Quoted - Tozer Edition

'"Until the Bible begins to talk to us, we really have not been reading it."

  - AW Tozer

What?!?!?

¹⁶ Let me start by saying this:

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, ¹⁷ so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

2 Timothy 3:16-17

Footnotes:

1. 2 Timothy 3:17 Or that you, a man of God,

I absolutely believe this.  It's the foundation of my whole faith.

That being said...I often read a verse that completely befuddles me.  More often than not, the study bible footnotes are no help either.  So from now on I am going to post these verses and see if any of you can help.  I know they are in the Bible for a reason.  I just don't know what that reason is in every case.
Here's the first one:


Then Samuel said, “Bring here to me Agag the king of the Amalekites.” And Agag came to him cheerfully. Agag said, “Surely the bitterness of death is past.”  And Samuel said, “As your sword has made women childless, so shall your mother be childless among women.” And Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal.

1 Samuel 15:32-33

What?!?!?!

TeeVee

We at Kline Manor don't normally watch a lot of television.  Normally when someone says that, they want you to know how intellectually superior they are.  They want you to know they think tv is somehow beneath them.  That's not the case for our family.  We love tv and we ain't intellectually superior to much of anything.  But we are pretty busy and between dropping kids here and picking them up there, most nights of the week just aren't condusive to hours of tv viewing. 

For a while, we were very excited about the 'On Demand' feature of our cable system.  Our excitement waned when 6 out of 7 times that we settled in to watch something, that feature was out of service for some reason.  Apparently wind, rain, sun and happiness interfere with the signal.  So we basically decided that we would just plan to catch up on a lifetime of television after Kevin retired.

Until I found this little miracle.

The Roku has changed my life. Now we can stream Netflix to the large family tv plus my Amazon Prime account (which is the best 79 bucks I have ever spent) gives us access to a gazillion different programs.  And the thing works on demand every dang time.

First, I watched every delicious episode of Downtown Abbey.  I have no words to adequately describe how much I love this show.  Let's just say I want to eat it and leave it at that.

Kevin and I also discovered Breaking Bad.  (I know what you are thinking already.  Why are we three years behind on every good tv show?  We suck.  Move on.)  

Have you seen this show?  Honestly, the writing and acting are so good.  It makes you weep for how bad other shows are.  We are only on Season 2 but I kinda never want it to end. 

I saved the best for last.

Ya'lll...

This is THE BEST SHOW EVER!!!

Now, clearly, I have a bit of a Sherlock Holmes obsession.  I don't deny it.  (Much like my crush on Adam Levine, I thought I was keeping it secret.  My husband assures me I am not.  Touche')  But even if you barely know anything about the great detective, this show will make you happy.  First, Sherlock is played by a man named Benedict Cumberbatch.  Seriously.  Wouldn't Benedict Cumberbatch win first place in a "Make up a quintessentially British fake name " contest?  I will not rest until I have a grandchild named Benedict Cumberbatch...or maybe a dog.  Whatever.

Anyway, all of these shows are free on either Netflix or Amazon streaming.  Get both.  Get a Roku.

Be happy :)

Empty Chairs

There's a grief that can't be spoken.

Bible Tuesday

We talk a lot about how Jesus ate with sinners. Tax collectors, prostitutes, etc.  He loved them all.  To eat with someone in the culture of Jesus’s earthly life was a big deal. It meant acceptance.  Jesus says:

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.

Revelation 3:20

Dinner with Jesus was no Baptist potluck.  It was a big deal.

Now lookie here:

One of the Pharisees asked him (Jesus) to eat with him, and he went into the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table.

Luke 7:36

A pharisee invited Jesus to dinner.And Jesus accepted. We sure beat up on these guys a lot in Scripture. And not without good reason. The pharisees represent the very worst of religion. And Jesus calls them out on a pretty regular basis. But Jesus loved the Pharisees too.

Remember that the next time you see a supposedly evangelical blowhard on teevee.  It helps a bit.

Quoted

We're better off as our real, sinful selves with Jesus as Savior than as our ideal selves without Jesus.

- Ray Ortlumd

Book Review - The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Ever hear of HeLa cells? 

Me neither.  But, apparently, everybody else has.

This book wasn't as good as I wanted to be. This thing had 999 five-star ratings on Amazon. Five stars ain't easy  to come by on Amazon people.

I've had such good luck with Unbroken and Seabiscuit,  that I thought my bad nonfiction luck was over. This book was good... it just wasn't good enough. The story is about  Henrietta Lacks,  a poor black woman  who died of cervical cancer before she was 40 years old. Her cells were harvested without her knowledge and were the first cells to be grown in lab. Henrietta's cells were grown and sold all over the world.  They aided countless medical discoveries and research.  It would not be an overstatement to say that she changed the course of modern medicine.  Meanwhile, her  children grew up in poverty and ignorance.

