Good Read With Good Friends

Last night our good friends, Steve and Sheila, had us over for a lovely pork chop dinner. Sheila made this really great brown rice with dried fruit and nuts. They have us over every Tuesday for dinner and I gotta say it is great not having to worry about dinner at all for one day!

We get together to stay in touch with the Body of Christ. They are part of the regular gathering on Saturdays that turned us on to the whole idea of gathering with the local expression of the Body in homes and we are grateful to Jim and Kathy for their persistence in inviting us. It is where we came to see that it is good that communion is part of a whole meal, the Blood a full glass of wine, the Body a hunk of a loaf of bread we all share in, that no one in particular is in charge and we can spend all night in equality giving praises to the Father, believing in our commonality in Jesus Christ and talking of the counsel we are receiving from the Holy Spirit.

No, I do not mean that they are into the currently popular cell groups, home groups or mini-churches that are adjunct to a traditional brick and mortar church. We strongly believe that we, those who believe in the saving grace of Jesus Christ, are the church. To talk of the church as a place or an event is kinda weird when you look at the references to church in the NT. You really can't come up with anything except that church is people and not a building or an event on Sunday or Saturday. Yes, it does refer to churches that are located here or there but that is the geographical location that those believers lived and worked in. And while many may agree in principle with the wrongness of the notion that church is a building or an event, it is so engrained in most of us that Rebecca and I are doing our very best to refer to one of the things the church does, that which most call "church," as "the gathering of the Body," "gathering" for short, to break our habit of language.

We meet on Tuesdays with Steve and Sheila as yet another chance to meet with the Body in a more intimate setting and minister to one another's needs. Lately we have been ministering to one another by reading and discussing A.W. Tozer's book, The Pursuit of God. Last night we finished up with the last chapter. Tozer did not disappoint us but once again delivered a very thought provoking chapter, Chapter 10, "The Sacrament of Living". A very good way to wind up an excellent book and a nice segue into our next choice, Richard Foster's, Celebration of Discipline.

Tozer writes: "A concomitant of the error (attaching sacredness to some acts while attaching secularity to others (summary mine)) which we have been discussing is the sacred-secular antithesis as applied to places. It is little short of astonishing that we can read the New Testament and still believe in the inherent sacredness of some places. This error is so widespread that one feels alone when he tries to combat it, It has acted as a kind of dye to color
the thinking of religious persons and has colored the eyes as well so that it is all but impossible to detect its fallacy. In the face of every New Testament teaching to the contrary, it has been said and sung throughout the centuries and accepted as a part of the Christian message, that which it most surely is not. Only the Quakers, so far as my knowledge goes, have had the perception to see the error and the courage to expose it."

Mind you this was written in the 40's, 1948 to be exact. A lot has happened to various denominations of Christianity since. Things he says about Catholics, in chapter 10, for instance can most certainly be applied to many denominations now.

Even Tozer doesn't completely avoid making divisions of sorts, the divisions man is so easily drawn to. Christ is adamant that we not attach what we perceive as important to things of his creation and there by justifying our actions towards certain people, certain acts, certain days and certain things. For the most part Tozer does say what most will not but what needs to be said so that Christianity can heal from the hurts that we endure from ignoring what is written in red. "Do not call anything impure that God has made clean." Acts 10:15.

Identity Saved, Patch Tilled

Dirt is wonderful! The best thing that I have after God. I'm not talking about the stuff I till and plant in. I am talking about my wonderful husband. He came by that nickname because his given name is Phil and he had a t-ball coach that would say, "hey, I saw you on a wanted sign. It said 'fill dirt wanted'." Phil then became "Dirt". It is the main reason the title of this blog is 'It's the Dirt'. God truly sent him into my life to show me what God is all about and turn my silly, rebellious, mistrustful rear around. But that is another post not this one.

This one is about how wonderful he is. I am about to abandon him to help a friend take her married daughter back home to San Diego. It will take a week. I have already abandoned him during this whole "Romantic Influenza" thing for a week or more. I haven't cooked, I have barely kept up with minor cleaning and the garden has got little more than a few deadheading walks. I am so far behind it is crazy.

But I can cross off part of one of my to dos for May. The pumpkin patch has been tilled! He is such a sweetie. I am very grateful for it getting done because I don't know how I am going to fit everything in one week before I head off to California. So I am not sad for his doing it even though I do love out go out to the patch with our 1950 Allis Chalmers tractor and go up and down and up and down the beds. Our good friend, and our daughter's father-in- law, Rick, was kind enough to loan us his PTO tiller and it fit the back of our Allis just right. I do so like the aesthetics of tilling a pumpkin patch with a big orange tractor.

