It's interesting. Despite the truth that we are far better off than many would be in our situation, I find myself often giving in to fear, rather than living by faith, or hope. Part of that fear is fueled by the chaos here in America and around the globe. It worries me (always has) that we are not secure in our person(al) situation, our property, or our papers.
It's interesting, this inclination I have to discard faith and dance near fear, because I've done my share of 12 step programs. I know that sometimes you just have to "Let Go and Let God." An acquaintance of mine recently wrote on his blog about trusting in God, rather than trusting solely on your own strength (ok, he wrote more than that, but that's my take away.)
I tell a friend of mine frequently, that I would feel more secure if I owned my own home. Or was debt free. But as I reflect on it, that's not really accurate either.
I know someone who lives in Michigan (yeah, I'm talking about you !!!) who if I recall right, managed to become debt free except for his house while being unemployed for a year. That's living by faith !! I know someone who lives in Oklahoma who not only survived but thrived when her husband and son were both unemployed for 18 months. That's living by faith !
I'd be interested to hear your comments about how you have lived by faith rather than fear. Doesn't have to be monetary, or religious. Just wondering how you keep your sanity, while all about you are losing theirs <grin.>
Friday, March 29, 2013
Sunday, March 24, 2013
The Marriage Covenant
Few of us remember what the Marriage Covenant really means. And I'm likely not going where you think I might be going.
It's laid out pretty clearly in the Old Testament in several places, starting with Genesis 2:19-25. The six periods of creation have already happened (Genesis 1), in verse 19, the Lord brings all the creations to Adam and has him name them. There is no help(meet) for Adam, so the Lord creates a woman, and (this is the point most people know, but miss) joins them together as husband and wife in a marriage covenant.
Think about that. What kind of covenant is that? Death has not entered the world yet, so it is an eternal, everlasting, covenant of marriage, made so because it was performed by the Lord Himself. A covenant and the blessing pertaining to the covenant made by the Lord, is never broken by Him, but is often cast away by us. A covenant has fixed terms and blessings. When we choose to accept the Lord's covenant, and its terms, we receive its blessings.
In the original marriage covenant, the Lord extended eternal companionship, an eternal family unit, eternal offspring (multiply and replenish) among other things. But in order to obtain those blessings, one has to choose to come into the covenant, and be bound by it.
I'll accept that it's hard to get all that from Genesis 2. How do we know that this is true? We know that Adam (and Eve) were given authority directly from God to perform work and his covenants. Abel for example, was authorized by Adam to perform sacrifice, Cain was not, he had to go through his brother, which didn't sit well with Cain. You know the result. But I digress.
We know that the authority to establish and perform eternal marriage covenants continued down through Adam's descendants. We know this because the Lord extends the same covenant with Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 17:1-16). It continues through Isaac. Abraham is very concerned that Isaac not marry outside of the eternal marriage covenant (Genesis 24:1-7) and so he sends him to "his people" who are living within covenant, to choose a wife who has been brought up within that framework of authority. This is how we get Rebekah.
Later, Rebekah sees that of her two sons, Esau is not covenant minded, while Jacob is. Esau demonstrates this initially by selling his birthright covenant for food (the " but it's what I want " mindset). He then chooses to marry outside the covenant (Genesis 26:34-35). In doing so, he accepted his marriage would be a shadow of glory, rather than the eternal marriage he could have had by accepting God's terms in covenant of eternal marriage. Covenant marriage starts by marrying someone who is already living within (or willing to live) the terms of the covenant (duh.) The Hittites were not. This choice of Esau's caused his parents great sorrow.
A small segue. Years pass. Esau becomes a great nation. He becomes very wealthy. Eventually he becomes reconciled to the fact that he never was personally willing to abide by the terms of God's covenants and he and Jacob are reconciled. But this is the part we miss: all the reconciliation and long-term civil contracts made, still do NOT give Esau an eternal marriage covenant.
The story is repeated with Jacob. His parents, having learned they need to be more pro-active, send Jacob to an area populated by people already living God's covenants. There he meets Laban, and is married by eternal covenant to Leah and then Rachel.
