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Perseverance: Boring — or Blessing?
What is perseverance and why does the Bible mention it a lot? Because we sure don’t see modern book titles like “30 Days to More Perseverance!” or “How to Persevere in Seven Easy Steps!” The secular definition for “perseverance” is “steady persistence in a course of action, a purpose, a state, etc., especially in spite of difficulties, obstacles, or discouragement.” And this is true. But for Christians, there is more. The secondary definition is “Continuance in a state of grace to the end, leading to eternal salvation.” Let’s see what the Bible says about it. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering…
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Speech Recognition and Snow
I’m experimenting with speech recognition on my new laptop. I’m frankly a better speaker than a writer so I do better when I write by talking it out first to myself. Psychotic? You decide. 🙂 While training the computer I came up with this snippet that I rather liked: It’s snowing here in the mountains. I took my dog for short walk earlier. I wasn’t going to, but he gets kind of impossible without it and heaven knows I need it too. I thought the snow was over, and was delighted to feel a few flakes. Then I thought it was really over, and was surprised to look back out…
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The Christmas Story of the Holly Tree
I usually tell this traditional story in the character of Mrs. Alice Porter, my southern storytelling character. When Jesus was born, the evil, wicked King Herod tried to kill all the boy children so he could murder the young king. Angels had shown up in Joseph’s dream and told him to take Mary and Jesus and hightail it for Egypt until the trouble was done. And so he did. It was about the third day on the road to Egypt, when trouble started. Joseph had stopped to rest Jack the donkey, who was seeing the world for the first time. Joseph climbed a large rock to look around the countryside.…