GO WORLD?! GO U.S.AMERICA!

Like many, I have been watching the Olympics. It’s been awesome! I am truly excited and happy and proud for each person who gets to be there and represent their country. I want to see the best win, but.. I am profoundly disturbed by an ad campaign running while I watch the events. It’s a VISA ad whose tag line is: Go World.

Look, I know propaganda for globalization when I see it. I just have this question for Visa: How many card holders are there in rural China? How about rural any third world country? How about North Korea? (btw, yes, I know that unsecured consumer debt in the poor parts of America is not a good thing, that’s not my point today.)

I’m disgusted! While I want the best to legitimately win at all events, I sincerely hope the best will be from MY country – the U.S.A. I am sick to death of hearing how awful our country is! Yes, I’ll agree, there are plenty of problems, there are plenty of bad policies, bad government, etc.. But it seems to have become a sin to have national pride these days. We are only allowed to adore Europe, or non-Christians, or…ANYONE but the USA.

Well, it is the Capitalism of the USA which created VISA, the free press, a place to tolerate others, and more. While I watch the Olympics, I feel very strongly about my country in a positive way, and I feel sad for the citizens of many other countries I see. Can you imagine what awaits the Chinese Olympic athlete who fails? In their system of Communism, the children have been taken from their families while very young and put into dormitories. The CHILDREN’S jobs is to perfect arbitrary athleticism mandated by their government! China isn’t alone, either. I think we all remember what happened to Iraqi Olympians who failed – they were killed. What awaits Iranian Olympians, or North Korea?

No, I don’t cheer, “Go World”. I do cheer for the individuals I see who have worked and are working so hard. But I don’t cheer a world where such tyranny and “Animal Farm” tactics are practiced. I cheer strong, determined people and leaders who fight against, in spite of, and sometimes, under such horrible conditions for their own survival – or the survival of others.

Busy

It has been too long since I last posted. I've been a bit distracted, I'm afraid. I've also been completely overwhelmed. There's been so much going on in the news, I didn't really know where to begin.. so I didn't begin at all.

My garden was beautiful, but the heat got to it... Now I have to start all over - there's a lesson.

There's the whole election thing...ugh.

My homeowner's association is bickering..again.

My daughter left for the summer, so I miss her.

In other news, I could write about how I keep hoping I can find a school for my middle child, but when I find any that could be a fit, there's no room or some other issue. I think God is trying to tell me something (HOMESCHOOL).

A direct-sales company whose products I've been using for five years - well, all of the sudden, people are come to ME to ask questions, so I'm in prayer about that. Think I'll just take that one friend at a time.

It looks like we may have finally found a medication for my son which is working. Our days are .. delightful! YAY!

My husband's job is really stressful, but to his credit, he never brings it home. Instead, it brings him home. His heart is really toward his home and his children, and I am grateful beyond what I can say.

I guess I just find it interesting that when there's a lot to do, there's often not much to say!

It's been quite a whie since I posted. I've had many things I could have written about, but sometimes, we just need to be still.

During my times of meditating on the beautiful life the Lord has given to me, I like to go through all the pictures I've taken of trips, the children, everything moms take pictures of. While rummaging around my computer photos, inspiration struck. I've been taking lots of pictures of gardens and flowers, some are even my own! So, I made a new store:

WWW.cafepress.com/BOUQUETBEAUTY

It has a collection of my floral photographs from Florida to California and Texas in between. I've put them on notecards, prints..I do hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

COOKBOOK ON THE WAY

I've noticed that many well-intentioned gluten-free or casein-free cookbooks are...tedious. The ingredients are expensive or odd. I've been adjusting meals for my family who cannot have either dairy (casein) or gluten (wheat). My daughter convinced me that I should start writing down everything I cook so I can put it all in an easier cookbook. Now, I will tell my readers that we do use other allergens, such as shellfish, eggs, etc... Also, there are some things that I do prefer gluten-free mixes to make, such as pancakes - it's just faster. As soon as the publication is ready (in several months) I will make the link available. Let's Eat!

Jobs should be filled by qualified candidates, please.

If you click on the link of the title of this entry, you'll go to a news article about the Victoria police. Apparently, the men of the force don't really like it when tiny women become officers. Why might this be? Well, how about when these officers are in a chase, who runs faster? When the police must subdue a 250 lb man, can the little women actually perform? The answer is often that they cannot. Now, I understand that women do come in all shapes and sizes, but this "Harrison Bergeron" world of equality is truly out of hand. If I am being assaulted by a 250 lb man, I want two 200 lb men there to "take him down", not two other 5' 130lb women whom he can throw off like small gnats. Now, imagine my assailant is on PCP....gasp!

