Devotional Blog: 12/21/11, Topic: “Workers at Home”, Titus 2: 3-5 I’ve heard this verse used to justify a woman’s calling to ‘stay at ‘ and raise a family as opposed to being independent and working. I’m not going to say much about this books devotional entry except that I like how the author deals with this and I agree with what she says…amazing given I rarely agree with what she has to say.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Home Base”, 12/12/2011, 1 Chronicles 16:43 NIV

So while the devotional entry gave me the idea of this blog…it’s actually got nothing to do with what she wrote in the book and I am citing a different verse. But I have taken her topic title of Home Base because it inspired what I will write about.

“Then all the people left, each for their own , and David returned home to bless his family.”  ~1 Chronicles 16:43 NIV

Since leaving Hawaii for college I always get the question of “so when are you going home next?” Where are you from? Where is home for you? Everytime I get asked this question it prompts me to ponder about ‘what IS home’ exactly. For me, home has always been where my folks are which over the years has changed locations many times. When we are in school we never think to call our college towns ‘home’–I certainly wouldn’t call Parkland, WA (near Tacoma) home–blech! When I moved to Bozeman, MT at first home was Hawaii…”Are you going home for the holidays?”–“Yes, I am going home.” That was years 1, 2 and 3. Around year 4 and in later years in MT I started noticing a change…”Are you going back to Hawaii for Christmas?”…”Yes, I am going back to spend Christmas with my folks.” Had I decided that Hawaii was no longer my home?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

“Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.”

― Gautama Buddha{.authorOrTitle}

I’m not an ‘angry’ person. Ask just about anyone that knows me or has known me for any extended period of time and they’ll probably say I’m pretty easy going. I usually care more about how I am making others feel and that trumps how they are making me feel. Sure I get hurt, annoyed or pist like the next person but then time goes by and it’s supposed to go away. Well, while it doesn’t consume my days and nights (usually), it never goes away. I’m still pist about stuff from elementary school – yes, elementary school. From about the 4th grade through 8th grade I was a very angry, depressed, rather morbid child and it manifested in creative ways at home and in school it did not lend itself to making friends. I was made fun of, I was bullied, I was ostracized…the kids pretty much hated me and at  the time I had no idea why.  I didn’t think  I was such a terrible person, but y’know schoolyard politics dictate who the misfits are. Which is why I am forever grateful my best friend (of 30+ years now!) stuck it out with me.

Because I was such a little shit as a child, when we moved to Hawaii and I got the chance to ‘start over’ in  high school, I made a concerted effort to remake myself and suck less as a human being. To a large degree it worked and my inner anger dissipated. Being in a stable location for all of high school helped. Going to church helped and aside from nearly getting my ass kicked freshman year of high school – I was able to make an amazing group of friends, hopefully, many of whom I’ll see this summer at our 20 year high school reunion.

When I got to college I saw kids from elementary school…they were going to the same college…they were in MY dorm – karma!? We were civil, had our own circles, wasn’t a big deal – but on seeing them, the anger came back. You think you have something resolved, you’ve moved on with your life and low and behold…

“Mother! f**@ss chomping monkey vomit son of a heartless goat sh***bag gahhhhhh…i hate you…” – No not a stream of consciousness, I think at some point this sentence actually came out of my mouth.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

So kudos to my cousin Lauren and my friend Heather for reminding me I still haven’t posted about Nepal…but the Masala tea I sent them did make it to them…woohoo! Sometimes mail even from a US APO address may take a lifetime to reach its destination, it might as well have been put on the slow boat to China for all I know…except maybe that wouldn’t work–China is actually quite close to me. But you get the idea.

So back in August I traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal to attend a conference/workshop on Flu in SE Asia and it was quite interesting. Though the majority of the workshop didn’t really deal with my specific field I did learn a lot about epidemiology and analysis that goes with that kind of data which is supplemental and valuable to know. So that was neat.

