Back to Life

Here's a happy story for the weekend. It's not often that we see evidence of real-life miracles while we're eating our Cheerios, but such a miracle was featured on the Today show Friday morning. 

The parents of a 2-year-old boy named Gore shared the story of their son, who shows no signs of brain damage after his heart stopped for about an hour as the result of a near-drowning earlier this summer. When he was found in an irrigation ditch, his heart had stopped. His grandfather, a retired orthopaedic surgeon and the first to try to resuscitate Gore, said he had the color of someone who had died - which he had.

Once his heart started beating again, his temperature was kept low for a couple of days before slowing bringing it back to normal. Even then, there wasn't much hope that he would be unaffected by the experience until after an MRI showed normal brain activity.

It's an amazing story.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Until next time,
Margaret

Now the crowd that was with him when he called Lazarus from the tomb and raised him from the dead continued to spread the word. ~ John 12:17

The Art of Conversation

It's already Thursday, which means it's time for another writing assignment from Mama Kat. This time I chose prompt #5, "Describe an awkward conversation you had with someone recently." The timing was perfect, as I had an awkward conversation just this past weekend.

First a little background. I live in the same town where I have spent most of my life. We moved here when I was 2, and except for a 2-1/2 year period from the fourth grade until the sixth, I have lived here ever since. It was when we moved back in the middle of my sixth grade year that I learned "you can't go home again."

Are We Intolerant?

Matt, at The Church of No People*, asked a simple question on Friday, "Do Americans have a lot more work to do when it comes to being tolerant?" 

Okay, maybe it wasn't all that simple. Regardless of how much more tolerant we are - generally speaking - than a number of other nations that come to mind, I can see where we might come across as intolerant. One guy even came up with a visual way to make fun of our appearance of intolerance:

Photo Source: A wide variety of Internet sites

For the record, I don't know that God cares much about most signs, but I do think he hates "hate" signs.

Today's post is my answer to Matt's question about whether or not I think we're intolerant, with a just couple of minor changes in an effort to tweak it.

Mom Friends

Holy cow. It's already time for another writing assignment from Mama Kat! Perhaps it was the long holiday weekend, but the week has flown by. Or maybe it's just that Mama Kat gives out too much homework because I swear I just turned one of these in and it cannot possibly have been a week.

This time I chose prompt #2: "A list of things you no longer have in common with your married/child bearing friends…and why you love them anyways."

First of all, I hate to complain, but I just can't use the word anyways in a sentence. I want to make it clear that I don't blame Mama Kat. Who was the first person to decide a perfectly good word like anyway needed an 's' tacked onto the end? I'm sure it's a regional thing. I can say "y'all" 'til the cows come home, but anyways isn't a word that has ever come out of my mouth and its very presence made it difficult for me to choose this prompt.

The News Spread Like Wildfire

My city experienced a tragic loss early Friday afternoon. A coworker received a breaking news text and within minutes it was all over Facebook. I left work to get my hair cut and, as I drove, it was all they were talking about on the radio. When I arrived at the salon, the stylists were stunned by the news. One was absolutely heartbroken  as she stared at the picture on her phone. The shock caused drivers to pull off the highway, and the 10:00 p.m. news reported that people were still stopping by to pay their respects.

What happened?

We lost a local icon.

The screens at the drive-in movie theatre caught on fire.

Seriously.

Dear Alec

It's time for another assignment from Mama Kat. This time I chose the prompt, "write an open letter to a celebrity." My letter is to my secret celebrity crush. But, shhhhh, don't tell anybody who it is.





Dear Alec,

I realize this is probably not your wildest fantasy, to have a Christian woman who is about your age and who lives in a red state tell you she has a secret celebrity crush on you. Would it help if I told you I'm a purple voter who lives in a red state? Really, it's more of a periwinkle. (That's the closest I could find to periwinkle in Blogger's limited color palette.) And I have never voted for the guy who refuses to even entertain the possibility of climate change. Oh wait, there was that one time, but it was only once. Surely you can understand a person making a bad decision in a weak moment.

I wish I could tell you when I realized I had a crush on you. It wasn't when you were young. You were plenty attractive when you were young, but to tell you the truth, I thought you were kind of shallow. And cocky. Really cocky.

But life has a way of taking that know-it-all attitude out of all of us. Life, and the mistakes we make. And of course, you made a whopper. Isn't it funny how Mel Gibson can make a mistake that's just as appalling and we say, "there but for the grace of God"?  (Believe me, we're super miffed, but it's awfully hard to let Mel have it after that Jesus movie.)

My Childhood Neighborhood

This has been another busy week at work, and the one night I didn't work late, I was busy enjoying the final night of a favorite summertime activity - a weekly outdoor concert. It was the only one I made it to this summer, primarily due to the excessively hot weather we experienced. So while I can't say the dog ate my homework, I still think I have a decent excuse for being late with my writing assignment from Mama Kat.