This reminds me of an almost laughable program going on in Baltimore when I lived there in the early 1990's. It was noted that the police academy was having a hard time retaining new recruits-specifically recruits from the inner city. The first hurdle was that the candidates could not pass the physical requirements, so they were made easier.

As a friend of mine put it: Great, now we have cops who cannot run a mile.

Next, it was discovered that the new recruits were not passing the psychological profile, so guess what? Yup, it was made easier, too.

My friend continued: We now have cops who can't run a mile and might not be able to asses situations and respond with a gun.

All this in an effort to recruit a certain "class" of people. All to promote "equality". It reminds me of a T-shirt I saw on cafepress: "Silly Liberal, Class Struggles are for Communists."

My understanding is that this ill-conceived plan by Baltimore was abandonded. While living there, I saw many a police car wrapped around some telephone or light pole. See, the chosen vertical market didn't know how to drive. Oh, boy......

God is Love

A dear friend of mine is wrestling with the different accounts of religion and of what/who God is. After a fabulous visit, I thought about what she said and wrote the following letter to her.

I would appreciate any comments and thoughts.

Dearest Friend,
I've been thinking a lot about what you said: God is Love.
yes, that is ABSOLUTELY true, but, my love, it is only a part of the story. Mind you, it is the BEST part, but it is the best part because of what comes before it:

So, I share what the "gospel" really is with my most precious friend.

Going to the personality of God, we must first remember that He is God, and we are not, so we can only understand God through ourselves, which is ultimately inadequate. This is why we have scripture (and sometimes disagreement :-) ).

the four atributes of God:

1)God is perfectly Holy/Pure: He cannot be around that which is not perfectly pure. He cannot sin. He cannot violate his own law, nor simply "look over" when it is violated. Whether one believes we violated His law and commandments (they are pretty good - that top ten has yet to be beat!) through birth, or after, the fact is that we all have done so. We are, therefore, not pure or holy.
2) God is perfectly Just. When we have violated our relationship with him through sin, there must be penance. "The wages of sin is death." Pretty drastic, I know, but not when you even try to consider how perfect He is in His being and doing.
3) God is perfectly Merciful: God does not want us to die. He does not want us to be out of fellowship with Him. He wants to be with us, His creation for EVER. He wants to Love us...so..
4)God is perfectly Loving. This is where Jesus comes in. In the Old Testament, God required a sacrifice of a perfect Lamb from the Hebrews each year. This lamb died for the sins of the Hebrew people. However, even the Garden of Eden, God promised a savior one day. That savior is His son, Jesus Christ. "He that knew no sin, became sin for us that we might be Holy in Him."

Jesus died to pay the price for our sins because we could not pay for them ourselves. God made a way for us to be with Him forever! We must be pure to be with God, and the only way to be pure is cast our sin/transgression/disobedience on Christ. "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one may come to the Father, but by me."

Many people simply call Jesus a great teacher, but no other teacher has said what he just said, and no other teacher in the world has ever done what he has done - conquered DEATH!

Jesus has given us a legacy of peace (not perfect easiness, but peace) if we will believe and follow Him. I hope you will be blessed by experiencing and living in His perfect Love forever through Jesus-the only way.
All MY LOVE, FOREVER,
Charly

I visited here today and thought that you would enjoy it too! - check this out at: http://wandascountryhome.com/trilogy/

The Truth About Feminism: Article Reprint

I have recently stated to my dear cousin, “Ah, there’s nothing like oxytocin!”
He replied with, “What’s oxytocin?”
“Oxytocin,” I answered, “is the hormone released when, one, women give birth, but also when they are near their children. It makes you feel reeeeeaaaaallll good! Aaahhhh” At that moment, I was snuggling my two year old.
Today, I had him in my lap again. He was watching Teletubbies and I was holding him and delighting in the soft, fuzzy hair that tickled my face. Mmmmm….. Then, later, I found this article on www.humanevents.com by Marie T. Sullivan of the Chicago Daily Observer. It originally printed on March 11, 2008 and is copywrited. It is her intellectual material, but well worth re-printing:

Phyllis Schlafly Was Right By Marie T. Sullivan

Following the 1997 re-make of the movie Titanic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, an amusing T-shirt began showing up about town. “THE SHIP SANK,” it read. “GET OVER IT.”

