Campervan Tips

• Pita bread packs better and stays in better shape while camping than regular type breads.

• To cook hamburgers more evenly throughout, put a hole in the middle of your hamburger about the size of your finger, during grilling the hole will disappear but the center will be cooked the same as the edges.

• Disposable water bottles make great dispensers for salad dressings, oils and sauces.
• Instead of taking eggs in the carton, crack them at home and put into a hard sided re-usable water bottle. Shake the bottle to break up the yolks and pour straight into a hot pan for scrambled eggs. 
• Pack dry ingredients for pancakes.
• Pack games.
• Quick-cook oats.
• Get sleeping bag liners.
• Steer clear of colognes, perfumes and fragrant lotions because they attract bugs.
• Invest in a Sporg.
• Head Torhes. Xenon and Krypton bulbs are commonly found in headtorches these days and are a halogen hybrid with good battery life without compromising the brightness.The longest burning times comes from LED bulbs that last over 20x longer than the other 3 put together! 
• Window and door seals - Smear a thin film of vaseline on all your window and door seals to keep them in good condition during your winter lay up.
• A link to what to remember when crossing by Ferry.What to remember when using the Ferries.

Is this the first ever small motor home from the 1930's?

Maggots!

Originally emailed to the parents of our grandchildren in far away lands, and then to my friends with
whom I'm reading Exodus at present.

If you have stumbled across this post, may it bring the blessing that comes from bringing children the living Word of God.

Maybe you want to get the you tube page ready in a separate window - for greater effect!

We wish we were a fly against the wall!  (This should not take long at all - unless they have further ideas - who knows!!)

Suggestion:  If you children are still little, start by reading the verses for yourself a few times, then start with the video clip and talk about the visual and the Bible.

HI OUR TREASURES:  JOSHUA, JOSIE, JESSE AND EVIE!

How are you with paying attention at school?

What does a person look like who pays attention (body language)

(listening and obeying)

How are you with flies?
Josh and Jesse once at a battery-driven fly-swatter and they killed records of flies!!!

What do you think crawl out of flies’ eggs?

Maggots!  (show some disgust).

Maggots have the most ferocious APPETITE - worse than yours!!

Here is why 

- you should keep flies away from your food 

- and for a gooooood look on the vid-clip  at first flies and then MAGGOTS   

They have the most ferocious APPETITE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saswW8A5FVo

And when you  FINISHED  watching this video clip….how about reading these 3  verses:

from Exodus 16.

11 The Lord said to Moses,12 “I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites.
Tell them, ‘At twilight you will eat meat, and in the morning you will be filled with bread.
THEN YOU WILL KNOW THAT I AM THE LORD YOUR GOD.
19 Then Moses said to them, “No one is to keep any of it until morning.”
20 But…………., some of them PAID NO ATTENTION to Moses; they kept part of it until morning,
but…………….. their food was FULL OF MAGGOTS and began to SMELL!!

So Moses was angry with them. It’s left “hanging” for you to make own applications if they are still “Paying attention” - or as an illustration later again.

Pharaoh's hard heart

My friends Charlene and Kana and I have now arrived at Exodus in our Bible Reading Plan.  Exodus, where God’s acts of both liberation and judgment are in full force and public. I plan to come back to this post very soon to list here my friends’ and my thoughts.

In the mean time, I’m just yearning to see what is actually stated about the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart as in the Bible between Exodus 4 and 14.

After making umpteen notes from Exodus and listening to several sermons (while working on my photos in the background), I found this neat summary by Walt Kaiser on the net:

1. “In all there are ten places where ‘hardening’ of Pharaoh is ascribed to God (4.21; 7.3; 9.12; 10.1, 20, 27; 11.10; 14:4, 8, 17). 
2.  Pharaoh hardened his own heart in another ten passages (7.13, 14, 22; 8.15, 19, 32; 9.7, 34, 35; 13.15). 

Not until the sixth plague was it stated that God actually hardened Pharaoh’s heart (9.12), as he had warned Moses in Midian that he would have to do [4.21].”

God revealed himself. his power, supremacy, love for his people, hatred of sin through the signs and wonders of the plagues. God exercised His freedom as a holy, holy, holy God to justly 

carry out His judgment on Egypt and to graciously liberated His people from slavery.

Pharaoh bucked and dived, dug in his heels and stubbornly refused God’s “Let my people go.”

I look from Pharaoh’s heart to my own heart without  Christ:  a heart of stone, hard and cold, calloused and angry and unbelieving that does not want to hear what God revealed and did in Jesus.

I bow in humility and with a song of deliverance that Jesus came, that He sought, that He found and that He melted my heart with His love!

This is why it is dangerous not to call sin, sin:  it’s our root problem, it’s our inheritance from Adam that led to a dead, stone-hard heart. But Christ came to give life to ANYONE WHO BELIEVES HIM, a heart of flesh that loves Him and people. A life filled with the Spirit and life and love and glad obedience.  A life lived to find out what pleases God and live for His Will.

Once again my new heart bows in humility for His conquering grace in my life in Christ - my hope of glory!

God hardened Pharaoh’s heart…..I would like to go to the beginning of Romans and chapters in Hebrews to see how/if this fits in with God giving rebels over to their own sin in his judgement.  The fear of  God is the beginning of wisdom.

On Cynicism

Dick Keyes, director of L’Abri Fellowship in Southborough, Massachusetts, unmasked the dark side of cynicism in his book, “Seeing Through Cynicism: A Reconsideration of the Power of Suspicion.”  I highly recommend it.

“Cynicism,” Keyes wrote, “does not get the scrutiny it deserves…it has some privileged position that makes it immune to serious challenge.”

“In some groups, particularly those associated with media and higher education, cynicism seems to have the status of common sense or self-evident truth. It becomes the default setting of many conversations. We don’t think to question it when it is all around us.”

“Some embrace cynicism with pride and defiance. Others suffer from a cynicism that they do not want but feel forced to adopt by honesty. Still others fight against it with whatever they find handy, and far more drift into it by accident with little awareness of what has happened.”

"Yes, we must be honesty and discerning. We must strive to see through triviality, hypocrisy, flattery, evil agendas and false motives. We must not be gullible and susceptible to con-artistry and sentimental optimism. Yet, we dare not allow ourselves to become ridden with suspicions and hardened by cynicism.”

Spiritual Security: lion cub or baby monkey?

A friend from our previous church in St Albans, Peter, 

writes about ther spiritual security of everyone born of God:

"Although we may feel at times like baby monkeys clinging on to God for dear life through the storms of life - at any moment at risk of losing our grip - our real situation, regardless of how we might feel, is more like that of baby kittens secure in the faithful grip of their mother’s jaws. Cub or baby monkey?