In the meantime

The ladies' Sunday School class at church just finished going through Women of the Word , by Jen Wilkin.    While I had read it once before, it was a blessing to go through it again! Yes, I am a slow learner and need to have things repeated over and over again . It was an incredibly helpful book for learning how to approach God’s Word for myself in order to clearly understand what it is saying.  In several ways, this book has helped me to put together some pieces of the “Bible study methods” puzzle that before seemed obscure and vague, without a clear fit into the picture. In my understanding of the big picture of how to study the Bible for myself, Women of the Word contributed one significant piece: that piece was a grid for approaching the passage and determining how that affects my life.  This is most easily summed up into three main questions: What does this passage teach me about God?  How does this aspect of God’s character change my view of self?...

The day I turned ten stands out in my mind, for several reasons: we were in the United States, which meant I got to celebrate my birthday with my cousins, aunt and uncle, and my grandma.  That wasn’t something we got to do very often.  In fact, that was one of maybe two birthdays that I remember celebrating with them.  Anyway, the year I turned ten, I also got some glittery butterfly clippies that I had been eyeing in the store for weeks--you know, those clips that were all the rage, that worked perfectly to make cornrows in my hair.  Yeah…those clips were the best!  And then, the main reason I remember that birthday:  my family and I went to the apple orchard for the morning. Let me explain why this was such a big deal:  I hated apples.  I would eat them in something (like apple crisp or apple muffins, and perhaps apple pie, but I doubt I’d ever even eaten apple pie back then.)  But to eat them plain, no way.  It’s not that I real...