The author heard about this woman but could not find any information about her.  She set out to find out all she could about Henrietta.  It's a sad story really. You can't help but realize just how much this woman was taken advantage of in life and death. But the book is full of a lot of technical details that were just a little bit beyond me. It took me so long to read and  I hate to spend more than one week on a book.  It  just goes against  my nature.  That being said, I think Henrietta deserves to be known and I am glad Rebecca Skloot introduced me to her.

Book Review - Heads You Lose

Head's  You Lose is one of the funniest books I've read in a long time.   One of the authors, Lisa Lutz, is the author of the Spellman books that I've talked about here before. She has a very dry wit which appeals to me as you might imagine. David Hayward is the co-author.  Each author writes a different chapter so they're handing the book back and forth to write it and writing letters to each other within.  Those letters make up the funniest part of the book.  It's fun to read how the two authors quibble back and forth, kill off each other's characters, and pretty much critique every word that the other author writes.  I'm not sure how much of this is a contrived schtick for the book and how much of it is the real relationship between the two authors but it's fun to read either way.  The basic story is a murder mystery. The two main characters are a brother and sister who run a small pot farm.  How could you go wrong when your two main characters own a pot farm?

Quoted - Blue Like Jazz Edition

"As I drove over the mountain that afternoon, realizing I was too proud to receive God's grace, I was humbled. Who am I to think myself above God's charity? And why would I forsake the riches of God's righteousness for the dung of my own ego?"

- Donald Miller

Bible Tuesday

This is the last Psalm 139 post...unless it isn't.

“ I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

Your works are wonderful,

I know that full well.”

Psalm 139:14

This verse is so easy to believe about our children but so hard to believe about ourselves.  You cannot hold a newborn baby and marvel at those tiny hands and feet without knowing the truth of this verse.  But isn’t it just as true when I am standing in a fitting room under those fluorescent lights staring into that three sided mirror?  Obviously it is, but my attitude certainly doesn’t reflect that.   And, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, our attitudes toward other people don’t reflect that belief either.  Consider this.  If you passed a woman with a huge nose, would you be more likely to:

A.       Turn to your companion and say “Have you ever seen a nose so big in your entire life?”

B.      Change your Facebook status to reflect that you just saw a woman who could win 2^nd place in the “Biggest Nose in America” contest.

C.      Ask yourself “I wonder why God gave her such a distinctive nose?”

I am guessing here that most of us would not answer “C” but I’m feeling more and more that this is the attitude that God desires.  But how do we get there?

We owe more to this verse than we have given it.  It’s too important to just print on a coffee mug or cross stitch on a baby blanket.  We must begin to really believe it.  We must “write it on the tablet of our hearts”.  (Proverbs 3:3)

 ‘Fearfully and wonderfully made’  -  nothing about the way I was made is wrong.

‘Fearfully and wonderfully made’  - nothing about the way I was made was an accident.

‘Fearfully and wonderfully made’  - nothing about the way I was made is outside of the dominion and providence of God.

How do you think we can start walking in the truth of this verse?  For me, today, the answer comes from Mark 9:24 "I believe; help my unbelief!"

Book Review - Explosive Eighteen

Explosive Eighteen is the latest book by Janet  Evanovich in her long-running series about Stephanie Plum,the bumbling bounty hunter.   What can I tell ya?  This eighteenth  book was as good as the first one.  There's no deep mystery here.  There's no underlying theme about humanity or man's place in the world.  These books are like chocolate chip cookies. You know what you're going to get. And what you're gonna get is pretty dang good.

Quoted

Sin is building your identity on anything besides God.

- Tim Keller

Book Review - Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones was a fantastic book.  Just like I like them.  Long.  Involved. Tons of characters.

I made the mistake of leaving it in the bathroom and Kevin found it.  He devoured the whole thing in three days before I wrestled it back from him.  He rarely reads any fiction so I love it when we read the same things because it gives us one more thing to talk about.  He went on to the second book in the series while I was finishing up the first. Luckily Kevin knows me very well. He knows that I'm uber-sensitive to scenes of violence ,torture etc.  This is why I can't finish the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series.  I loved the first one but I just couldn't get past the scenes of violence.  They weren't gratuitous but I just cannot do it.  While there were a few of those scenes that were hard to read in Game of Thrones,  Kevin knew that I would not be able to handle what was coming in the next books. So he read them for me for me and edited out all the bad parts. 

Ain't he sweet? 

Isn't I lucky?

Jesus to a Child

I forget sometimes how evocative music can be. 

This song made me remember.