The first day I arrived I was really tired and though I arrived in the afternoon I had little energy to venture beyond the hotel, Dwarika’s Hotel. I made it as far as the intersection. I don’t know what I expected, it was a lot more chaotic than I’d expected and there were tons of people. In my head I was thinking…damn if I can’t handle this how would I ever survive going anywhere in India?! Haha. I think it was just a lot to take in at first. The hotel was amazing, thank God for per diems and conference discounts that allowed me to stay there, it really was beautiful.

And just a note: In keeping with the chaos that Nepal was this blog is written in an organized chronological manner with absolute chaos with regard to the pictures and text. I’d like to think its my underlying ‘motif’ or ‘commentary’ on the crazy…but alas, I am not that smart to have thought that up prior. Instead its more a result of my lack in ability to use wordpress to post pictures in a non-chaotic format with respect to the text. I got better toward the end though.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So if you read any number of reviews on this book, say in Goodreads for Amazon it seems readers have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book. The vast majority–of those at least writing reviews loved it. I myself grew hot and cold during the course of reading it. It deals with such an interesting subject and important awful time in history and it felt to me like it was written to go straight to movie–tragic and ‘feel good’ all at the same time, great movie fodder. But does that necessarily make good fiction? And low and behold where is this book now? In movies! I’ll be interested to see how they interpret the book in the movie. I have a rule of reading books before I see them in the movies as much as I can…and I’m not one of those people where the movie has to have every last exhaustive detail from the book for it to be ‘good’. I’m always interested in adaptations. And I think Kathryn Stockett makes a good point in her quote:

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”

To say the least, its a little discussed area of history…how ‘the maid’ feels. I found myself more excited about her blurb at the end about her physical experiences growing up in the 60’s in Mississippi and I found myself more compelled and wishing she’d written about that rather than this book. But to be fair I have always been more partial to non-fiction unless it’s a literary ‘classic’ ala Wuthering Heights or the Secret Garden. Is this book a ‘classic’? Um…no. It’s not bad…but it’s kind of a let down. I wish she’d developed some characters more and played down others. But I recognize the difficulty she must’ve faced writing characters she could not relate too.

I loved the relationship the author built between Aibileen and the little girl Mae Mobeley, my favorite part of the book and an important one as no child is ever born racist, it’s taught–many times harshly. And my favorite parts of the book had Mae in them. When she starts school her teacher Miss. Taylor shames her to no end because she drew a black child as something that makes her happy. Aibileen had been teaching her that there is ‘no color’, we are all the same and can love each other as such. While Mae is playing with her little brother she makes her little brother be the ‘black child’ and tells him no matter what she does he has to sit there and take it or he’ll go to ‘jail’ and then she proceeds to throw dolls at him, pour crayons on him then tells him lets play back of the bus like Rosa Parks etc…Mae’s father watches this and asks her who taught her this and she lies and says it was her teacher, when in fact it was Aibileen that’d been telling her stories…’secret’ stories.

Surprisingly the ending was not what I was expecting which is good, but I’m not sure I liked it either…I dunno, it was both sad and hopeful I suppose.

As the title suggests I walked into the office this morning to two computers…both shut off. Now no one touches my desk especially when I have analysis running and we had a huge storm last night with lightening and wind and although Bangkok is a ‘1st’ world entity of itself some days the fact of the matter is, I live in a 3rd world country that is 98% agriculture. The result?

I decided to repost this from ProMed because I thought it was interesting…who comes up with these disease names!? When I saw it in my inbox of course I had visions of cult activities involving longan fruit in the jungles of Vietnam…yes I have an active imagination.

Witch’s broom gets its name from a deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest. [Source]

A quick shout out to ProMed which is a great resource for hearing about disease outbreaks of known or unknown etiology around the world…check it out!

But really, Longan fruit is quite prevalent in Thailand as well and it is quite delicious. So, fantastical imagination aside, see below, feel free to read the culti-c disease activities plaguing Longan in Vietnam!

