With a bang and a whimper…

Health care comes at last. With half of us kicking, screaming, wailing, and digging fingernails into the door frame and the other half throwing a kick-ass victory party, America will at long last join the ranks of developed countries who have recognized that health care is a critical piece of the social fabric and the legitimate province of government regulation, even if we are still fidgeting uneasily at the end of the line.

It’s certainly not a perfect bill. And it’s not a quick fix either. The pieces will take several years to fall into place, and there will be kinks along way. Good people will look at the same fact sets and differ over implementation and scope. But finally – finally!! – we are moving in the right direction.

I hope to flesh this out a little more thoroughly in the days to come, but let me put forward just a few salient points:

• Just for the record, the procedural maneuvers that brought us reconciliation and deem and pass are no more illegitimate than the use of a filibuster to require a super majority of 60 votes.  The Senate was designed to operate on a majority vote, and an excellent case can be made that requiring 60 votes thwarts the expressed will of the majority of the electorate. Reconciliation and deem and pass serve as a check to a dictatorial minority in the Senate.
• Requiring citizens to purchase health insurance is no more tyrannical than requiring them to purchase car insurance. Uninsured people impose huge costs on the rest of society. It’s just good economics to require everyone to participate in order to minimize costs across the board.
• Health care cannot be unmoored from its moral implications. I don’t want to get mired down in a debate over whether it’s a right or not. I don’t care what you call it so much, but it is important to recognize that we’re talking about services that make the difference between living and dying, and that changes the terms of the debate in important ways.

If you really can’t bring yourself to find a scrap of good in this, I hope you can at least enjoy the political theater. It’s been unusually exciting lately, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to let up any time soon.

Bon voyage, Rushie baby! Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.

Welcome, hubby!

I’m very happy to announce that my darling hubby has consented to grace my blog with occasional Op-ed pieces. You’ll find his first post immediately below.

So, in the future, if something you’re reading doesn’t sound quite like me, check the author…

The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord!

This. is. stunning.

Statement about Race at Bob Jones University

At Bob Jones University, Scripture is our final authority for faith and practice and it is our intent to have it govern all of our policies. It teaches that God created the human race as one race. History, reality and Scripture affirm that in that act of creation was the potential for great diversity, manifested today by the remarkable racial and cultural diversity of humanity. Scripture also teaches that this beautiful, God-caused and sustained diversity is divinely intended to incline mankind to seek the Lord and depend on Him for salvation from sin (Acts 17:24–28).

The true unity of humanity is found only through faith in Christ alone for salvation from sin—in contrast to the superficial unity found in humanistic philosophies or political points of view. For those made new in Christ, all sinful social, cultural and racial barriers are erased (Colossians 3:11), allowing the beauty of redeemed human unity in diversity to be demonstrated through the Church.

The Christian is set free by Christ’s redeeming grace to love God fully and to love his neighbor as himself, regardless of his neighbor’s race or culture. As believers, we demonstrate our love for others first by presenting Christ our Great Savior to every person, irrespective of race, culture, or national origin. This we do in obedience to Christ’s final command to proclaim the Gospel to all men (Matthew 28:19–20). As believers we are also committed to demonstrating the love of Christ daily in our relationships with others, disregarding the economic, cultural and racial divisions invented by sinful humanity (Luke 10:25–37; James 2:1–13).

Bob Jones University has existed since 1927 as a private Christian institution of higher learning for the purpose of helping young men and women cultivate a biblical worldview, represent Christ and His Gospel to others, and glorify God in every dimension of life.

BJU’s history has been chiefly characterized by striving to achieve those goals; but like any human institution, we have failures as well. For almost two centuries American Christianity, including BJU in its early stages, was characterized by the segregationist ethos of American culture. Consequently, for far too long, we allowed institutional policies regarding race to be shaped more directly by that ethos than by the principles and precepts of the Scriptures. We conformed to the culture rather than provide a clear Christian counterpoint to it.

In so doing, we failed to accurately represent the Lord and to fulfill the commandment to love others as ourselves. For these failures we are profoundly sorry. Though no known antagonism toward minorities or expressions of racism on a personal level have ever been tolerated on our campus, we allowed institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful.

On national television in March 2000, Bob Jones III, who was the university’s president until 2005, stated that BJU was wrong in not admitting African-American students before 1971, which sadly was a common practice of both public and private universities in the years prior to that time. On the same program, he announced the lifting of the University’s policy against interracial dating.

Our sincere desire is to exhibit a truly Christlike spirit and biblical position in these areas. Today, Bob Jones University enrolls students from all 50 states and nearly 50 countries, representing various ethnicities and cultures. The University solicits financial support for two scholarship funds for minority applicants, and the administration is committed to maintaining on the campus the racial and cultural diversity and harmony characteristic of the true Church of Jesus Christ throughout the world.

Please urgently pray and consider

This is a shout-out to every person who has come into contact with Bob Jones University in one way or another. I would urge you to prayerfully consider supporting the effort at www.please-reconcile.org. The letter will be closed to new signatures at midnight tonight PST.

