Not a chance we happened but a witha plan we were created

I was just thinking about the lesson I will be giving the boys in the morning. We have been having so much fun with school now that we have our new books. We start off with a lesson out of "little people" program for our devotions. Every night before I pre-read the next mornings lesson, and as I was reading this one I just thought how wonderful it is that my children and I are so blessed to be able to study and freely learn about our creator!!!

So this lesson has an illustration I am supposed to give, take 10 coins write the number 1 - 10 one them, lay them out in order so the children can see that I want them in this exact order. Then take them and toss them in the air and see where they land. NOT in the exact order that I wanted, do this a few times so they see that it is highly unlikely for them to land exactly in order, probably impossible.

This leads to a further discussion about how creation/ everything is so perfectly made exactly right with every detail. How slim the odds are that anything could line up exactly right in creation... LET ALONE the fact that EVERYTHING is lined up perfectly!!!! our God is so amazing.

It was so fun last night, I went to a fiesta in Independance and when it got late I took my children in the car and let them fall asleep a little earlier than David wanted to leave. The three little ones were fast asleep, and just Alex and I were awake watching the stars, when we both looked up at the sky at the same time and saw a shooting star and both looked at each other and saw it at the same time. I know he will remember that forever. A memory of something so fun to see as a child. I dont think I ever saw one before until this summer. Another thing I can bring up to discuss in the morning. How amazing everything is, and let them ponder on that...

"Thank you Father for every precious, beautiful thing you have made that my eye get the pleasure to look upon :) "

Poor Mint Plant... Poor Boys...

Early this morning while I was setting the times on all my sprinklers, I was looking around my back yard and thanking God for each and every small little blessing he has recently given me.


My three precious little chicken AND the material to build their little yard AND that at least two are already laying.

The rabbit that Marcus has a pet to take care of and feels included when his brothers are doing their chores AND that it is making me a beautiful big fertalized area where my garden will be next year. For my newly installed sprinkler system that I put in all by myself!!!! That I finally got it right and that it covers every square inch of my back yard including all flower beds :) I am thrilled to peices about that one....

As I was admiring God for all the little things in life that make me smile, I noticed my newly transplanted mint plants... :( not doing so well. In fact they were flat out wilting and probably done for. I wanted to save them from the chickens so I moved them from the chicken pen to a small flower bed that receives NO sunlight, thus no ability to draw up its necessary water, hence why it is not going to make it.

I began to reflex on that and thought that (here is a little honesty so don't judge me too hard please ) I feel like I have kept my boys from the world with good intentions, to protect and shelter them. (like protecting the mint from the chickens) But in moving them to the protection of my home only I feel like they don't get enough sunshine (the poor mint being in the shade) I guess it feels like I need to smile at them a lot more, laugh with them, tickle, and just PLAY with them. I have begun to let life sweep me along again. I have also forgotten to include friends for them to play with, grow up with, and safely learn that there does exist other like minded, christian, "safe" friends which we can let our guard down around. My boys seem like life is just a bit boring, or dull or missing that spice and joy that friends put in it. (the mint needed to be planted in full sun in another area of the yard)

I want to make their life one to look back on and say "we had a BLAST together" even if it is doing the chores, do it all in fun :) I want them to not just live, I want them to THRIVE!!!!!

Home made Paintbrushes

I had such a wonderful day with my boys today. I had a lot to do, my house needed a little bit more tidying, clean the suburban, paint my mother in laws living room, fix the rabbit hutch, mop etc... but I decided that I needed to just BE with my children. To just play with them and enjoy them and the work was not a must, it could wait till tomorrow!!! It turned into a fabulous day.

I did start off with our regular basic chores: everyone dressed, beds made, rooms picked up, pets fed, personal chores done, each child has a few areas to clean etc so we weren't going to get behind...

then i made a nice lunch of home made whole wheat tortillas and chroizo and eggs for my husband whom i knew was going to be there soon, then we went to his mothers, the children played outside while I painted her living room. It took a whole three hours of my day but the children were behaving great so I finished the job and David went back to work at 1, he only had a lunch break. Then I took the children home at 3pm.