Here's the point. Like Esau, you can call it whatever you want. You can get a piece of paper and call it marriage, but unless it is performed by God, or someone possessing His true authority, you can't call it a covenant, eternal marriage, nor can you expect to get all of the blessings from one.
Isaac and Rebekah didn't "sorrow greatly" because Esau married the girl down the road. They "sorrowed greatly" because they saw him rejecting God and His covenants, and by default, chose the consequences of that decision (Genesis 26:2-5.) They did everything they could to guide him into a different choice, but he still chose to "marry out."
It's interesting that after this Isaac and Rebekah didn't just throw in the towel, saying, well, that's it. There aren't enough women living within covenant, so we'll just accept that our sons have to marry whoever they can find. Or take the position that covenant marriage was too difficult so we'll settle for a civil (non-covenant) marriage, or if that's even too hard, we'll just do away with marriage altogether.
No. They decided to dig in, and do all they could to make sure that their other children had a chance of an eternal, covenant marriage.
We have that same choice today. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of United States is going to hear cases to determine whether or not the civil marriages we perform in the United States are going to be thrown out entirely, by changing the entire definition of marriage.
Before you read this blog, you might not have been able to see how far away we have stepped from what God established. God established the blessing of eternal, covenant marriage for us. Most of us have stepped away from that into a civil marriage which lasts only until "death do us part." Civil marriage nice as it is, is a shadow of what marriage could be. Most of us don't know how or where, or what we need to do in order to qualify for a covenant marriage. Far fewer of those who do know how, where or what, choose to do it.
So we have stepped from a knowing covenant, to a (usually) unknowing civil shadow, and now we stand poised to accept not even that.
Personally, I want you to have the chance of a covenant marriage. Because I want you to have that opportunity, even if you don't know where or how to get it, or even if you're not sure you want it right now, I am not going to do anything to lower your chances of getting one.
That means I'm not going to support the entire rewriting of marriage as an institution. I'm not going to support replacing echoes of marriage glory with complete and utter darkness. I know that people will take their little slingshots and hurl big boulders my way because of that stand. I'm okay with that. My kids do the same thing when I say "no" to something I believe will cause them harm.
I care about you enough to not help you hurl yourself off a marriage cliff. I just hope you care enough about yourself to come to a screeching halt, and realize just how close to the edge we all are.
It's laid out pretty clearly in the Old Testament in several places, starting with Genesis 2:19-25. The six periods of creation have already happened (Genesis 1), in verse 19, the Lord brings all the creations to Adam and has him name them. There is no help(meet) for Adam, so the Lord creates a woman, and (this is the point most people know, but miss) joins them together as husband and wife in a marriage covenant.
Think about that. What kind of covenant is that? Death has not entered the world yet, so it is an eternal, everlasting, covenant of marriage, made so because it was performed by the Lord Himself. A covenant and the blessing pertaining to the covenant made by the Lord, is never broken by Him, but is often cast away by us. A covenant has fixed terms and blessings. When we choose to accept the Lord's covenant, and its terms, we receive its blessings.
In the original marriage covenant, the Lord extended eternal companionship, an eternal family unit, eternal offspring (multiply and replenish) among other things. But in order to obtain those blessings, one has to choose to come into the covenant, and be bound by it.
I'll accept that it's hard to get all that from Genesis 2. How do we know that this is true? We know that Adam (and Eve) were given authority directly from God to perform work and his covenants. Abel for example, was authorized by Adam to perform sacrifice, Cain was not, he had to go through his brother, which didn't sit well with Cain. You know the result. But I digress.
We know that the authority to establish and perform eternal marriage covenants continued down through Adam's descendants. We know this because the Lord extends the same covenant with Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 17:1-16). It continues through Isaac. Abraham is very concerned that Isaac not marry outside of the eternal marriage covenant (Genesis 24:1-7) and so he sends him to "his people" who are living within covenant, to choose a wife who has been brought up within that framework of authority. This is how we get Rebekah.