I no longer need to get the Super Spray Max 550 and become a killing machine. Dirt has saved me from another identity crisis. He some how worked his magic on the lame-o gasket and it fit, stayed right where I had tried for an hour to get it to stay. How does he do that? But that's why I married him. Well I'm not really sure I knew at the moment of marriage that was one of the things I would appreciate about him and would add to my respect for him but it is now. Dirt can fix anything. Young unmarried ladies ought to pray that their future husbands be given the gift of fix-it.

Can't leave you with that ugly image of my weeds another day, so here is my latest accomplishment in bloom. I can't recall right now what the pansies are but the tulips are "Princess Irene". They are supposed to be fragrant but with my sinuses recovering still from the "Romantic Influenza" I cannot tell you for certain that they are. I have been wanting to grow these for a few years ever since I saw them in a catalog of heritage bulbs. I finally went for it this fall and feel very rewarded. I don't usually go for such a bold look in a spring flower but I am glad I did, what a treat.

Be a Total Killer or Not At All

You know sometimes I'm just not sure who I am. Like today, I had finally had it with the weeds in the driveway. Driveways should either look like a country lane or be impeccably free of weeds. Even though I live on a farm and my driveway is pretty long it will never be a country lane, five eights gravel will never look like a country lane. But that is a whole different subject and my husband says five eights so five eights it is. I just have to deal with what bugs me and attempt to remove the weeds.

Now mind you I do not try to weed the entire driveway. That would be ridiculous. I just want the stuff up by the house weed free. My garden isn't even weed free but the driveway must be because it is a weed free look - five eights and all. So that said, let me get to my confusion and my question, who am I?

I don't usually load up a sprayer and go around spraying everything in sight. For the most part what comes out of the end of my sprayer is what my husband would refer to as my hippie-veggie concoctions. A little pulverized tomato leaf goes a long way when you are dealing with black spot and garlic will send the aphids to the neighbors a half mile away. But the driveway weeds have never responded to my oldest daughters famed vinegar weed-killing solution.

I have succumbed in the past to using a little Round-Up. I used to distain the use of it till a hippie-type chemistry guy assured me that once the Round-Up hits the ground it is nothing that "ain't natural". Around here the weeds and grass will climb up over your face and suffocate you in your sleep if your not careful. So, in non-garden or non-pasture areas that need to be weed free I have on occasion in the past used a little Round-Up. Trust me I only use it sparingly and only a few time a year. Granted I do sit down while on the phone and gab and pull driveway weeds a few times on top of the spraying but those are usually the crafty ones that hold their breath when the RU comes around. So honest, just once or twice maybe three times in a good/bad year.

But then that is where my dilemma comes in. Call me paranoid but I like to keep the weed killing stuff in a totally separate sprayer from my hippie-veggie stuff But then that means that I have a sprayer that I use infrequently. Which wasn't too bad an idea until it did the typical modern plastic thing and broke. It didn't really out and out right break, it is just that the rinky-dink gasket it came with finally got to rinky-dink to do its job. Granted I did not spend a good deal of money on this sprayer but it wasn't for free either and now I am faced with buying another one cause I just don't see the hardware store having replacement parts for rinky-dink sprayers.

But who am I and should I be buying a better sprayer for killing when I am just and occasional killer?

You know what I dream of when I have to spray my fruit trees (all organic good stuff)? To have a commercial sprayer that I could hook up to a pressure sprayer. That would be nice. I'm getting old, that whole pump thing can really get me. Okay who am I kidding I never liked having to pressurize that stupid little two gallon bottle that is just going to go dead again, all too soon. So maybe I should just become an out right killing machine and by the super max 550 automatic sprayer that sprays 500 feet and just get it over with.

"Everybody gets dead, it was just his time"

Romantic Influenza and a lap top

We are all still suffering a little from the Romantic Influenza. My good friend Rebecca had it a few days before I did and that is what she calls it. When she first pegged it as the "Romantic Influenza" I said, "Why? Cause we can die from this?" That made her giggle, okay rasp-giggle, so it must be why.

The Romantic influenza had me out of any sort of rational participation in life for five days before I realized I just needed to go to bed and stay there. So I did, for three days, then I resumed to a level just below rational participation for five more days. On the first five days I didn't go anywhere and on the last five days I wished I hadn't.