We stopped by the park right next to my house. It really was dark and cloudy and starting to threaten to rain. but I thought " summer is almost over i better squeeze out every last day i can outside" so i ran laps arround our tiny play ground and they played their heart out for like 20 mins. then it really started to rain so we ran!!! LOL it was great I love REALLY playing with them like that. It makes my heart feel so so good...

The fun begings: I helped Alex, Isaiah, and Marcu make homemade paintbrushed out of horses hair, thread and sticks out of our back yard. My sister just trimmed all the horses "bridal path" an inch or two between their ears and gave the boys the hair to take home for this very idea. Then we got out the paint and paper and they each tried out their very own brush. It was wonderful.

then they got out blocks AND tinkertoys, and they thought that was great making a huge mess, because we dont get to do that very often, we try to keep the toys and mess in the buckets and just gently build little projects.. but they made a tornade trail LOL. as long as we got it picked back up before David got home, nobody knew the difference....

all in all a fun fun day...

Havent been on here in a while

Its been a long long time since I have been on here. Life just got busy with all my precious little ones. I had to stop a lot of things and just focus on them for a while. I got a lot of up dating to do for ya, but it might take me a few post to do that. I had a beautiful little girl last December 6th. Another home birth. I still enjoy staying at home with my children. I got to go with my dear David to the home school conference this year for the first time. It was wonderful. I would recommend it to everyone who has children. Homeschooling or not.

David still works for the same counseling business. Work is going well for him. We are very blessed to have such a wonderful stable job that has supported us just fine throughout our marriage. He has talked about continuing school this fall to get another degree. but I'm not sure what is going to happen.

My brother Stephen and my sister Carissa are both married off now :) Praise God it is to two WONDERFUL people. I adore both Kailey and Thomas for what a beautiful addition to our family they are!!! I'm so happy for all four of you....

Here are just a few pics of my children lately....
Isaiah and Alex
Marcus
Victoria

Bible Versions

This is just another article I have enjoyed about bible versions : )

Conversation In A ‘Bible’ Bookstore

“Hello. May I help you?”
“Yes. I’m looking for a Bible I can use in my church. Could you help me?”
“I’d be happy to. I would recommend the NIV. It is our most popular seller.”

“Do you know the story of the Ethiopian eunuch?”
“Sure.”
“Well, the only verse that tells us what we need to do before baptism is in Acts 8:37. It’s really important that my Bible states this clearly. Would you read it to me?”
“Certainly...” (The helpful employee looks and looks.) “Uh, it’s not there.”
“What’s not there?”
“I’m sorry, but there is no verse 37...”
“Well, I don’t want a Bible that is missing something that important. Let’s try another Bible.”

“Well, we have another popular one, the Revised Standard version.”
“My Bible has to be clear about the virgin birth of Christ. Would you please check Isaiah 7:14?”
“Hmm. It says ‘a young woman shall conceive...’”
“Then forget the Revised Standard! What other Bibles have you?”

“Well, we are very proud of the New American Standard. It’s called ‘the most literal’ version.”
“Alright, then let’s look up John 6:47. It’s the one place where Jesus tells us to believe in Him to have eternal life.”
“Wait! It only says ‘he who believes has eternal life.’ It doesn’t say who to believe in.”
“My old occultic friends would love that. They believe, but not in Jesus Christ. So much for the NASV.”

“Let’s try again. When I witness to Jehovah’s Witnesses, I like to use Revelation 1:11, where Jesus says, ‘I am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last.’ What do you have left?”
“Here’s our New Living Translation. Let me see. Huh? It says, ‘Write down what you see...’ No ‘Alpha and Omega’ here.

“All I see left is an old American Standard. Would you look up 1 John 5:7? It tells us the Father, the Word and the Holy Ghost are one God.”
“I’m very sorry. It says, ‘And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is the truth.’ There’s no Trinity here.”

“Well, then, I’ll just stay with my Bible. It has everything I mentioned to you.”
“What Bible is that?”
“God’s preserved words in English: The King James Bible.”

New Age Bible Versions

New Aged Versions...

This article has started a lot of thinking in my life. I have never really cared about which bible I read, they were just some versions I thought were easier to read... now I strongly believe against that and this is just one article that helped me to start researching that :) I hope it helps inspire some of you .... this is written by a man i highly respect. I have learned almost all my mothering skills from his gentle wife....