I was driving down the road hitting the advance button on my iPod over and over again while thinking "WHY DOES EVERY SONG I OWN SUCK SO BAD!!!"  (Just a side note here... people trying to play an iPod while driving are much more dangerous than drunk drivers or people trying to text and drive.  Some compassionate lawmaker should consider addressing this situation.) 

So after hitting that button forty seven times, I heard the first strains of this song comes through and almost had to pull over.   Countless shuffles and this song had never come up.  (Thanks iTunes!) Hearing it reminded me  vividly of the first time I heard it in 1996. It was raining.   I was sitting in my car wondering where it all gone wrong.   I was only 23 years old so I had no idea how wrong things would go from even there but at the time I only knew that it was really, really wrong right then.  I had made a series of terrible decisions (why does that sentence come up so often when retelling my life story?) and I was living out  the consequences of said decisions.   And I was regretting just about everything from high school graduation on.  

I heard this song and I thought George Michael was singing specifically to me.  (I found out later he was actually singing to his dead boyfriend.  Who knew?) The song really had nothing to do with the situation I was in but there was something so haunting and beautiful about it. It gave me hope that love like that could exist and that if I could ever get out of the mess I was in that I might someday find it. 

And I did.  

Just ten years and three kids later. 

Bible Tuesday - More Psalm 139

 You hem me in--behind and before;

you have laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,

too lofty for me to attain.

Where can I go from your Spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

f I go up to the heavens, you are there;

if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.

If I rise on the wings of the dawn,

if I settle on the far side of the sea,

even there your hand will guide me,

your right hand will hold me fast.

Psalm 139 :  5-10



I was a high school band nerd.  Our marching band kept a pretty rigorous schedule each fall.  We performed at football games, marching competitions, parades of all sorts and, once, at the opening of a bypass on the interstate.  Most of us were blessed with attentive, loving parents.  But even the best of them could not sustain the energy and interest to attend all of our events.  That changed during my senior year.  Mrs G’s daughter joined the band as a freshman.  Mrs G became our groupie.  At every performance she announced her presence as we marched onto the field.  “That’s my baby!” she would shout at the top of her voice.  Her daughter was embarrassed but the rest of us began to look forward to hearing it. At football games in small rural towns - “That’s my baby!”  At competitions in neighboring states - “That’s my baby!” On the main street in our town during the Christmas Parade -“That’s my baby!”  

Six months after our season had ended; our band took a trip to Disney World.  500 miles from home, we marched down that famous Disney Main Street and guess what we heard? Yep. “That’s my baby!”  Mrs G had travelled all the way to Florida to make her signature proclamation.

I hate to use such a clumsy analogy but God is a lot like Mrs G.  No matter where you go, He is there.  In front of you to lead the way.  Behind you to ‘watch your back’.  Beside you for companionship or support.  And here’s the part that is almost impossible for us to really accept.  You may spend an inordinate amount of time out of God’s will but you are never out of His sight.  You are never out of His reach.   And you are never out of His heart.  He delights in you.  He does not grow weary.  When you succeed.  When you fail.  God is there and he never tires of proclaiming over you.  “That’s my baby!”

Book Review - Revolution

Why do you read?  Do you ever ask yourself that question?  I rarely do.  Reading has been such a big part of my life for so long, I often take it for granted.  I forget that there are some people who never read for pleasure.  (Can you imagine?) Or some people who read only non-fiction to glean true information.  (I weep for these wretched creatures, truly I do.) And many people who claim to be voracious readers but never stray from the genre involving covers with shirtless men. (And I love trash too but good grief...)

Revolution is the story of Andi, a seventeen year old having lots of trouble.  Her brother was killed two years prior.  She blames herself and takes lots of meds just to barely stay sane.  Her mom is not so lucky and has pretty much gone crazy.  Her distant (literally and figuratively) father comes back to try to clean up his mess of a family.  He commits the mom to treatment and packs Andie up for a trip to Paris.  While there, Andie discovers the diary of a young girl written during the French Revolution.
Beyond the basic story, the author tries to figure out how any of us deal with the cruel world we live in.  Is it as hopeless as it seems?

This pitiful synopsis cannot even begin to tell you what this story is about.

Ya'll...
it is so good.

Here's one reason why:

"Because God loves us, but the devil takes an interest."

This is why I read.

Not for entertainment or to gain knowledge.  Those things are just fortunate byproducts.  I read because, every now and again, you find a sentence like this.  A thought so well crafted that it makes you slam the book shut and gasp.  A sentence that literally takes your breath away.  This is why 'the pen is mightier than the sword'.  Because words have the power to change you.  And, if you are lucky, they make you better than you were.

And that's what keeps me going back.  Sure, I love a good story.  I like to be entertained.  Who doesn't? But the hours of my life spent in dusty libraries are nothing but a quest.  A search for that next great sentence.  And I can't stop until I find it.  And the next one just leaves me wanting more.

