Free Study

If you want access to a free Bible study series I wrote, you can find one at bible.org, which is a great place to get free resources. The topic is: Your Worth in Christ, and it explores how precious you are to God. Here are the topics and links:

Defaced But Not Erased (Lesson 1)

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Lesson 2)

Adopted as God’s Child (Lesson 3)

Disciplined as God’s Child (Lesson 4)

Restored and Rejoiced Over as God’s Child (Lesson 5)

Justified, Sanctified, and Headed for Glory (Lesson 6)

Broken but Usable For His Glory (Lesson 7)

Check This Out

If you live anywhere near Dallas or plan to visit in the next few months, be sure to check out the latest exhibit at Fort Worth's Kimbell, "Picturing the Bible: The Earliest Christian Art."

My teaching assistant, Eva, went with me on Tuesday, which is the Kimbell's half-price day, to check it out.

What we found, I highly recommend. My biggest surprise was seeing how much the early Christians referred to the "Jonah" story, and also how few crucifixes (none) we saw. Eva, who knows more about early Christian history than I do, said that's because anyone who actually saw a crucifixion would have recoiled at the thought of making that image into art.

Other popular images were anchors; depictions of shepherds with sheep; the Daniel story about Shadrack, Meshack, and Abednego; and a strong Jesus who looked people in the eye.

Developed and organized by the Kimbell (its exclusive venue), the exhibit is guest-curated by Dr. Jeffrey Spier of the University of Arizona. It draws on recent discoveries to demonstrate how Christians in the third to sixth centuries gave visual expression to their religious beliefs. The Museum's web site says this:

A spectacular display of many of the greatest treasures of early Christianity from around the world, Picturing the Bible includes major loans from the Vatican, the Bargello and the Laurentian Library in Florence, the British Museum, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a number of other international institutions. A landmark event both for scholarship on the Early Christian era and for the broader appreciation of this crucial period in world history, this exhibition is the first major review of third-to sixth-century Christian art since The Age of Spirituality at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977. There have been many important advances in scholarship since then, as well as a considerable number of new archaeological discoveries, all of which this exhibition fully reassesses.

For more info, you can go here.

Mercy Me

I made this card a number of years ago as part of a SoulPerSuit (SPS) meditation, which is basically refrigerator art made for God. (It does not have to be Rembrandt quality. It's just a playing-card-sized expression of a child toward a loving Parent.)

What does this one mean?

It was a year of war. The U.S. had invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq. Iraq was formerly Babylon, where Daniel prayed to the Lord in the midst of a generation who did not know Yahweh. It's easy to pray "bless the U.S. troops and keep them safe," but all humans--even those in nations against whom we fight--are made in God's image. And anyway, we're told to bless our enemies.

I was also taking a PhD class from a woman who is not a Christian. She was initially rather militant against the gospel (but she actually softened when she heard about SoulPerSuit and the desire to give artistic expression to our spiritual contemplations). Her speciality is Italian. I put the word "Italian" there as an acknowledgment that God's mercies extend to her, too. And finally, I included a very small "me." Every day I am under the mercy of a holy God.

I just returned from spending a weekend doing a women's retreat at the beautiful Billy Graham Training Center at The Cove in Asheville, North Carolina. And my friend Rhonda, a co-SPSer, joined me from her home in Winston-Salem. She showed the women how to do SPS, and they came up with some moving, amazing stuff.

You can see more in the days to come at the retreat gallery on the SPS web site.

Two Movie Recommendations

Here are a couple of video flicks to add to your personal collection or your Netflix queue:


Saving Sarah Cain. Directed by Michael Landon, Jr., and based on a bestselling novel by Beverly Lewis, this is the story of a single journalist who finds herself as the legal guardian of her deceased sister's kids--who happen to be Amish. Movieguide just nominated this flick for "best picture of the year in television."

