Up the Sunbeam

-- In the late night quiet that only comes when everyone sleeps but me, I relish the opportunity to concentrate, uninterrupted, on the textbook reading for my Essentials in Psychology class. I haven't fully decided how I feel about the idea of an e-textbook with no pages to turn, no heft to hold in my hands, nothing tangible to give evidence of the copious amounts of knowledge I am absorbing. Not only that, but I have to go through a measure of rigmarole to electronically highlight key words and concepts, which is one of my favorite ways to remember things I don't want to forget. Yep, the jury is still out, but I am adjusting. As you would expect from a college textbook, this is a book with a secular viewpoint, academic in nature, and one that has no intention whatsoever of speaking to me about God . . . but it can't help itself. In teaching me what learned men and women have discovered about the human brain, the way the mind works, concepts like motivation

-- Do you ever wake up and find everything you touch falls down,                                                                                       tips over,                                                                                               won't work,                                                                                                      makes a mess,                                                                                                             gets stuck,                                                                                                                    fights back? It's not your imagination. "And to the man he said, 'Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree        whose fruit I commanded you not to eat,    the ground is cursed because of you.        All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it.'" [emphasis mine] Genesis 3:17 NLT  Some

-- " Then Jesus said,  'What is the Kingdom of God like? How can I illustrate it?   It is like a tiny mustard seed that a man planted in a garden; it grows and becomes a tree, and the birds make nests in its branches. '”   Luke 13:18-19 NLT The variety of mustard that grows here in Northern California may not be quite the same as the kind Jesus used as an object lesson, but it does grow awfully tall. It doesn't grow to be tree-like, but the red-winged blackbirds find it sturdy enough to sit in, especially when it is thick with ladybugs this time of year! It must be the bird's equivalent of a fast food restaurant, complete with fly-thru service! The Kingdom of God . . . like a mustard seed. Seeing fields splashed glorious in yellow, I wonder what that means. Jesus also used the mustard seed to illustrate the familiar subject of faith, and much is taught about growing faith and the power of faith even as small as a mustard seed.  We know quite a bit ab