life. faithful.

"by faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible." hebrews 11:3 this is one of my favorite verses--i call it my physics verse because to me it is tying together my faith and subatomic particles. no, really--i mean it! when i first started working on a degree in physics and a minor in biology, somebody (i don't remember who anymore, but it seems like it was somebody on some kind of discussion board...) told me that i would forget about all that dumb "christianity" (<--spell checker doesn't like that. hmm...) stuff. once i had been educated, i would see that faith was superstition and a pointless waste of time, something for the ignorant, uneducated masses.  while i'm sure that is the conclusion some people come to, it sure wasn't for me.                                quite the opposite, really. i sat/struggled/cried through a lot of physics and bio

  my kids are seriously into turtles. not these...                               but these! both my daughter and my son love to watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. the other day when we were all watching TMNT for probably the third time in a row (sometimes you give in just to keep the peace, you know?), Raphael made a clone of himself. hang with me here. of course, things with the clone went wrong and the fake Raphael started terrorizing the city. Raphael was talking to the other turtles and said that Master Splinter had told him something bad would happen if he made the clone. my comment to my husband: "the turtles could solve the majority of their problems if they would just listen to Master Splinter." huh. how many times has that been true in my life? the majority of my problems would be solved if i would just listen to the Master. who would have thought, a lesson from the turtles!

when my family milked, we had one cow that my parents named after me. while that in itself may seem crazy enough, the reason they named her after me was that she was a messy eater, always throwing the grain out of her feeder. quite the compliment, huh? though they were only referring to my habit of ending up with part of anything i eat left behind on some part of what i'm wearing, messy also pertains to me in other ways, ways i usually keep to myself. in this blog, though, i think i'm being called to show some of that messy side. what follows here is a journal entry i wrote, something i definitely meant to keep to myself. however, my word for this year is faithful, and i feel like this is something i'm supposed to share. so, here goes... ************ what in the world am i starting a new blog for? this is craziness--i don't hardly keep up with the one i already have . why would i start another one? i guess it is me taking a step out in faith, trying to use my

i've been challenged by some of the blogs i read (see here for one example) to claim one word for 2012 instead of making new year's resolutions. the idea is that the new year should be focused on becoming a new person instead of just coming up with new things to do (or old things to do in a new way). i decided to take that challenge, and part of that, for me, is this blog. i thought it would be hard to pick a word. i imagined myself pouring through a dictionary or the concordance in my bible, trying to figure out the perfect word. i pictured words like peace joy amazing-- words that would be talking about a year where everything goes according to plan and i don't have any big, nasty surprises jumping out at me. in the post that challenged me, the author talks about trying on words like she tries on clothes. i guess my problem, then, is that i don't try on clothes. or something like that. when i started thinking about the word i would claim f