New Age Bible Versions
By: Michael Pearl

Some of you have asked why we make available the book New Age Bible Versions. Thirty-five years ago I was a student at a very conservative Bible College.
I was taught the generally accepted, fundamentalist views on inspiration of Scripture. When I first began to read a little Greek, I thought I had arrived. I was reading the Bible in the original language, or so I thought. The Greek, which I thought was THE Greek Bible, was the 25th edition of the Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament published by the American Bible Society. After I graduated from Bible college and went on to pastor a church, when I came to a passage in the Bible that didn’t read the way I thought it should, I would search the many other "bibles" until I found a reading that met my doctrinal criterion. I found the Greek lexicons very helpful when I needed to reject a given passage.

I believed as I was taught, that the Scripture which had been "given by inspiration of God" had been lost many years ago, and that at best we could "trust" the almost perfect copies that remained. What I didn’t learn in Bible college is that the Greek New Testament I was using did not even exist until 1898. I thought it was a copy of "the original." Upon investigation, I learned that there are 24 different Greek N Ts, just as there are different English versions. It surprised me to learn that modern scholarship did not believe what I had been taught as a child. I went back to one of the faculty members at my old college and discussed it with him. I discovered that he was not able to hand me just one book in any language and assure me that it was the inerrant, perfect words of God. No one in my college had ever so much as seen such a book.

Needless to say, twenty-eight years ago I launched into a study of manuscript evidences. As a result, I came to believe that the King James Bible is the words of God, and nothing but the words of God, to English speaking people.

Do you believe that the book you call a Bible is the word of God? If it is not a King James Bible, then know that the translators and publishers of your "version" do not believe that your bible is the Bible, the Word of God.

I now reach up and pull a book from the shelf here in my library. Like many of the books in my library it is one that expresses views contrary to my own.

It is a little paperback, sent to the subscribers of Biblical Archeology Review, called The Dead Sea Scrolls After Forty Years. It was published in 1991 by BAR. If you want to read apostasy at its best, subscribe to BAR. I have found it useful in keeping up with the infidels. I open the book to page 60 and read comments by James Sanders, a member of the United Bible Society. He served on the committee that put out the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. He says, "The NRSV is not the Bible; no translation is the Bible. So what is the Bible? What and whence these texts?" On page 62 he continues, "We are now very careful about using the word ’original,’ because we don’t really know what we mean by it." On page 63, he suggests, "[W]e should just drop the word [original, as in original Greek Bible] because we do not have the autographs of anything…" He goes on to answer his question as to where the Bible originated, "Therefore, we have to say that we don’t really know exactly the inception of any of these texts, but they develop into what we call traditioning process."

Do you believe your Bible had an unknown beginning through the various traditions that were slowly collected and assembled over several centuries until they evolved into a document of religious importance? You don’t? One of the "Bible Scholars" responsible for the NRSV does. On page 69 he says, "[T]he stabilization of the text is not yet finished…" He is telling you that what you think is the Bible today may not be the Bible tomorrow. For example, the Greek Bible I studied when I was in College is now different in over 600 places. Words have been changed, deleted or added. It is not the same Greek Bible it was when I was in college studying "the original Greek." Men like Sanders changed it.

He goes on to describe his duties as Bible translator, "We try to reconstruct what was first said or written." Then in a moment of candidacy (page 71), on behalf of his fellow scholars and Bible translators, he says, "I think it is time for us to stop fooling the people, making them think there is just one Bible and that our Bible committee got closer to it than their committee did." Of course that is the sales pitch for any new bible. When a man "fools" you he makes you look like a fool by causing you to believe the ridiculous. Sanders then expresses the reason why the "scholars" deliberately fool the public: "I have been told by some that that [telling the truth as they see it] would just destroy the Bible because lay folk still want to think of the Bible as somehow ’inerrant.’" Are you one of the "lay people" who buys bibles and have been "fooled" lest you learn what the translators are deliberately keeping from you, that the Bible is not inerrant? He concludes with, "It may well be that if there should ever be the possibility of discussing the text of Isaiah with Isaiah, he might very well say, ’But I did not say that.’"