Martian Child. (Available Feb. 12) John Cusack (High Fidelity) stars alongside his real-life sister, Joan (Saving Helen; My Blue Heaven). The former Cusack's character, a sci-fi novelist/widower, adopts a troubled boy who insists he's from Mars. Though the child's performance is well-done, John Cusack is flat-out brilliant. The story line will especially appeal to those who like movies such as "The Big Fish," which explore the power of story to heal, as well as to anyone touched by adoption.

Wordless Wednesday

Book Club

Have you read Informed Consent? Live near Dallas? Then feel free to join Heather G's book club discussion this Monday night, where I'll talk about the story behind the story. The club has outgrown Heather's living room, so they'll meet in Plano at Christ Church on Legacy Road between Coit and Preston in Room 4225, Archgate center at 7:30. Here's a map: (christchurchplano.org directions). Hope you'll join us!

That Procedure Isn't Covered, Either

Did you hear the news that the waiting time to see a doctor has shot up for heart attack patients needing emergent care? This presumably because of long wait times at hospitals due to other emergency rooms closing.

And that's partly because so many uninsured people use emergency rooms for every level of care.

The number of uninsured Americans rose for the sixth consecutive year in 2006, to 47 million according to Census data released on August 28. And about one in three of us now hassles with HMOs. (Try staying in the hospital until you are truly ready to come home and see how much enthusiasm you can generate from your insurer on the subject.)

Forty seven million!? Our total population is around 300 million, so that means about one in six of us lacks health insurance and another huge number of us are haggling to get the care promised to us by companies trying to wiggle out of agreements via every loophole imaginable. But go to Canada or France or England and everybody's covered and their prescription medications are available for a reasonable cost. We don't want Socialism here, we say. Yet we have no problem with free schools, free military protection, free roads...

Okay, yes, our taxes pay for those things. So let's think about what it might cost us to raise taxes, provide universal health care, and get rid of the whole "for profit" thing. Recently we got an estimate of what it would cost us to buy private insurance to cover our family of three. To keep the same level of coverage we have now (which is great, but still meant we paid more than six grand out of pocket for my hip/shoulder surgeries in the past two years), we'd have to pay fifteen hundred bucks per month. I'm thinking we could raise taxes by a lot less than that number and still have better care and coverage than we, the fortunate insured, received. (Add to that the fact that my endocrinologist does not take insurance at all. So I pay 100 percent out of pocket every time I see him. And the doc who operated on me is not in my "plan," but then, none of the ortho trauma docs who practice out of my "in plan" hospital are "in plan," so I had no choice...)

Now, have you checked out the level of compensation most healthcare CEO's are making? And consider this announcement made in November 2007: "Kaiser Permanente has reported that its Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and subsidiaries saw dramatic increases in its net income, operating income and investment income over the last three and nine months, with nine month profits more than doubling." Hmmm.

Back when I was an infertility patient, I needed some injectible medications. They cost $4,000 per month here. The same meds cost about $50 in France and Mexico. So some of the members of our support group found legal ways to obtain these meds for less, and the pharma company found out. They issued warnings to our members stating that they were in danger of getting meds without necessary FDA packaging info (so what?). So I did some research and found that all the meds going to the U.S. and Canada and France were made at the same factory--in Belgium. It was the same stuff. (A local doc even tested samples and verified it was all the same.) When I talked with the pharma company rep to ask for the reason behind the price difference, here's what she told me: In America we have to pad the price to cover the cost of law suits.

You know what's really sad about that? That same company did get slapped with a suit in 2005 that cost them $704 million. And you know why they got sued? Because they paid kickbacks to docs who prescribed an AIDS medication that didn't work as claimed. They got sued because of their own unethical practices that ripped off some of the most vulnerable patients!

Pure greed.

Did you hear about the 9/11 rescue workers who developed serious respiratory issues, but their insurance companies refused to allow what they needed so to get proper care they had to go to...Cuba?

I wish I were making this up.

Sanctity of Life Sunday

This Sunday many churches across America will set aside the day to honor the sanctity of human life. In doing so they acknowledge that God created humans in his own image (see Genesis 1), and that all human life is precious.

This is a good thing to do. A biblical thing to do. A just thing to do.

