Really?!

Does this trouble any one else?  In one day of "news worthy" items I saw: a devastating earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand; rioting against the government in Libya; and...Jennifer Aniston and Justin Bieber got haircuts!

Really?!

Kids Say: No! No! No! No! Snow!

We're not against snow - this is how my youngest daughter started saying "snow" back in November and December.  When she first picked it up she would say, very excitedly, "No!  No!  No!  No!"  A bit confusing for us if we didn't know what she was looking at.  But we caught on eventually.  Sometime mid-December I caught a few lispy "s" sounds with it, making it "shno," and once very distinctly she called out, "Snow!"...then reverted back to "No!"  Recently, when we saw snow falling she added, "Nonen" (snowing) to her repertoire.  Sometimes we get the "s" for "Snow!" but mostly it's still "No!"  My oldest daughter was the same when she was learning to talk - "No!  No!  No!  No!"  Always very excited and oh so full of wonder even before they could say it properly.  Comes in handy living up north where we get drifts of snow taller than they are!

Safety or Trust

Getting my thoughts together is proving harder than I thought.  I'm still not sure this says all I wanted to or says it the way I wanted.  It's just some things I've been thinking about recently.  There's much more of this going on in my head, but this is the gist of it that I managed to get "on paper".

From things going on in the world I’ve been wondering about finding balance between the need to feel safe and trusting God.  Basically the idea is this: when we do not trust in God we try too hard to make ourselves safe.  To me it seems like people are going too far in trying to preserve their lives.

That is not to deny the need to take reasonable precautions.  However, it is to realize that even with those precautions we have no guarantee of safety.  Therefore, it is necessary to trust God with our lives; that whether we are comfortable or suffering it is not apart from God.  Because if being safe is the desire of our hearts, when life takes that safety away we are lost, we blame God, we fear life.

Ultimately perhaps fear is the key.  If safety is our goal we will spend our lives trying to do anything to keep ourselves safe, fearing that something will hurt us.  If trust in God is our goal we don’t have to fear anything because we believe He has control over what is going on, good or bad.