Cause I am a total Sap!

I love this video. It reminds me of Isaiah 11:5-7

Righteousness shall be the belt of His loins,
And faithfulness the belt of His waist.
“ The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.



And yes, it did make me cry...twice!

Paging the Jones

I work with some really cool people. They make work fun and challenging. One lady here is particularly funny to talk to, but sometime it can be a little...well....head scratching. Like today for example, she just had to show us her new Chanel sunglasses, which are SO nice.

Can you guess how much they cost? Really...guess...okay, I will tell you...

$545!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! For sunglasses!

Now, if she had the money I probably wouldn't trip too much (okay, I would trip a little), but she had to cash out her 401K last year to pay off come credit cards. 16 years worth of 401K!! To top it off her husband has his own business, and he gives her the cash he earns (alot!), and she has no problem taking a thousand or five hundred out here and there before depositing it and not telling him.

I think taking the FPU classes have made me more and more aware of my own subversive desire to "keep up with the Jones'". I can't imagine living with such a huge load of debt over my head. I am so happy to be taking these classes and I am learning so much. I haven't gotten my budget down yet, but I am working on it.

If I was rich everything would be better (tongue firmly implanted in cheek). :)

Earthquuake Test

I was nowhere near that earthquake that hit Los Angeles yesterday, but this is a great test. I would have like it better if I hadn't only gotten 50%!! (insert visual of native Californian hanging head in shame) When did they change the rules on me! Well, I have been educated :)

Now I Have Heard Everything...

I came across this article, entitled, Gay Man Sues Bible Publishers and thought..."you have to be kidding me".

But it's no joke, and I ain't laughing.

Attraction

Okay, I have been wondering lately…Does it always come first? Or is something that grows? Is it different in every situation? Is it different for men than it is women?

Often I hear my friends say, (both guys and girls), “I just wasn’t attracted to them”, and then they basically write the person off or slot them into the “just friends” category. Although many of my girl friends have said, “I wasn’t that attracted to him, but it grew as I got to know him”, which I rarely hear guys say.

In the movies it all about the eye contact. That moment where two people’s eyes meet across the room, the music swells, BAM the attraction hits and tada "it’s" happened. Or there’s a moment where a person is physically transformed from an ugly duckling to a beautiful swan and all the sudden the other person notices and BAM there ya go…instant attraction. I love the romantic movies as much as the next chick, but that ain’t exactly reality. I wish!

I am a BIG believer in physical attraction :). I think everyone deserves the whole enchilada when it comes to relationships/marriage. I mean seriously, who wants to settle for less? With the pressures of marriage and children the physical side can be harder to keep up, so I at least want to start with the hot stuff :)

I have met maybe a handful of guys in my whole life that I was instantly physically attracted to. I am not talking about guys I think are hotties. I mean come on, those are everywhere. I live in California and we have them in abundance. No, I am talking about the physical attraction that has me tongue tied, the kind where when I sit next to them I can feel the heat from his body, the kind where I just want to stare at them and learn all their facial expressions, the kind that makes eye contact hard because my face is on fire, and the kind that makes my hands shake.

And all that is well and good and can be exciting, but how important it is to have that right away? Does that kind of attraction grow? Maybe these are unanswerable questions because everyone is different. I can’t decide. I wish it was more cut and dried. I wish both men and women in the church would give more people a chance instead of relegating them to a slot and leaving them there. It is something I need to work on.

I have no doubts that physical attraction is very important. I just hope many of us aren’t writing off “the one” because of a false paradigm when it comes to attraction. If there was a manual for all this I missed it.

Pretty deep, huh?

The Winds of Fate

This poem caught my attention today.

The Winds of Fate
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and another drives west

With the selfsame winds that blow.

'Tis the set of the sails,

And Not the gales,

That tell us the way to go.

Like the winds of the sea are the ways of fate;

As we voyage along through life,

'Tis the set of a soul

That decides its goal,

And not the calm or the strife.

Nurturing Protection?

I came across this excellent article on Boundless Webzine. They have some great articles. I think about this topic quite a bit...the questions regarding the differences between men and women and how they are addressed.

The article starts out...

"I can remember last September, sitting on my living room couch, watching my TV, mesmerized and horrified.

It was an episode of Dateline NBC, and a security consultant nicknamed "Wild Bill" was showing how easy it is for women to become victims. To prove his point, Bill went into a bar with an actress accomplice. He proceeded to tell several men at the bar what he planned to do — lace this woman's drink with a date rape drug and then rape her. With the men watching, he acted out slipping a drug into her drink. The men did nothing."

I saw this video and it really made me pause. Do we even realize what is happening to our kids and what they are taking in on a daily basis?

Being Practical

Sometimes I hate being practical. Sometimes I wish I could just go with the flow and not worry about the repercussions of certain choices. I have pretty much always been practical about the realities of things. I am not one to get emotionally involved in something that can't have a future, but it's so tempting just to let things ride...

BUT the practical side of me always steps in and reminds me of what I really want out of life and my future.

It is so tempting to just go with the flow, but I know that flow will take me somewhere I don't want to be. Sigh...being practical, at least today, is a pain in my rear.