A month in Thailand…amazing how quickly adaptable a person can become given continuously changing circumstances. I work in the Virology Dept of a U.S. military medical science institute (AFRIMS). My focus, dengue virus with perhaps occasional forays into malaria and avian influenza. Being raised in Hawaii and having traveled abroad to Central and South America I thought I was prepared for inevitable massacre of heat and humidity. Alas, nothing can prepare you for the literal melting of your body the moment you step onto the tarmac at Suvarnabhumi airport. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’ve decided to enter Thailand at the hottest time of year. No it’s actually perfectly in keeping in a life where I decided to go to graduate school in Montana, moving from Hawaii in mid-January and stepping off the plane to 10 below zero. Apparently I live for extremes.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

So another blog on the wedding planning is sorely overdue, I thought I would regale you with the tale of finding a dress. Now I haven’t ‘found’ the dress persay but the adventure of finding one has been interesting to say the least.

I always thought I’d be more excited about finding shoes for the wedding than my actual dress.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So if you read any number of reviews on this book, say in Goodreads for Amazon it seems readers have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book. The vast majority–of those at least writing reviews loved it. I myself grew hot and cold during the course of reading it. It deals with such an interesting subject and important awful time in history and it felt to me like it was written to go straight to movie–tragic and ‘feel good’ all at the same time, great movie fodder. But does that necessarily make good fiction? And low and behold where is this book now? In movies! I’ll be interested to see how they interpret the book in the movie. I have a rule of reading books before I see them in the movies as much as I can…and I’m not one of those people where the movie has to have every last exhaustive detail from the book for it to be ‘good’. I’m always interested in adaptations. And I think Kathryn Stockett makes a good point in her quote:

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”

To say the least, its a little discussed area of history…how ‘the maid’ feels. I found myself more excited about her blurb at the end about her physical experiences growing up in the 60’s in Mississippi and I found myself more compelled and wishing she’d written about that rather than this book. But to be fair I have always been more partial to non-fiction unless it’s a literary ‘classic’ ala Wuthering Heights or the Secret Garden. Is this book a ‘classic’? Um…no. It’s not bad…but it’s kind of a let down. I wish she’d developed some characters more and played down others. But I recognize the difficulty she must’ve faced writing characters she could not relate too.

I loved the relationship the author built between Aibileen and the little girl Mae Mobeley, my favorite part of the book and an important one as no child is ever born racist, it’s taught–many times harshly. And my favorite parts of the book had Mae in them. When she starts school her teacher Miss. Taylor shames her to no end because she drew a black child as something that makes her happy. Aibileen had been teaching her that there is ‘no color’, we are all the same and can love each other as such. While Mae is playing with her little brother she makes her little brother be the ‘black child’ and tells him no matter what she does he has to sit there and take it or he’ll go to ‘jail’ and then she proceeds to throw dolls at him, pour crayons on him then tells him lets play back of the bus like Rosa Parks etc…Mae’s father watches this and asks her who taught her this and she lies and says it was her teacher, when in fact it was Aibileen that’d been telling her stories…’secret’ stories.

Surprisingly the ending was not what I was expecting which is good, but I’m not sure I liked it either…I dunno, it was both sad and hopeful I suppose.

So this past weekend I got to attempt to get in touch with my inner entomologist…sort of. I went up to the AFRIMS entomology facility in the North at Kamphaeng Phet. Their main purpose is to wait for patient blood samples collected from the villages to come back positive for Dengue virus then they mobilize and head out to the village. They enroll and collected mosquitoes from houses within a 200 m radius of the index house that has the patient. They use backpack aspirators to collect the mosquitoes record information about the house and give it a unique ID. Back at the lab, mosquitoes are sorted into their respective species, Ae. aegypti females being of most interest, and dissected as we are only interested in their head and thorax for Dengue PCR/isolation. The goal being cluster studies of Dengue in patients and mosquitoes and to track movement from village to village. Then I come in with my all-powerful, mostly open source programs and attempt to correlate/track the genetics vs. epidemiology of host/vector.