Let me ask you, would you trust a man like that if he changed the Bible text and gave as a reason that the "oldest and best manuscripts read…"? Then could you trust your favorite minister of the gospel who, after reading James Sanders or one like him, should take up the same tune and correct the bible on grounds that "the oldest and best manuscripts…" or "all scholars agree…?" What are the oldest and best manuscripts? Can you trust the marginal notes that so freely alter the Bible text? Do all scholars agree, or just the ones that are "fooling" the people? In this New Age in which we live, Christians are taken to be fools by the "good godly men" that have provided the English speaking people with over 200 "modern translations."

There you have it. Does this concern you? Have you searched out the facts for yourself? I believed the King James Bible is the Word of God 25 years before I read New Age Bible Versions. I have in my library more books on this subject than you could carry in a wheelbarrow. There are many scholars that do not agree with Sanders and his kind. I offer you New Age Bible Versions because among many books on the subject it is the easiest for the layman to understand.

Yes, I have read several authors that have dismissed this book on various grounds, but I also read the book, along with 50 others on the subject—pro and con. Don’t think you are informed just because you read one author that smugly discounted this thoroughly researched work.
There are many that would discourage you from investigating beyond their opinions. Openness and investigation is the enemy of deceit only. If someone would prevent you from reading this or any book on doctrinal issues, ask yourself what they fear and why. Truth doesn’t need to be policed. It can stand alone against all error. So in the name of open dialogue and ready access to information, we offer you New Age Bible Versions, a book that goes behind the scenes and uncovers the plot to change your Bible. Read it and be shocked.

I am not attempting to enter the arena on this issue. We have been called to child training and family ministry. There is an avalanche of material available on this subject, so do not write expecting me to take up the challenge. Others more qualified have said it all better than I ever could. Do your own research. I will read anything you send me as long as it disagrees with my position. There is a web site I have never seen, but I heard it is helpful on this subject.

www.biblebelievers.com

Don’t forget to exercise grace towards those that disagree with you. Even Bible believers need love. Happy research!

Musings

Just thinking about stuff... there is so much going on in this world that is so confusing. Mainly Christians, how have they been so blindly lead astray on so many topics of important like a literal creation which took 6 literal 24hr periods of time called days... to which version of the bible is most accurate. Does this matter? I strongly believe it does. Its like a bunch of people go out to plant a garden and they are all trying to plant the same way, encountering the same weeds, etc... point is they all are experiencing the same gardening task... Some people dwadle around and slowly atempt to plant their seeds in the uncleared land... Some people start weeding out the little weeds and are making a slow attempt at it.. While the last group take back hoes and big machinery to their land and start clearing out the HUGE brush and trees by the burn pile full... I mean they mean business, they are going to plant a garden and they want the land cleared now... so they can start planting their seeds this spring.

This got me thinking and comparing this illustration to Christians who are so flaky about church they dont pray or read their bible, just sort of dwadle around church from time to time.. and the second is Christians who don't see the whole picture, they are just doing such little studying or discussion group stuff they don't know what they are really doing.. and the third group is REALLY rare.. they KNOW there is a spiritual battle going on right now, they want to know what is the truth and what they need to do to start LIVING the life TODAY, right now, not some time a few years from now... topic that are huge to me in Christianity are:

Literal Creation which took 6 days, earth being only about 6,000 years old
KJV being our only English version which we can trust in its entirety
Salvation, what does it take to get to heaven
Sins, when are we forgiven, what if you sin directly after you repent... will you then go to hell?
The end times, rapture, what are Christians to do in the end times... run to the mountains?
Birth control, abortion, family planning, children
Public schools system and evolution vs homeschooling
femininity and modesty and virtuous women of god
denominations and do they even matter as long as you are a christian?

I mean there is so much rattling around in this little brain, and then who can you turn to? who is there to ask questions to that would actually be of help and know the truth? I haven't found a single person who is ON THE PATH OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.... for whom I can ask my many questions of ponderings....

the sad thing to me is that whom ever we do trust around us believes such different things from us ... like hugely different... that how can we even agree on any part of God truth if we don't agree on the huge topics. plus should we even get together to talk to those loved ones arround us if we dissagree so drasticaly? wont we just harm our relatoinship? and offend each other? I'm worried about distancing ourselves rather than drawing each other closer together towards Christ....

.... just musing...