Prayer Needed for Pakistani Christians

The Taliban has informed Pakistani Christians in a northwestern town that their churches must be shut down by today, and that they must convert or die. The government is offering little protection. Please pray for our brothers and sisters to have faith that cannot be shaken, a peace that passes understanding no matter the circumstances, and for their persecutors to be thwarted.

You can read more about this story here and here.

You CAN make a difference!

I have a hero. I don't know her name, but I chat with her frequently. She is just another mom who picks up children at the local elementary school. Two of her children are special needs, and she has to be there when school is released to get a daily report. Her other children are much the same as mine, laughing and bouncing as they arrive to tell Mom all about their day at school. Three of her children are adopted, all from foster care she provided. I admire her desire to make a difference in the lives of a few children, her willingness to sacrifice normal for something better.

May is National Foster Care Month. Click on the picture below to find out more about how you can make a difference!



There are 513,000 children in foster care in the United States. Here are the most recent stats I could find on foster care in my state.

• As of 2003, there were 6,079 children in the foster care system.
• 25% were under the age of 5.
• 52% were between the ages of 11 and 18.
• The average length of stay for these children is 34 months. 34 MONTHS.
• Over half of these children are not reunified with their birth families.

Imagine being a toddler or elementary school age child and spending three years without a family of your own. Now imagine being a teenager and doing that. Adolescence is hard enough with a family to support and guide you.

Think about spending your formative years in a group home and then trying to be a spouse or a parent, maintaining a home and having had no one to learn how to do these things from. How do you know how to be a mom or dad, a husband or wife? Where have you learned how to solve problems and work through disagreements? Who has shared Christ with you? Prayed for you? Disciplined you? Felt joy in your successes and sadness in your times of disappointment?

Scripture tells us that pure and undefiled religion is caring for orphans and widows in their times of need. How are we doing that?

National Tax Freedom Day

From the Tax Foundation...

America's Tax Freedom Day Arrives April 30 in 2007, Two Days Later Than 2006

Tax Freedom Day, which shows just how long we work for the government rather than ourselves, will fall on April 30 in 2007, according to the Tax Foundation's annual calculation using the latest government data on income and taxes. (Click here to read the full study).

"Tax freedom will come two days later in 2007 than it did in 2006," said Tax Foundation President Scott A. Hodge, "and fully 12 days later than in 2003, when tax cuts caused Tax Freedom Day to arrive comparatively early, on April 18."

However, 2007's Tax Freedom Day is still slightly earlier than it was in 2000, when the economic boom, the tech bubble and higher tax rates pushed tax burdens to a record high, and Tax Freedom Day was postponed until May.

For those of us living in Alabama, our tax freedom day actually arrived much earlier than the national average, occurring on April 12th!

News That's Weird But True

DNA from unfinished Cinnamon bun nabs thief .

Love my cat, love me!

Another story of being so stupid, it's criminal.

President Gets His Groove Back

President Bush has some fun after promoting Malaria Awareness Day on Wednesday.

Georgia Finally Integrates

I grew up in a middle class suburb of Atlanta. I read Gone With the Wind for the first time in 5th grade, and wept at Scarlett's bad choices. I enjoy Southern food, Southern hospitality, sweet tea and kids running barefoot outside. When I hear Ray Charles' recording of Georgia on My Mind and think of the moonlight on the pines, it brings back fond memories.

My grandmother and grandfather were baptized together as teenagers in a "warsh" hole made by damming up a small creek. They were double cousins (no, that's not blood related--her aunt married his uncle). Grandma dropped out of school after 8th grade to go to work so her sister could continue in school. They were dirt poor, but she is one of the most industrious women I know. Having worked hard to create a better life for her children, she never lost sight of her values and belief in God and His ability to change people.

I remember when Jimmy Carter won the presidency. I was a child and didn't know about the politics...but I was proud he was from Georgia. In sixth grade, several students got to eat lunch with the Governor when he toured our school. I was one of them. We had fried chicken that day, and to be polite, we all tried to eat fried chicken with plastic forks. It didn't work out that well, and I think the Governor himself was relieved when we went to the finger-lickin'-good way of doing things.

Georgia football is pretty much the best football there is. There is nothing like watching the Silver Britches hunker down 'tween the Hedges. I marched in the band at UGA. Long before I got there, someone made a stink about the band playing Dixie, so they switched to playing Tara's Theme, from Gone With the Wind. Sweet Georgia Brown was another staple for the after game show.

Atlanta has become a city of opportunity and growth. While I do not support the lottery, Georgia has made good choices with their profits--enabling students to attend college through the HOPE scholarship. When education, income, housing and other ways of measuring one's standard of living are calculated, Georgia fares much better than many of her counterparts in the Southeast United States.

Yet for all my love of Georgia, I am amazed and embarrassed that Ashburn, GA found ways to avoid integration until the year 2007. Read the details here. It is unbelievable to me that in this day and age, a county can have separate proms and homecoming kings and queens based on race. Here is an example of a place where "separate but equal" is still being practiced. It seems to me this is a lot worse than the Imus incident of a few weeks ago that everyone was up in arms about.

My husband and I have been fortunate enough to travel to many parts of the world, meeting many people along the way. The hopes, dreams, feelings and needs of people are basically the same--God, food, water, shelter, clothing, family, friendship.

A Kazakh child crying in an orphanage feels the same emotional loss as an Eastern European child abandoned by her mother. A black child with a scraped knee feels the same pain as a white child. A man without a job, unable to support his family, has the same feelings of shame and loss of respect for himself. A woman watching her daughter or son marry feels the same love. A couple, watching their newborn enter the world, feels a similar pride and joy.