As the title suggests I walked into the office this morning to two computers…both shut off. Now no one touches my desk especially when I have analysis running and we had a huge storm last night with lightening and wind and although Bangkok is a ‘1st’ world entity of itself some days the fact of the matter is, I live in a 3rd world country that is 98% agriculture. The result?

So in the world of molecular evolution one of the cu-de-gras-de-analysis programs would have to be BEAST. A power-packed bayesian analysis software that makes phylogenetic trees, calculates the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) and substitution rates, geographic partitioning, can handle copious amounts of data and pretty much squeezes blood from a turnip…walks on water…heals your mother, in short, it’s cool.

Sound awesome? It is. For a more technical in depth discussion and introduction to BEAST software I suggest reading the Wiki and attacking the tutorials with full force as well as reading some awesome books on phylogenetic inference such as The Phylogenetic Handbook. If you are super impatient and channeling your inner terrible twos about phylogenetic analysis then read Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy. It has a nice introduction and literal button for button how tos on different software packages including Bayesian ones. When you’ve finished your tantrum, enter the adult world and read Felsenstein or the phylogenetic handbook mentioned above. Now that you’ve been introduced to phylogenetic inference and genetic analysis with forays into evolution over time…jump into BEAST. Although the BEAST wiki and manual are still navigate-able without that background but you’ll be scratching your head a bit and heading to google for answers.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Can or Can’t”, 01/02/12, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So about the only thing I have been able to take away from this entry was the first sentence where she quotes her son’s favorite coaching quotes. “Whether you can or you can’t, you are probably right.” A quick internet showed me that this quote is from Henry Ford. She then proceeds to illustrate the point of believing you can do something even if its hard by using a cheerleading competition her son was participating in.

Devotional Blog:

The Word of God, 03/02/2012, 2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. ~2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

So I figured I should start chipping away at all the dog eared pages in this devotional book that I’ve been neglecting. I keep up on my daily reading but somedays I have enough time to blog and other days I don’t so they end up dog eared for future contemplation. Oddly enough this entry is about ‘bearing each others burdens’ rather than the word of God but when I read it, I realized I needed to address the ‘word of God’ topic first. I’ll explain…

From the devotional: “We all need to make time for Bible study. David writes in Psalm 73:26, ‘My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.’ (NIV)…Only as I make God’s Word a priority do I have anything to give. A Bible study should be a refuge, a safe harbor.”

A week or so ago in a conversation with friends I stated that scripture will never ‘convince’ me of whether someone is ‘right or wrong’. No one will ever ‘win’ an argument with me only using scripture. I think I’ve even stated in previous blogs that I refuse to go tit for tat on Bible verses for various reasons aside from its just plain tedious and I feel its more ‘posturing your verse memorization prowess’, rather than attempting to make a valid point. For the first time now, I am wondering why that is. I am a Christian after all and I believe in God’s word, why isn’t God’s divinely inspired word enough to convince me of someone’s argument?

Devotional Blog: “Family and Finance”, 11/4/2011; 1 Timothy 5:3-4, 8, 16

I took the title above from a quote by Author Unknown: “I am having an out of money experience”. It amused me.

So surprise, surprise this is yet another devotional entry in the book that I see differently than the author perhaps. Family, finances and lending money are huge topics. We all know that one of the biggest problems that can arise in a marriage can be over money or lack of it rather. I’ve seen money tear people and apart sometimes because of greed sometimes because of the emotions attached to the money that may have nothing to do with the money itself.

In the book, Pam talks about the duality of lending money to family that is discussed in the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 12:14 it states “…After all, children should not have to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.” and then in 1 Timothy 5:8 it states: “But those who won’t care for their own relatives, especially those living in the same household have denied what we believe. Such people are worse than unbelievers.” She then goes on to ask what should our responsibility be in terms of using our money to care for relatives/family? Her answer: “When in doubt, do like God recommends: ‘speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice (Proverbs 31:9). He doesn’t allow people to continue in unhealthy patterns, but if they have tried their best and fall short, his long arm of love reaches out.”

