An Inconvenient Christianity

Whew...I just got finished putting my things together for church tomorrow. We are in the middle of our Annual Ladies' Conference and while I'm excited about the Word, I'm really excited about the outfit I have planned. I have been researching outfits for tomorrow's service for about a year now. On our Annual Ladies' Day, we dress in all white. I saw the PERFECT dress online around this time last year and I wanted it. It was a little (okay, a lot) over my budget so I decided to track the dress. It had to go on sale at some point, right? Wrong. Very wrong. I can't even find it on eBay or any of my other usual sites. So...new plan. Look for something else. (Did I mention that I have a perfectly acceptable white suit?) So I searched online and in stores. Always looking for something, but to no avail. The dresses I saw were always too short, or too tight or too low-cut, or too see-through, or too not white. When I finally resigned myself to wearing my "perfe

A few minutes ago, I was in a store trying to find an item that I wanted to purchase. As I searched the aisles and chatted with my bestie on the phone, the store owner came up to me and loudly said, "Oh my G-d! What happened to your face?!" Then he repeated it, presumably to maximize my embarrassment...or for emphasis, whichever. Now, because my rapier wit is only evident when I am NOT mortified, I timidly mumbled something about having suffered a break-out. He nodded with understanding and then suggested I try a particular face cream which, as luck would have it, could be found right there in his store. How serendipitous! Not only was I informed that I was afflicted with a hideous skin condition (for which apparently only confinement to some sort of colony would be appropriate), but also that the cure was within my reach. So naturally, I left without  purchasing anything. I was SO irritated. Why on earth would he embarrass me like that and then expect me to patronize h

I'm writing right now to make sense of some news that I just got. A wonderful man of God, teacher, preacher and Bible expositor went home to be with the Lord tonight and I feel.... ....weird. He'd been battling health issues since before I met him in 2004, but God had been sustaining him for so long, I didn't think it would end any time soon. But it did. Abruptly, if you ask me, but perhaps not a moment too soon, if I understand anything about his cause of death. This past Saturday, I was at a funeral for another individual...a husband and father who was YOUNGER than me. I didn't know him well, but the fact that he was younger than me made me sit up and take notice. Psalm 90, written by Moses, is another good reminder. In verse 10, Moses tells us that humans live on average 70 years, 80 if you have strength and favour. Yet, all those years are full of labour and sorrow and then the life is cut off. Moses goes on to ask the Almighty to teach us to number our days

I went to bed last night singing Not For A Moment by Meredith Andrews and the Vertical Church Band . I had dreams with Not For A Moment as the musical score. I woke up this morning singing Not For A Moment. All day long the song was in my heart. This afternoon as I was driving, I was thinking about my current job situation. I began to compare myself with other people that I thought were inferior. It started to irritate me that less experienced, less qualified...and let's face it, less Christian people were finding and securing proper employment and I wasn't. Just then, Not For A Moment began to play again in my head and I got angry. For the first time, I realized that I was angry at God. I felt entitled to more than I have received from His hand and I was not happy. As the song continued to play in my head, I realized that since last night the Holy Spirit was trying to show me something through the words of the chorus of that song: After all, You are constant After all,

*So....I'm going to be asking for a little audience participation on this one. Please, please oblige me (just this once...lol). Have you ever been in a situation with no clue of what to do? In the moment your mind is reeling and you're desperately trying to figure out how to act or what to say. Of course, later on when you're far removed from the stress of the situation, a million things pop into your head as to what you should have said or what you should have done?  Well, that happened to me yesterday, except I am still unclear as to what I should have said or done. I just kept thinking, " Come on, Josie! Think! What would Jesus do? " But to my chagrin, I came up woefully and hopelessly blank. Here's the scenario:  I am currently doing contract, project-driven work. It's not steady, but for the time being it is my Brook Cherith (see 1 Kings 17:2-6), so I'm not complaining (out loud). I started a new project last week and found out t