Later, Rebekah sees that of her two sons, Esau is not covenant minded, while Jacob is. Esau demonstrates this initially by selling his birthright covenant for food (the " but it's what I want " mindset). He then chooses to marry outside the covenant (Genesis 26:34-35). In doing so, he accepted his marriage would be a shadow of glory, rather than the eternal marriage he could have had by accepting God's terms in covenant of eternal marriage. Covenant marriage starts by marrying someone who is already living within (or willing to live) the terms of the covenant (duh.) The Hittites were not. This choice of Esau's caused his parents great sorrow.
A small segue. Years pass. Esau becomes a great nation. He becomes very wealthy. Eventually he becomes reconciled to the fact that he never was personally willing to abide by the terms of God's covenants and he and Jacob are reconciled. But this is the part we miss: all the reconciliation and long-term civil contracts made, still do NOT give Esau an eternal marriage covenant.
The story is repeated with Jacob. His parents, having learned they need to be more pro-active, send Jacob to an area populated by people already living God's covenants. There he meets Laban, and is married by eternal covenant to Leah and then Rachel.
Here's the point. Like Esau, you can call it whatever you want. You can get a piece of paper and call it marriage, but unless it is performed by God, or someone possessing His true authority, you can't call it a covenant, eternal marriage, nor can you expect to get all of the blessings from one.
Isaac and Rebekah didn't "sorrow greatly" because Esau married the girl down the road. They "sorrowed greatly" because they saw him rejecting God and His covenants, and by default, chose the consequences of that decision (Genesis 26:2-5.) They did everything they could to guide him into a different choice, but he still chose to "marry out."
It's interesting that after this Isaac and Rebekah didn't just throw in the towel, saying, well, that's it. There aren't enough women living within covenant, so we'll just accept that our sons have to marry whoever they can find. Or take the position that covenant marriage was too difficult so we'll settle for a civil (non-covenant) marriage, or if that's even too hard, we'll just do away with marriage altogether.
No. They decided to dig in, and do all they could to make sure that their other children had a chance of an eternal, covenant marriage.
We have that same choice today. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of United States is going to hear cases to determine whether or not the civil marriages we perform in the United States are going to be thrown out entirely, by changing the entire definition of marriage.
Before you read this blog, you might not have been able to see how far away we have stepped from what God established. God established the blessing of eternal, covenant marriage for us. Most of us have stepped away from that into a civil marriage which lasts only until "death do us part." Civil marriage nice as it is, is a shadow of what marriage could be. Most of us don't know how or where, or what we need to do in order to qualify for a covenant marriage. Far fewer of those who do know how, where or what, choose to do it.
So we have stepped from a knowing covenant, to a (usually) unknowing civil shadow, and now we stand poised to accept not even that.
Personally, I want you to have the chance of a covenant marriage. Because I want you to have that opportunity, even if you don't know where or how to get it, or even if you're not sure you want it right now, I am not going to do anything to lower your chances of getting one.
That means I'm not going to support the entire rewriting of marriage as an institution. I'm not going to support replacing echoes of marriage glory with complete and utter darkness. I know that people will take their little slingshots and hurl big boulders my way because of that stand. I'm okay with that. My kids do the same thing when I say "no" to something I believe will cause them harm.
I care about you enough to not help you hurl yourself off a marriage cliff. I just hope you care enough about yourself to come to a screeching halt, and realize just how close to the edge we all are.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
HomeFront Pest Control
BUYER BEWARE. Seriously. If you live in southern California, and they come to your door, do yourself the biggest favor, and slam the door in their face.
I made the mistake of signing a contract for services with them (this would be the company at 537 West Rincon Str., Corona CA in case there is another company out there with the same or similar name.)
It was a mistake because they perform poorly. At the time, I had huge wasp nests all around my house. They came and removed half of them (left the nests on the ground, rather than removing them). I had to call to get the rest of them removed, which they resisted, because "their worker said he had removed them all."