I know there are enormous humanly insurmountable problems throughout the world. I probably should be happy that this town is stepping in the right direction. But, frankly, it is without comprehension that despite how far American society has come, we still have areas where it is okay, yea even normal, to practice racial discrimination.

I long for the day, and at this point am convinced it will only be in heaven as we fall at the feet of Jesus, when people will love and care for one another without regard to race. There, we will be too busy worshipping God to care about skin color.

As Far as the East is From the West

We've all read about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's condemnation of the Brits, and western culture in general, for allowing a female soldier to be deployed to the Persian Gulf. He apparently questions our "family values". Ahmadinejad criticized Britain for deploying Leading Seaman Faye Turney, one of the 15 detainees, in the Gulf, pointing out that she is a woman with a child. "How can you justify seeing a mother away from her home, her children? Why don't they respect family values in the West?" he asked of the British government.

When kindergartners are proudly interviewed on television reciting martyrdom poems to celebrate their mother's demise as a suicide bomber, and boasting how many Jews were killed by their mother, I believe his culture has lost any authority to comment on the family values of other societies. Somehow, in the fight against the West it is apparently okay to send mothers permanently away from their children.

While this video deals with Palestinian children rather than Iranians, it does give some insight into the radical nature of the culture war and religious war being waged in the world. I do not assume that every Muslim, Middle Easterner, or Persian thinks what is shown in the video is good. In fact, I have had the privilege of being friends with a Persian that would never support this. Still, the radicalism is real and violent and we must be vigilant in our attempts to understand what is happening, defend ourselves, and give the hope of Christ.



h/t: reformedchicksblabbing.blogspot.com

Inaccurate, but it's fun...

Check out my visual DNA--they say I am physically fit based on my choices (ha), but it is fun. I stole this idea from Em...

Read my VisualDNA™ Get your own VisualDNA™

I Do Not Like Them, Sam I Am

Recently, my two youngest children celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday by going to school dressed as their favorite book character (from any author) and listening to Dr. Seuss all day. My daughter was Laura Ingalls Wilder from Little House on the Prairie. My son chose to dress up as Sam I Am from Green Eggs and Ham.

This brought to mind a recent conversation with one of my sisters. I told her about my children's rules for spending money at the book fair--no Disney Princess books, no Nemo or Cars books, no toys, no junk. My husband actually took my daughter to the book fair so she did not shop on her own, but she did come home with a My Little Pony book (in other words, junk).

My sister stated that it really didn't matter what the kids read, as long as they were reading. On the surface, this sounds good. In actuality, however, this rings false. Children learn the art of telling and writing stories from hearing and reading stories. They learn syntax, rules of the genre, and creativity from the books they read. In reality, we don't live in a Disney Princess world, and while it might be okay to watch a movie or read an occasional story about a Disney Princess, I would rather have them spend their time on worthwhile literature--biographies on people who have impacted the world for better or worse, stories that promote creativity, perseverance or problem-solving, not fluff written without a story in mind because the book is all about a movie.

Here are thoughts from others on the matter:

The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Mark Twain

Many books require no thought from those who read them, and for a very simple reason; they made no such demand upon those who wrote them.
Charles Caleb Colton

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Let me know what you think.

Christmas 2006

The children enjoyed Christmas this year, although our goal to slow down and enjoy some days at home was not met. We enjoyed time with extended family and enjoyed celebrating our Savior's birth, and yes, we enjoyed presents too.

Although we cut back this year on the amount of gifts we gave the children, we still had one child who couldn't understand that Christmas was not about getting. Next year, I hope we can really help him to understand--maybe by forsaking our gifts and gladly giving to those in need.

For those who know me, it will not come as a surprise that I greatly enjoy receiving gifts. According to The Five Love Languages by Smalley and Trent, it is one of my two strongest languages. Yet this year, I did not enjoy it as much as normal. It was financially stressful to meet the expectations of extended family, and none of us really needed as much as we got. I kept thinking of the orphans we have seen overseas and the sheer desperation and neediness of their situation and felt guilt at my abundance. It isn't that exchanging gifts is wrong, but the tradition has become more of a burden than a joy. I think I would receive greater joy from meeting a need that might allow the love of Christ to be shared and received.

For all that, I am enjoying my presents, and enjoyed the season.

Numero Uno

Today, I decided to join the rest of the world in the blogging revolution. Whether what I have to say is of any worth remains to be seen.

I was struck by the following excerpt from a Washington Post article my dad sent. Written by George Will, the article deals with the ongoing sectarian violnce we see in Iraq, and the underlying assumption the U.S government made that Iraqis are primarily nationalists and only secondarily separationists.

"But it did not take three years of Zarqawi and terrorism and sectarian violence to turn Iraqis into difficult raw material for self-government. For that, give another devil his due: Saddam Hussein's truly atomizing tyranny and terror. On June 20, 2003, just 72 days after the fall of Baghdad, The Post reported this from Fallujah:

'Military engineers recently cleared garbage from a field in Fallujah, resurfaced it with dirt and put up goal posts to create an instant soccer field. A day later, the goal posts were stolen and all the dirt had been scraped from the field. Garbage began to pile up again.'

An Army captain asked, 'What kind of people loot dirt?' There are many answers to that question. Here is one: a kind of people who are hard to help."

We can only hope that our initial premise was correct, although taking longer than we hoped for to settle into. To read the full article, click on this link:

Washington Post