trials were plausibly caused by an epidemic of encephalitis lethargica. She goes so far as to list side-by-side the symptoms from the trial documents with those of a 1930s encephalitis epidemic. Allowing for discrepancies in terminology, it seems the manifestations of the symptoms would have looked the same. Here is a duplication of Carlson's list: 1692 SALEM                   ...

A couple of my Facebook friends shared this article yesterday, wherein Matt Moore describes how for years he plead with God to make him straight. Though I do not affirm his moral conclusions on the matter, I think it is a thoughtful post, and in fact quite gracious (from a Conservative viewpoint) to those who may be in the Church and experiencing same-sex attraction - it doesn't discount it or degrade them for their plight. Moore concluded, however, that his prayers to God were based not on a desire to be "right" with God, but on a desire to "fit in" or be found acceptable to other Christians. He cites the Romans 1:18-26 anti-homosexuality clobber text and states, "Homosexual desire – and all other sinful desire — exists in the hearts of people because worship of God doesn't. ...So why didn't God answer my prayer to rid me of my homosexual desires? Because homosexual desires were not my main problem. They were a problem, for sure. But the root of...

When I was in the first grade, I discovered one of my classmates lived right around the corner from me. She became my first unrelated friend. We lived in rural Northwest Ohio and spent the summers riding our bikes and/or walking down the freshly tarred back road she lived on. Maybe three quarters of a mile away, past nothing except a neighboring farm warranting its own traffic signs (My sister kindly went and took these two shots for me today.) :) and fields growing corn taller than we were, we would visit a drainage ditch with two tunnels under an even "backer" road. We called this magical place "The Bridge". I introduced my brothers and cousins to The Bridge right away. My older brother almost stepped on a snake there once. My youngest brother liked watching two small otters that played there one year. My cousin David caught a crayfish, a.k.a. the strangest-looking creature I think I ever saw outside of a zoo or a science book. Me? I would lie on my sto...