This book is also classified as 'Young Adult'.  Don't let that stop you from reading it.  It will make you happy.  It will make you sad.  And, hopefully, it will make you better.

The Winter of our Discontent

So yeah...

The past few months have been challenging.  This is not a whine post.  Everyone here is good, in fact, better than we deserve but we are not without some new hurdles to face.

Kevin had been experiencing some strange symptoms for the past several months.  First, he had been super tired.  I admit to being annoyed by this.  He has a Cpap.  He generally sleeps well. But for a few months, I found him asleep at any and all hours on any soft spot in the house.  I didn't think "My beloved husband is sick."  I thought "This dude is too lazy to exist."  In retrospect, I feel bad about that.  He also started losing weight without trying.  Can you even imagine how much that bothered me?  Kevin has no weight to lose plus from Halloween to New Year's, he ate anything he could get his hands on.  And every morning, he would jump on the scale and gleefully exclaim "I'm down another pound!"   I didn't think "My beloved husband is sick." I thought "I hate this man." In retrospect, I feel bad about that.

Eventually, the symptoms went from being aggravating to troubling.  I started to realize that something had to be wrong so I sent him to his doctor to have some bloodwork done.  He explained all his symptoms to the doc. She made no diagnosis but ran the tests.  Two weeks later, I opened a letter from her and this is what I saw:

Yep.  No phone call.  No "Hey Mr Kline, could you come in so we can talk about your test results?"  Nope.  Just a hastily scratched out message informing my husband that he had a debilitating disease. 
We were able to see a Physician's assistant that same afternoon. (Lucky us!)  She was very helpful.  Kevin had EXTREMELY elevated blood sugar...like 'how did you not end up in the ER?' elevated.  And it had been going on for a while, which explained his lethargy.  His body was working so hard to try to regulate his blood sugar that it left little energy for stuff like staying awake.

Since his blood sugar was so high and had come about so suddenly, the PA wanted him to have a CT to make sure there wasn't any sign of pancreatic cancer or other horrible possibilities.  After waiting for four very long days to get the results from that scan, we were relived to find out that Kevin 'just' had diabetes.  (Or 'diabeetus" as we have started calling it in honor of Wilford Brimley.) 

We've had a chance to adjust to this diagnosis.  Kevin is adapting as well as can be expected.  He ate a pretty healthy diet beforehand and he isn't overweight so it's mostly a matter of getting the right meds to help him control his blood sugar.  That, and giving up Heath Blizzards from Dairy Queen.  He's not totally onboard with that one yet.

While all this was going on, I got to have my first mammogram.  No.  There are no pictures.  It was just a 'precaution' suggested by my doctor.  They like to get a scan when you are young(er?) so they will have something to compare to scans when you get old(er?).  I had the test.  No pain.  No big deal.  Then got a call (on the same day we got the 'you have diabetes' letter) that there was 'something' in my left breast that the doctor wanted to rescan.   I went into complete denial.  I schedued the retest and went back to obsessing about Kevin's blood glucose.  A week later, I went back for the retest.  The tech took the picture.  Turned her screen around and said "Yeah, there is definitely something there.  we are going to need to do an ultrasound."  I just sat there stunned.  All I could think is "I can't have breast cancer, I have a ton of laundry to do."  They took me in for an ultrasound, the doctor came in, did the scan and said "Oh, that's nothing.  Come back in two years."  Now understand, I was thrilled that 'it was nothing', but...it seems like that whole deal could have been handled a bit more delicately.  The best part is that insurance covers your first mammogram at 100% but any subsequent scans cost you 300 bucks.  I'm not saying it's a scam.  I'm just saying that I paid a lot of money to get the crap scared out of me. But I'm fine and I'm grateful...yet still annoyed.

Also, did I mention this?

Ava has been snoring most of her life.  I always assumed it was her allergies.  (She is allergic to everything.)  But after a year of allergy shots, the doctor thought it might be time to do a sleep study since the snoring had not gotten any better.

Her sleep study showed that she does have sleep apnea and the specialist recommended a tonsillectomy/adenoidectomy.  In 90% of kids, that surgery cures sleep apnea.  She has never had strep throat or tonsillitis but, apparently, her throat is just too small for her tonsils so they obstruct her airway and cause the apnea.  Who knew?

So to sum up:

Kevin has diabetes.

I do not have cancer.

Ava has sleep apnea.

Also...Anna has a stomachache, Katie hates school, Savannah is tired, Kaylee talks too much, Dylan has a new job and Emily has a new tattoo.  So mostly, everything around here is back to normal. 

So, yeah...

Quoted - Tozer Edition

"If the Church says it but Scripture does not say it, I will reject it."

AW Tozer