I agree with her statements and the verses she used in some respects.

Devotional Blog: “Family and Finance”, 11/4/2011; 1 Timothy 5:3-4, 8, 16

I took the title above from a quote by Author Unknown: “I am having an out of money experience”. It amused me.

So surprise, surprise this is yet another devotional entry in the book that I see differently than the author perhaps. Family, finances and lending money are huge topics. We all know that one of the biggest problems that can arise in a marriage can be over money or lack of it rather. I’ve seen money tear people and apart sometimes because of greed sometimes because of the emotions attached to the money that may have nothing to do with the money itself.

In the book, Pam talks about the duality of lending money to family that is discussed in the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 12:14 it states “…After all, children should not have to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.” and then in 1 Timothy 5:8 it states: “But those who won’t care for their own relatives, especially those living in the same household have denied what we believe. Such people are worse than unbelievers.” She then goes on to ask what should our responsibility be in terms of using our money to care for relatives/family? Her answer: “When in doubt, do like God recommends: ‘speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice (Proverbs 31:9). He doesn’t allow people to continue in unhealthy patterns, but if they have tried their best and fall short, his long arm of love reaches out.”

I agree with her statements and the verses she used in some respects.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

So after combing the myspace, facebook and personal archives I have compiled everything now onto this site with handy category tags listed to the right. If you are interested in a particular topic click a tag and you are off! So if posts are entitled and have a repost note and date you know its my invocations from a previous life…most likely my Ph.D. life; which you may find highly amusing or slightly depressing.

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

Can people change? When I ask this question I am surprised by the variation in responses I get. I suppose I assumed the general consensus would be “sure, yes”. After all we are all humans with the power of choice and ability to adapt and be flexible in our existence and relationships with others. I don’t think anyone doubts it’s ‘possible’ for someone to change, when I get more specific with the question is when they ‘waffle’.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

I wrote this in high school as an English project and figured I would post it as my tribute to Edgar Allen Poe on his birthday, which is today January 19th. It’s a parody of his poem ‘The Raven’. Now it was an English project so I had to copy the meter and style and everything…looking back I think it was a pretty decent job. That and well…I was an odd teenager, I still am odd…just not a teenager anymore.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog: 12/21/11, Topic: “Workers at Home”, Titus 2: 3-5 I’ve heard this verse used to justify a woman’s calling to ‘stay at ‘ and raise a family as opposed to being independent and working. I’m not going to say much about this books devotional entry except that I like how the author deals with this and I agree with what she says…amazing given I rarely agree with what she has to say.

So I’ve gotten a lot of requests to know how my Saturday, August 21st went…

We’d decided to go zip lining with my Thai friend Fon and another friend from frisbee AnnaRae. It was actually a pretty perfect day to head out, cloudy but not raining which was amazing considering it’s been raining pretty constantly here. It was fairly cool even…well as cool as Bangkok, Thailand can get (86 degrees and 88% humidity). We headed north-east to ChonBuri to a tour called Fly with the Gibbons and after a brief introduction and getting geared up we were off on a 24 platform romp through the jungle…

Our guide couldn’t say my name, Mel, so I became Miaw (Cat in Thai) and everytime I came to the platform prior to sailing off it, he felt the need to meow several times. Around platform 19 we asked if I was married, I said no, he asked it I had a boyfriend…I said you see the 6’5 man that you just sent off to the next platform? Him. He called Tyghe Yak (but don’t pronounce the ‘k’ really and say it with emphasis on the ‘a’ sound), it means giant apparently.  He then proceeded to ‘marry’ AnnaRae on the next platform where you could go two at a time. AnnaRae said she’d fly over there with him and he surmised that now it would mean they were married.