I would also peg this influenza as romantic because I fell in love during this bout of the crud. My husband has of late gone on a technology upgrade feeding frenzy. Since February we have new TVs and the components that go with them but the latest, just five days before the romantic influenza, was a new computer, a lap top. And I am in love! Okay so for the first few days of the new relationship I was so over whelmed if I wasn't just staring at it, I was playing spider solitaire. But right at about the time the romantic influenza hit so did my acceptance of this new relationship and once I accepted it I quickly fell head over heals in love.

You need to understand that the last computer purchase was back in '96! So I missed several system changes that you all had the pleasure of experiencing. I am not in the ranks of those who are complaining about Vista, claiming that XP was just fine and that "they" should have left well enough alone. Heck I missed the whole "we were fine with Windows 2000 why do we need XP" thing that probably happened too. Trust me anything that doesn't give me the time to clean a whole room between commands is a good thing. I wanted to say that it was like going from a crank up phone linked to a local operator to a cell phone but that would have been hyperbole. It really is more like going from a rotary phone with a party line to a cell phone. You really have no idea the leap of change. I feel like Rip Van Winkle.

Once I upgraded my e-mail program from Windows Mail to Windows Live Mail and called to have the techy help me through fixing my whatever so my battery would work properly I have been good to go, smooth sailing. I don't see what all the fuss about not liking Vista is all about, how it is so horrible. Okay, my learning curve on language etc. is more like a 87 degree incline but it is good exercise for my brain right?. I haven't cried for ten days. Well except for that one John Wayne movie I watched.

The whole e-mail thing kinda cracked me up after all was said and done. When I first opened my new e-mail via Windows Mail, DSL no less, I was ready to go at it. I wrote a lovely letter to a friend and then I went to spell check it. Mind you I must use spell check. Even though I am the daughter of an incredible English teacher who knew Latin and every play ever written, I stink at English, spelling most of all. And no thanks to a garage sale I had once and an appliance I had for sale all my friends have experienced my lack of spell-ability. Okay here is the dirty laundry, I hear an "l" in stove. Where, you ask? Why like this, S-t-o-l-v-e. And that my friend is just the tip of the iceberg. My spelling is sometimes so bad that I'll just bag the word and use a different one that I can at least get close enough for the spell check program to figure out what I want.

So when I was using Windows Mail, went to spell check my lovely creative endeavor and all I got was some ridiculous notice that it couldn't check my spelling because "this language is no longer available for spell checking" and would I "Please select another in the spelling options dialog" suffice it to say I was shattered. I had no idea that my spelling was so bad that it couldn't even be recognized as English. But then I went to try and find this "spelling options dialog" and as far as I could tell no such animal existed. So I went to the "Get help from communities link" and after a thorough search all over all the possible places that had anything to do with my current problem, I found that I was not the only one who could not get past the "this language is no longer available for spell checking" and "Please select another in the spelling options dialog" message. Somewhere in all my searching (I spent a full day on it and nothing else, except drinking plenty of fluids, taking aspirin and using my neti pot) I came across the recommendation to download Windows Live Mail. So I did. And even though I am not excited about the layout of the window and getting used to it not looking like my old aol e-mail page I am okay with it. Hey, I can spell check . I did go through a bit of a rigmarole at the start cause I didn't set it up right with my DSL folks, after that nice lady at fairpoint solved that problem I was good to go.

The battery thing was a way easier solve. I know that probably somewhere in the itty bitty manual or in the web page explaining how to use my computer there is some mention about how to correctly use the battery. For the first few days of using my computer I was near a plug so I left it plugged in and didn't think about the battery. I had put it in when I open the package and that was the last time I thought about it. Maybe when I changed rooms I recognized that I could cause I had a battery in it so I could unplug and not stop what I was doing. But then I needed to go to a spot that to have a plug in would have been a problem. After all I had a battery I would just go. Not so. When I unplugged my computer went immediately to sleep. So I called the technical support people and the young man stepped me through this hocus pocus thing with taking the battery out, turning the computer back on, hitting the f10 key till something happened and then doing something else. I don't remember what all I did or the technical terms for what happened. I remember him saying something about "build up" somewhere that needed to be discharged?

Anyway what he did helped and then he told me not to leave the battery in when I plug in. So now I have a routine for taking out my battery while I run the computer on AC. I just slip it into a nifty little bag that I bought for my lap top the last day I was out before I went down with the Romantic Influenza.