From the DOD for Spire 03-02-09:
My cell phone I have had for almost 2 years finally died. I loved it. It was a simple bottom of the line phone but it never let me down. That is until it quit working. I’m not due for a new phone at a discounted rate until April, so I am using a friend’s spare phone. It’s one of those sweet newer models with all kinds of cool features. I’d wanted to try one out and she gave me the opportunity. It does have a lot of nifty features and it looks nice…. But it doesn’t close. It’s not a flip phone like I’m used to. The numbers are exposed. Have you seen that cell phone commercial on television where the man keeps accidentally calling his wife from his cell phone when he sits on it? She tells him that he “b***dialed“her again. Funny stuff. Until it happens to you. A friend of mine called me the other day laughing her head off… Apparently I had dialed John and Alonna Hughes’ number “inadvertently” when they were not home. She knew this because I left a message; or my derriere did; which was me yelling “LYDIA!!! Go potty if you’re gonna potty before we go! NOW!!! We are waiting on YOU!!! Hurry up and potty before we go!!! I mean it!!!” I sheepishly asked if I had been using my devil voice scream. She assured me that I sounded like the majority of mothers who are trying to get their children out the door when they are in a hurry. I want to be a calm, gentle mother. I don’t want my kids to grow up and think of me when they see “Rosanne” reruns. I want to be more like Jesus. Isn’t that what Lent is about? I want to share something I read on Spirithome.com: “Lent is the season for the experience of giving your life over -- in each moment, bodily, deliberately, to Christ and to what the Spirit is showing you. God wants you to surrender yourself, and let the Spirit work in you. In Lent, we take responsibility for our acts and thoughts, and treat certain of those as the killers they are. Lent is self-discovery of the parts of ourselves we don't want to discover, through prayer, fasting, and other disciplines. It is the opening up, the turning over to God, the repenting of our sins, the turning away from that which does not please God. Yet there is just a glimpse of Easter through the heavy clouds of Good Friday -- that Christ has taken the burden, and you don't have to carry it anymore. Don't you want to follow that kind of a God?” I know that I do…. Peace and Grace to you this season of Lent. –Rachel
We call Abraham "father" not because he got God's attention by living like a saint, but because God made something out of Abraham when he was a nobody. Isn't that what we've always read in Scripture, God saying to Abraham, "I set you up as father of many peoples"? Abraham was first named "father" and then became a father because he dared to trust God to do what only God could do: raise the dead to life, with a word make something out of nothing. When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn't do but on what God said he would do. And so he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, "You're going to have a big family, Abraham!" Romans 4: 17-18