That should have been my first clue this company was going to be nothing but trouble. Since then they have shown up without an appointment, wanting to spray when it was raining, show up to perform when I am not here, etc. etc.
I don't know why, given their abysmal track record of service, I thought we would be able to reach a deal when we became unemployed. Nope. Either "pay us a $170 cancellation fee, or schedule your 3 remaining appointments for service." I'm not the only one they have pulled this con on . It's just unfortunate that I didn't have the presence of mind to do some research on them before I signed a contract.
Moral of the story: be unwilling to sign a contract with a door to door salesman, no matter how smooth talking they are. Do your research quickly and cleanly. Even falling prey to petty lies, if I had been smarter, I would have checked their reputation (there's a reason I know I'm not the only one) and been able to cancel within 3 days. Put in a force majeure clause which states that in the event of a loss of employment (yours) the contract is null and void.
Of course, the best recourse of all is to work with a reputable vendor who has some integrity.
I made the mistake of signing a contract for services with them (this would be the company at 537 West Rincon Str., Corona CA in case there is another company out there with the same or similar name.)
It was a mistake because they perform poorly. At the time, I had huge wasp nests all around my house. They came and removed half of them (left the nests on the ground, rather than removing them). I had to call to get the rest of them removed, which they resisted, because "their worker said he had removed them all."
That should have been my first clue this company was going to be nothing but trouble. Since then they have shown up without an appointment, wanting to spray when it was raining, show up to perform when I am not here, etc. etc.
I don't know why, given their abysmal track record of service, I thought we would be able to reach a deal when we became unemployed. Nope. Either "pay us a $170 cancellation fee, or schedule your 3 remaining appointments for service." I'm not the only one they have pulled this con on . It's just unfortunate that I didn't have the presence of mind to do some research on them before I signed a contract.
Moral of the story: be unwilling to sign a contract with a door to door salesman, no matter how smooth talking they are. Do your research quickly and cleanly. Even falling prey to petty lies, if I had been smarter, I would have checked their reputation (there's a reason I know I'm not the only one) and been able to cancel within 3 days. Put in a force majeure clause which states that in the event of a loss of employment (yours) the contract is null and void.
Of course, the best recourse of all is to work with a reputable vendor who has some integrity.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
My Heroic Husband
The reason why my DH was let go from work corresponds to an earlier post in February: Bullying. I choose to write about it in the event it helps someone out in cyber-land.
About 6 weeks ago, DH came home from work and told me about an incident which, although the behavior had been ongoing, had come to a head that day. One of his subordinates had been terrorizing, bullying and harassing two women at work. DH had finally had enough, and reported him to management. He came home and said there was a good chance he'd get fired for his intervention. I told him if he got fired for standing up for the right, I was good with that all day long.
So we weren't too surprised when the women involved, fearful for their jobs, discounted the severity of the incidents, passing them off as "harmless." We were disappointed that the company chose to do the "easier" thing, rather than the right thing.
Choosing the "easier" path rather than the honorable road, is not an uncommon reaction. We recently found this article published by the Workplace Bullying Institute. 66% of people who fight back against workplace bullying are fired!
http://www.workplacebullying.org/individuals/solutions/wbi-action-plan/
On a broader scale, if you ever wanted tangible evidence of our decayed educational system, you're seeing it in that statistic. When we took God out of our schools (more specifically, His teachings, i.e., the Golden Rule), and replaced it with "we can't hurt anyone's feelings, even if they do something bad," this is the result. Isaiah saw our day (Isaiah 5:20) when he stated "Woe unto them who call good evil, and evil good..."
Did you know that the translation of the word Woe, is more accurately translated in english as cursed? The next time you are reading scripture, substitute "cursed" for the word "woe." It will blow your mind. Take Isaiah 5:20 for example. Cursed are those who call good evil and evil good....
Applied to our situation, the company is cursed (they kept a bully rather than choose the good), we're "cursed" in that we no longer have employment (somehow, I think that in the long run, we're going to be better off, I just have to say,) and the women involved who were too afraid to shine the light on evil, still remain in that environment, victimized.