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Spending Time”, 12/27/2011, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

This entry encouraged us to log our time for one week to see where our ‘priorities and passions’ were in our lives.

So a week from Sunday to Saturday (7 days) has 168 hours in it. Of those 168, I was alseep 53.5 hours…an average of 7.6 hrs/day. Although Saturday skews that as I slept 11 hours on Saturday and and if I just look at the work week, I slept an average of 6.9 hours/day. Apparently on the weekends I like my sleep, not to mention as the week progressed I got worse at getting up on time. My alarm goes off at 6am, I managed to get up and go work Monday and Tues at 6:30am. Weds and Thurs that got later and I managed to get up and go to work at 7am…on Friday it was 730am. A lot of wake-up fail!

So 168 hours in a week minus 54.5 sleeping = 113.5 to account for waking hours…which we’ll soon find out isn’t an altogether true statement…doh!

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

A friend of mine forwarded this poem to me and I thought it was just really interesting and lovely, so I am sharing it here. I love poetry.

———————————————–

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Love and Riddles”, 12/6/2011, Song of Songs (Solomon) 2:1-17

So I’ll be jumping around a bit as I play catch up in my devotional blog ‘series’ out of this book. I’m combining two entries in this blog. So Song of Songs or Solomon as its called in some Bibles is quite the ‘lovers’ book. It’s very short, only 8 short chapters (about 4 Bible pages) and sits between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. I kept missing it when I was flipping through my Bible trying to find it. And the book is all about love and how to treat your lover. And how can you not think this books is about desire with verses like:

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth–for your love is more delightful than wine. 1:13 My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.  1:16 My love is mine and I am his… 7:9-12 May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. I belong to my lover and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside let us spend the night in the villages. Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened,and if the pomegrantes are in bloom–there I will give you my love.

In spite of the lack of explicitly religious content, Song of Songs can also be interpreted as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel, or for Christians, Christ and the Church or Christ and the human soul (Cited from Wikipedia).

What struck me was the sincere passion these two characters within this book had for each other. Like all good internet junkies I googled “love”…

So another blog on the wedding planning is sorely overdue, I thought I would regale you with the tale of finding a dress. Now I haven’t ‘found’ the dress persay but the adventure of finding one has been interesting to say the least.

I always thought I’d be more excited about finding shoes for the wedding than my actual dress.

Yes I just linked getting married with Darth Vader, I’m officially an un-recoverable geek; I’ll explain further down…

So I got engaged last August 2010 on the top of a building in Thailand, interested? read here. Amidst the flurry of people who were happy for me and those who were substantially peeved they didn’t hear from me personally but rather through facebook–doh!–even when you think you are ‘winning’ by using social networking, you’re not; accept that now. Anyway, I started mulling the “oh crap, now I’ve actually got to plan this…from Thailand…in a state I don’t live in, where I have no family–although I do have a couple friends.” But, never fear…I have a year or more to do it. If you didn’t know I live in Thailand…read here….and here…and here…and if you’ve decided you’d like to be my stalker check here. Yes I actually live and work in Thailand.

I never dressed up as a bride as a child…not once. I liked to get white dresses dirty. All through elementary, junior high and high school, not once did I ever give weight to the thought of getting married. My type also wasn’t exactly in ‘high demand’ either, so that might have had something to do with it. I went through phases of being too immature, too geeky or that girl who your friends with but the thought of anything more makes you heave ho-ho’s or twinkies or whatever the heck you had for lunch that day.

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Can or Can’t”, 01/02/12, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So about the only thing I have been able to take away from this entry was the first sentence where she quotes her son’s favorite coaching quotes. “Whether you can or you can’t, you are probably right.” A quick internet showed me that this quote is from Henry Ford. She then proceeds to illustrate the point of believing you can do something even if its hard by using a cheerleading competition her son was participating in.