The topic was one I had to write on. My family moved quite a bit, but there was one house that we all think of as home. We lived there a little over 6 years, from shortly before my 3rd birthday, until shortly after my 9th. It was the last house we lived in as a family, as my brother was 18 when we left that house to move out-of-state.

It was in a wonderful neighborhood, filled with cottage-type brick homes, most of which were painted, keeping them from looking alike. There were big trees to climb, and to provide lots of shade. The only flaw was that, in the entire time we lived there, there were never any families with kids my age in the neighborhood. But there were plenty of kids the same ages as my older brother and sister, so it wasn't often that I noticed.

With my sister and brother in front of the last

house where we all lived together.

Na Na Na Na Boo Boo

A group of friends from high school gathered recently, and the topic soon turned to a classmate who had died unexpectedly a few months ago. He was the kind of guy who everybody liked, even if we didn't know him well. He had a kind, gentle spirit, and was always thoughtful and polite.

Someone brought up the fact that the name we had known him by in high school was not the name he had always had. He had actually changed both his first and last names - as well as his school - when we were still in grade school. I had first known him at the first school, when he went by the original name.

The person telling this story said he had hated that name because kids in our class had come up with a rhyme to make fun of him. While I don't remember that, it didn't surprise me. I clearly remember the day in 7th grade when I realized he was the same guy I had once known by another name. We were in our French class, and I guess the teacher had left the room for a couple of minutes because one of the girls yelled at him across the room, asking why he had changed his name. At first, he looked kind of stunned, then I realized the expression was one of pain. The girl who was questioning him was relentless, but he did not respond in anger or even defensiveness. He tried to avoid answering her at first, but when it soon became evident that she would not let it go, he graciously gave her an explanation that satisfied her. I don't remember the subject ever coming up again.

I Did Not Want to Write About This...

Let me tell you, I tried to avoid this topic. When I saw other bloggers writing about it, I quietly backed away, not wanting to get sucked into the debate. It's not an easy subject, and while on the surface it seems to be one over which many disagree, that is not really the case at all. The majority of Americans are in agreement.

And that troubles me, greatly.

We have become a country of kneejerk reactions. We get caught up in emotion, and we don't want to be influenced by anything that contradicts the emotion. Once in a blue moon, as in this case, an overwhelming majority of Americans agree on a topic. We begin to think if the majority agrees, then it must be right.

It's Beginning to Feel a Lot Like Christmas

It's still dangerously hot, of course. In the month since my Minnesota vacation filled with pleasant warm days and cool nights, the weather at home has been stifling around the clock. We have had excessive heat warnings for all but 4 or 5 days in the past month, and it doesn't cool below the low 80's at night. If the high hasn't actually been above 100 degrees, then the heat index  - what the temperature actually feels like - has well exceeded the century mark, usually in the neighborhood of 110-115.

School started this week, and it just doesn't feel right to still be this hot. But there might be a light at the end of this suffocating tunnel. All week long, there have been promises of a cool front by the weekend. Imagine my disappointment when I looked online yesterday afternoon and saw this:

He Said, She Said

Or maybe it should be, "She said, he said."

I know I just posted yesterday about being too busy to blog right now, but there is an aspect to this story that is so irritating, I just had to stay up and write about it.

Tuesday morning, the Today show featured an interview with Lynn France, who says she discovered pictures from her husband's wedding on Facebook....while she was still married to him. Lynn and John France were married in 2005 in an extravagant destination wedding which took place in Italy. By 2008, she was beginning to suspect that John was having an affair. She tracked John down and discovered him with Amanda, who told Lynn that she and John planned to be married. John left Lynn soon after that. According to Lynn, John took the couples' two young sons without her knowledge from their home in Ohio to Florida, where he now lives with his new wife, Amanda. John claims that his marriage to Lynn was not valid due to a clerical error, and he has filed in Florida courts for custody of the children. Although Lynn discovered hundreds of pictures of John's wedding to Amanda at Disney World - apparently Amanda was dressed as Sleeping Beauty and John was dressed as Prince Charming - she told Meredith Vieira that the most painful part was finding pictures of her children on Amanda's Facebook page, leading her to feel taunted by Amanda.

Blogging Distractions

Ever since I took a couple of weeks off in July, my blogging has slowed to a crawl. Once I got back from vacation, work went into high gear. I'm part of the support staff at a private high school and our freshmen will come for orientation beginning today, then school starts next Thursday. (Sure, it' over 100 degrees, but by golly, we'll get finals in before Christmas!) With the start of school so near, I've been putting in extra time at work and even bringing some work home so I haven't had as much time...or energy...or inspiration for blogging at the end of the day. I'm still trying to keep up up with your blogs, but I'm not commenting much to keep my time online down to a minimum. The blogging drought will likely continue for another week or two, but hopefully I'll soon be back to a regular schedule.

Beyond the start of school, another distraction this week has been the arrival of my niece and her family. My niece and her husband met halfway across the country, and soon discovered that they're both from the same hometown. They had no intention of moving back here, but once they had a baby girl, they began to see the advantages of raising her in a city where she would be surrounded by extended family.