This is not a "woe is us" post (pun intended.) This is a call to action. Edmund Burke (an Irish philosopher, politician and considered the founder of Conservatism) said "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." If more of us shined the light on evil, and exposed it for what it was, evil would shrink and wither away. If more of us we teach the Golden Rule in our homes, insist on it in our schools and communities, we change the tide of rampant evil.
We can change lives for good, if we simply choose to have the courage to stand up and be counted among the righteous. Standing against tyranny comes at a cost. Sometimes one just has to decide that the cost of ignoring it, is too high.
About 6 weeks ago, DH came home from work and told me about an incident which, although the behavior had been ongoing, had come to a head that day. One of his subordinates had been terrorizing, bullying and harassing two women at work. DH had finally had enough, and reported him to management. He came home and said there was a good chance he'd get fired for his intervention. I told him if he got fired for standing up for the right, I was good with that all day long.
So we weren't too surprised when the women involved, fearful for their jobs, discounted the severity of the incidents, passing them off as "harmless." We were disappointed that the company chose to do the "easier" thing, rather than the right thing.
Choosing the "easier" path rather than the honorable road, is not an uncommon reaction. We recently found this article published by the Workplace Bullying Institute. 66% of people who fight back against workplace bullying are fired!
http://www.workplacebullying.org/individuals/solutions/wbi-action-plan/
On a broader scale, if you ever wanted tangible evidence of our decayed educational system, you're seeing it in that statistic. When we took God out of our schools (more specifically, His teachings, i.e., the Golden Rule), and replaced it with "we can't hurt anyone's feelings, even if they do something bad," this is the result. Isaiah saw our day (Isaiah 5:20) when he stated "Woe unto them who call good evil, and evil good..."
Did you know that the translation of the word Woe, is more accurately translated in english as cursed? The next time you are reading scripture, substitute "cursed" for the word "woe." It will blow your mind. Take Isaiah 5:20 for example. Cursed are those who call good evil and evil good....
Applied to our situation, the company is cursed (they kept a bully rather than choose the good), we're "cursed" in that we no longer have employment (somehow, I think that in the long run, we're going to be better off, I just have to say,) and the women involved who were too afraid to shine the light on evil, still remain in that environment, victimized.
This is not a "woe is us" post (pun intended.) This is a call to action. Edmund Burke (an Irish philosopher, politician and considered the founder of Conservatism) said "All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." If more of us shined the light on evil, and exposed it for what it was, evil would shrink and wither away. If more of us we teach the Golden Rule in our homes, insist on it in our schools and communities, we change the tide of rampant evil.
We can change lives for good, if we simply choose to have the courage to stand up and be counted among the righteous. Standing against tyranny comes at a cost. Sometimes one just has to decide that the cost of ignoring it, is too high.
Friday, March 8, 2013
A New Day, A New Dawn
(Gardening has been updated; Debt has been updated; Prepping has been updated)
Wow. Didn't realize it had been 3 weeks since I last wrote. It's been a long three weeks. I've had pneumonia, had a bad reaction to Levaquin (the antibiotic), my husband lost his job, 2nd oldest daughter received her EAD for the AirForce, and it's baseball season !! I know, most of the world revolves around the common seasons Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer. We only know two seasons: Baseball, and the Rain-y season.
You may have figured out that we are Preppers. We're not like those extreme preppers you see on NatGeo, but we have taken the time and effort to stockpile food and household/personal hygiene items. Not enough to feed the world, but enough that it takes the panic out of something unexpected like a job loss.
That's a good thing, because I've learned already that "help" in the form of government assistance (i.e., unemployment), takes about 30-60 days to kick in. Wow. We are prepared to cover that, but it made me realize and wonder: what does the average person do? Answer: they panic, they face eviction, they go hungry.
It's such a simple thing really. I've taught classes on it for years. I don't even do the "traditional storage thing" (someone else called it Siege-er prepping) and store the traditional Wheat-only, oil-only, shortening-only, sugar-only, salt-only stuff. Can you imagine living on just that for 8 weeks? Yikes. Ok, it's better than starving, but not by much.