One could say the same for the feminist movement.

This thought came to mind as I attended a recent talk at DePaul University by Phyllis Schlafly, the Alton, Illinois housewife-turned-attorney, a visit organized by the DePaul Conservative Alliance.

Having attended college in the ‘seventies, I knew a thing or two about Phyllis Schlafly, all right. She was the annoying blue-haired lady who led the fight to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, and who wanted to keep women down. Never mind that I hadn’t ever read a scrap of her writing or heard her speak.

As a music student, I wasn’t interested in the grown-up working world anyway, and I’ve always liked men. But I was surrounded by feminist rhetoric.

So it was with fascination that I listened thirty years later to her ideas, which beamed clarity and refreshing good sense, and many of which weren’t what I expected to hear.

I am one of seven children, six of whom are female. My five sisters have provided a living laboratory for observing the real-life effects of the feminist movement over the past thirty years. “Feminism,” Phyllis Schlafly stated simply, “ is incompatible with happiness.” You know what? She’s right. The sisters who succumbed to its orthodoxies are divorced and struggling. They do have one source of enduring happiness, though: their children. Huh? The “movement” told us that having children should be your lowest priority because doing so gets in the way of your career and your personal freedom. Yet for most women, children are hands-down their primary source of happiness.

It turns out the woman had vision. Back in 1981, she predicted that the falling U.S. birthrate would bankrupt the Social Security system—common sense that was considered crackpot at the time, when everyone was worried about overpopulation. Early on she foresaw the consequences of no-fault divorce, which made it easy for men to dump their middle-aged wives, and predicted how other forms of engineered “equality” would harm people in the long run, women and children most of all.

To my surprise, Schlafly is fine with the idea of women succeeding in the working world and achieving all over the place, not that any person’s worth is measured by their achievements. Like Letitia Baldridge, though, she advises doing so after your children are grown. Schlafly herself earned a law degree after the age of fifty, after raising six children who clearly are her pride and joy. Her intellect is formidable. She holds a Master’s degree in political science from Radcliffe. Initially her area of expertise was foreign policy, not women’s issues. She has published twenty books, some of them influential. She’s now on the far side of eighty and she’s still achieving.

Last week the Chicago Tribune ran a story in its cooking section titled “Got 10 Minutes? We’ve Got Dinner!” The piece opens with a few modern-day scenarios: “By the time you get home after picking up the kids from school activities and day care, everyone’s yowling with the low-blood-sugar heebie-jeebies. Wouldn’t it just be easier to do drive-through again?” Or: “You and your significant other both work demanding jobs. At the end of the day, neither of you wants to spend an hour in the kitchen. It’s so much easier to let take-out Thai and a glass of wine serve as dinner.”

Is this really how we want to live?

The assumption that two incomes are always required in order to support a family is one of those falsehoods that’s perceived as true by way of frequent repetition, but that’s another article.

In short, Schlafly is the nation’s leading defender of the stay-at-home mother, a state of life we have scorned to our peril. And feminism has failed, she says, because it denies human nature, particularly the eternal (and delicious) differences between men and women.

“Want to see the difference?” she asked. “Put a mouse in the room at a family gathering. The women will scream, and the men will get rid of the mouse.” This is an oversimplification to make a point with humor, of course, but who can deny it? I am an educated woman and I WANT TO SCREAM at the sight of a mouse running loose indoors.

It appeared that very few students from DePaul’s women’s studies program attended the lecture. So much for the open and vigorous exchange of ideas on a university campus. Nonetheless there were a few detractors. Some young women were angry that male CEOs greatly outnumber females, for example. Poor lambs. They don’t know what a seventy-hour week in a cutthroat environment feels like. Contrary to expectation, Schlafly has no problem with women becoming CEOs. She merely points out the simple truth that most women don’t want to do what’s necessary to get there. They’d rather have babies. Well and good.

I close by describing a memorable sight I encountered by chance while on the University of Chicago campus in January. It was what I later learned to be the annual Polar Bear run, a sort of Oxfordian prank in which students cheerfully sprint naked in the cold and then dive into a lagoon, I suppose in defiance of both convention and Old Man Winter. Most of the participants were men, but perhaps ten percent were female. Now, how often do you see a large group of naked men and women side by side in public? Clothes mask our differences, but remove them and you are quickly reminded that those differences are startling.

Thank God. Androgyny’s a bore.