If you have not heard of or experienced racism in conjunction with or at Bob Jones University, please read through the supporting articles at www.please-reconcile.org. The FAQ section is a compilation of thorough answers to many common questions about the letter. For more posts about the need for a letter and the fundamental spiritual principles underlying our effort, please see http://www.drslewis.org/camille/2008/11/18/deadline-is-tonight-at-midnight-pacific/.

I hope that each of you will take the time to pray through this issue and seek God’s glory in your course of action. I will be the first to confess that I have been silent too long because I was afraid (see an excellent post by a fellow blogger, http://brokensilence.wordpress.com/2008/11/14/please-reconcile-the-fear-of-man/). But it is time to speak and to act.

Praying urgently for His will and glory,

Monica

Onward and upward!

Thank you all so much for all of your prayers! God has answered wonderfully. The therapist told me today that I’m ahead of schedule with the healing. The swelling has gone down enough so that my knee actually looks like a real knee instead of a balloon. The therapist said that one of the hardest things to do after ACL surgery is to be able to flex my knee enough to straighten it out completely, and I was able to do that today without any discomfort. They won’t let me off the crutches yet, and I’m still taking drugs, but I’m going to try to cut back to three doses per day instead of four starting tonight. Things are looking up…

Out from under the knife

To all my wonderful family and friends who prayed and, most of all, to my loving heavenly Father who is the Healer–thank you so much! The surgery well really well, and the pain is far less than I had expected. The doc said that I can do as much weight bearing on the leg as I want up to the point of pain, and he’s already got me working on leg stretches to keep the scar tissue from lumping up in my knee. Therapy starts tomorrow, and in eight months, I”m planning to walk onto a volleyball court and start making up for lost time.

Pictures!

I have so many pictures to post! Pictures of the new house, the new paint, the gardens–flower and vegetable, my hubby and I… And I’ve been so remiss about posting. But here is my beginning!

Chris and I have bought a house!! It’s so tremendously exciting. God provided us with a beautiful little condo on the south side of Charlotte. It’s in a great area, close to just about everything we need, and only about 25 minutes from both our jobs. We’re about 20 minutes from the church we’ve been attending since last fall.

Here’s the front:

And the foyer:

The stair: (You can see the doors to the two upstairs bedrooms in this picture. There’s a full bath with a walk in closet and two sinks that joins the two rooms. Underneath the stair, you can see a door that leads to a third bedroom with it’s own full bath.)

The living room:

The table side of the kitchen:

And the kitchen side:

Here’s our patio. It’s all filled up with vegetables now, and plants that are waiting to go into the ground, but I haven’t taken a picture of it yet.

New every year

It’s amazing every year. I line up the pots, fill them with dirt, stick dead, dried-up little seeds in them, and in two weeks give or take a little, I have live, green, growing things. I suppose it’s kind of cliched to talk about seedlings like this every spring, but the eight year old inside me is still wowed by it every. single. time. I look at the different seed shapes and imagine the plants that will grow, and I think to myself that we have one really cool God.

Onward and upward!

We’ve hit that part of the year when leasers sit down with their leases and think, “Do we really want to stay here another year? Are we paying too much in rent? Is moving again worth the hassle?” But that’s not a terribly pleasant process to go through every year, so this year, we decided to do something different.

We bought a house!! I can hardly believe that it’s happing, but we’re closing on April 1 on a beautiful little townhouse in a great part of town. Here are a few pictures. It’s in great shape. The last two owners have been artists, one a teacher and one a student, and there’s not a single white wall in the place. Everything is painted some warm and lovely color. And it’s been very well maintained.

There are three bedrooms, one downstairs with its own full bath and two upstairs with an adjoining full bath between them. We’re seriously considering making the downstairs bedroom our guest room and turning the upstairs into our own master suite. There’s not much that needs to be done to the inside. A little bit of touch up painting, but nothing more than about half a day’s work. We need to put a bit of molding along the kitchen wall where the red paint meets the cream paint.

There’s plenty of gardening space too! Lots of room out front, and the house is an end unit, so I have a three foot deep bed that goes around the side of the house and the back patio. There’s another two foot deep bed on the inside of the patio wall as well. One of the very first things I want to do is get rid of that wall and put up trellises instead. In addition to my regular summer veggies (tomatoes [6 different kinds this year!], peppers, beans, broccoli, cucumbers, and an assortment of herbs), I’m planning to put in strawberry plants along the side beds, and I’m hoping to turn the front beds into a bird and butterfly garden. Then once I’ve had a full year to see how the sunlight falls during the different seasons, I’ll come up with a more elaborate plan.

I haven’t been able to stop telling God “thank you” for this house. The way He brought us to it and worked out all the details has been absolutely amazing. We never imagined that we’d be able to afford anything in this neighborhood, but here we are, signed, sealed, and committed. It’s another one of those times where He has done more than we ever thought to ask Him for, and I can’t stop praising Him for it.

Verde

Green. It’s my new favorite color. The rain has set everything to growing again, and it’s beyond beautiful. Everything has been tired and dusty and dull for so long, but it’s all emeralds now.