So back to RealFood Storage. Seriously. Spaghetti sauce was on sale last week for .69 a can. I went out and bought 100 cans (that's $69 for you math folks). When pasta was on sale for .49 a package (this was months ago), I bought 100 of those too ($49). If we had spaghetti every day, I had enough on hand to feed my family for basically two months. Personally, I'd rather eat spaghetti every single day, than wheat-tina. But that's just me, and your mileage may vary.
Is it more expensive than 50# of wheat for $24? Absolutely. But I've experienced wheat fatigue, and you do get to a point quickly where you cannot eat one more spoonful. Fortunately (thank you Dad!) we're a RICE family, so we can largely avoid WF, but you get my point.
You don't need to be me and buy "a 100 of" one thing. But you really do need to change the mindset. The spaghetti sauce sale limited you to 10 cans at a time. REALLY??? BUY THE 10 CANS !! (yes, I heard from people who were like, "but I only need 2 cans for dinner this week.") Buy the 10 cans. Stick them in the pantry. Look, now you have enough for 5-10 meals for crying out loud depending on if you use 1 can of sauce or 2 per meal. That's like, at least a weeks' worth of sauce, maybe close to two ! And if I have to, I can grind the white wheat berries (or red, sigh) into flour, and make pasta from scratch (yes, I really can do that, I'm not just saying it.)
Now if I just had a three month supply of toilet paper.....
Wow. Didn't realize it had been 3 weeks since I last wrote. It's been a long three weeks. I've had pneumonia, had a bad reaction to Levaquin (the antibiotic), my husband lost his job, 2nd oldest daughter received her EAD for the AirForce, and it's baseball season !! I know, most of the world revolves around the common seasons Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer. We only know two seasons: Baseball, and the Rain-y season.
You may have figured out that we are Preppers. We're not like those extreme preppers you see on NatGeo, but we have taken the time and effort to stockpile food and household/personal hygiene items. Not enough to feed the world, but enough that it takes the panic out of something unexpected like a job loss.
That's a good thing, because I've learned already that "help" in the form of government assistance (i.e., unemployment), takes about 30-60 days to kick in. Wow. We are prepared to cover that, but it made me realize and wonder: what does the average person do? Answer: they panic, they face eviction, they go hungry.
It's such a simple thing really. I've taught classes on it for years. I don't even do the "traditional storage thing" (someone else called it Siege-er prepping) and store the traditional Wheat-only, oil-only, shortening-only, sugar-only, salt-only stuff. Can you imagine living on just that for 8 weeks? Yikes. Ok, it's better than starving, but not by much.
So back to RealFood Storage. Seriously. Spaghetti sauce was on sale last week for .69 a can. I went out and bought 100 cans (that's $69 for you math folks). When pasta was on sale for .49 a package (this was months ago), I bought 100 of those too ($49). If we had spaghetti every day, I had enough on hand to feed my family for basically two months. Personally, I'd rather eat spaghetti every single day, than wheat-tina. But that's just me, and your mileage may vary.
Is it more expensive than 50# of wheat for $24? Absolutely. But I've experienced wheat fatigue, and you do get to a point quickly where you cannot eat one more spoonful. Fortunately (thank you Dad!) we're a RICE family, so we can largely avoid WF, but you get my point.
You don't need to be me and buy "a 100 of" one thing. But you really do need to change the mindset. The spaghetti sauce sale limited you to 10 cans at a time. REALLY??? BUY THE 10 CANS !! (yes, I heard from people who were like, "but I only need 2 cans for dinner this week.") Buy the 10 cans. Stick them in the pantry. Look, now you have enough for 5-10 meals for crying out loud depending on if you use 1 can of sauce or 2 per meal. That's like, at least a weeks' worth of sauce, maybe close to two ! And if I have to, I can grind the white wheat berries (or red, sigh) into flour, and make pasta from scratch (yes, I really can do that, I'm not just saying it.)
Now if I just had a three month supply of toilet paper.....
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