Yet in doing so, most churches will focus only on unborn babies--about 46 million of whose lives were terminated last year. And my friend Kelley reminded me today that we need to consider the broader ramifications of life's preciousness.

While I believe we're justified in focusing most of our attention on unborn children (the numbers are staggering, aren't they?), I also think we should look more broadly at the ramifications of human dignity. Why not also...

...address the number of people who died of AIDS in 2007 (2.1 million) and give thanks for folks like my friend, Heather, who has opened a number of AIDS orphanages?
...project images of children who died of hunger in 2007 (15 million) and encourage contributions to aid organizations that feed the hungry?
...talk about the number of people who died daily in 2005 because they lacked clean water (4,700) and applaud the efforts of people like my nephew, who spent last summer in South America digging wells?
...give thanks for the lives saved in the past two decades because of immunizations (20+ million)?
...consider the number of people killed in Kenya this month (about 650), and pray for Heather and her family while they're displaced?

"In the image of God he created them--male and female," Moses wrote in Genesis. Yes, humanity is precious. And what does the Lord require of us? The prophet Micah said we are to "Do justice; love mercy; and walk humbly with [our] God." We must speak on behalf of those who can't speak for themselves (Prov. 30). And that includes those at the beginning and at the end of life--and a lot of folks in between.

Misogyny An Election Issue?

I appreciated this article about discrimination against women in today's New York Times. When I did a recent Google search to identify top "election issues," I didn't find misogyny on anyone's issue. Yet it persists as a serious social problem.

The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything

This evening I went with one grown-up and six kids ranging from the losing-teeth stage through the teen years to see Universal Studios' "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything."

In this flick three ordinary veggies struggling with fear, laziness, and low self-confidence try out for pirate parts in a dinner theater show, but they fail so miserably that they get thrown out and called "the pirates who don't do anything." Yet these ordinary guys have greatness thrust upon them as they stumble into a series of difficulties that prove their true character.

I have to take issue with the Variety reviewer who said the show offered nothing to adult audiences. Phil Vischer, who wrote the script, threw in lots of humor for the older set that sailed right over the heads of our kids and their friends. (The hour glass with the voiceover intro from Days of Our Lives was especially funny.) This grown-up laughed out loud in places, loved the music (especially the Arggghing pirates' barroom scene), and enjoyed seeing every single kid we took having a great time.

The spiritual themes are more subtle than in previous Veggie productions, and the novelist in me thinks that decision improved the storytelling. When the King explains why the three "pirates" were given the option to bail out when most needed, I found myself dabbing my eyes. Sometimes we are, indeed, given tests that help us determine what's most important. The one who has ears to hear will hear.

Cast Your Vote

Let your voice be heard. Vote for your favorites of 2007 here by January 31.

Epiphany

Merry Christmas to my Belarussian friends!

Our family just (a little over an hour ago) arrived home from four days in Sedona, Arizona, that included an all-day trip Friday to the Grand Canyon.

Twenty-one years ago this April my husband and uncle and dad and in-laws and I backpacked down the South Kiabab trail to Phantom Ranch in the bottom of the canyon and then up the Bright Angel trail out on a four-day adventure.

This was our first time to return since then. And the place still makes me gasp. Photos just cannot communicate how huge that hole is. Ten miles across and infinitely majestic.

Sedona was beautiful, too, with lots of interesting rock formations within fifteen minutes of our condo. We had good weather the first two days, so we got out and about. But we had rain yesterday and today, so we made good use of it by sleeping in, drinking hot chocolate, watching "Amazing Grace," and taking it easy.

It had been a whirlwind month punctuated by this family vacation (much needed, I might add) in Arizona. Nothing recharges me quite like a beauty "fix."

Speaking of beauty, a previous guest in our condo left their Mozart CD, which we thoroughly enjoyed (and I'm still humming). And the previous renter of the Jeep we used left an expensive digital camera. We're working to track him/her down and return it. But in the meantime we did enjoy taking shots like the one you see here!