So this past weekend Tyghe and I went to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon) for a frisbee tournament. The city itself is very different than Bangkok, it has more of a European flair/influence in the architecture of many buildings and baguettes on every corner. There are also millions of motorbikes…I think they outnumber cars. Attempting to cross the street was harrowing at first because the cars and bikes never really stop they simply just ‘magically’ part as you walk slow and steady across the street. As soon as you got used to that, walking around became easier. We stayed in Backpacker central which is equivalent to Khao San Road in Bangkok and it was interesting a lot of cool bars and cafes. I had high hopes of doing some exploring there but unfortunately we ran out of time…can only take so much time off work as it is. But we were there to play some frisbee and did we ever!

So here’s a snapshot of the trip/tournament from the point of view of a relative ‘newcomer’ to the frisbee world on her first out of country (I live in Thailand) hat tournament…

FIRST and foremost it was anonymous info gathering, no way to link anyone to anything here–anon posts were used. AND I have the authors permission and enthusiastic support in fact to share this information from his paper/poster.

The Authors: JA Fries (Computer Science Graduate Student), TY Ho (Comp Sci graduate student), PM Polgreen (his boss and assistant prof at Univ of Iowa), AM Serge.

I decided to repost this from ProMed because I thought it was interesting…who comes up with these disease names!? When I saw it in my inbox of course I had visions of cult activities involving longan fruit in the jungles of Vietnam…yes I have an active imagination.

Witch’s broom gets its name from a deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest. [Source]

A quick shout out to ProMed which is a great resource for hearing about disease outbreaks of known or unknown etiology around the world…check it out!

But really, Longan fruit is quite prevalent in Thailand as well and it is quite delicious. So, fantastical imagination aside, see below, feel free to read the culti-c disease activities plaguing Longan in Vietnam!

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So if you read any number of reviews on this book, say in Goodreads for Amazon it seems readers have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book. The vast majority–of those at least writing reviews loved it. I myself grew hot and cold during the course of reading it. It deals with such an interesting subject and important awful time in history and it felt to me like it was written to go straight to movie–tragic and ‘feel good’ all at the same time, great movie fodder. But does that necessarily make good fiction? And low and behold where is this book now? In movies! I’ll be interested to see how they interpret the book in the movie. I have a rule of reading books before I see them in the movies as much as I can…and I’m not one of those people where the movie has to have every last exhaustive detail from the book for it to be ‘good’. I’m always interested in adaptations. And I think Kathryn Stockett makes a good point in her quote:

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”

To say the least, its a little discussed area of history…how ‘the maid’ feels. I found myself more excited about her blurb at the end about her physical experiences growing up in the 60’s in Mississippi and I found myself more compelled and wishing she’d written about that rather than this book. But to be fair I have always been more partial to non-fiction unless it’s a literary ‘classic’ ala Wuthering Heights or the Secret Garden. Is this book a ‘classic’? Um…no. It’s not bad…but it’s kind of a let down. I wish she’d developed some characters more and played down others. But I recognize the difficulty she must’ve faced writing characters she could not relate too.

I loved the relationship the author built between Aibileen and the little girl Mae Mobeley, my favorite part of the book and an important one as no child is ever born racist, it’s taught–many times harshly. And my favorite parts of the book had Mae in them. When she starts school her teacher Miss. Taylor shames her to no end because she drew a black child as something that makes her happy. Aibileen had been teaching her that there is ‘no color’, we are all the same and can love each other as such. While Mae is playing with her little brother she makes her little brother be the ‘black child’ and tells him no matter what she does he has to sit there and take it or he’ll go to ‘jail’ and then she proceeds to throw dolls at him, pour crayons on him then tells him lets play back of the bus like Rosa Parks etc…Mae’s father watches this and asks her who taught her this and she lies and says it was her teacher, when in fact it was Aibileen that’d been telling her stories…’secret’ stories.

Surprisingly the ending was not what I was expecting which is good, but I’m not sure I liked it either…I dunno, it was both sad and hopeful I suppose.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Devotional Blog: “Signpost”, 10/24/2011, Psalm 71:14-17 In this entry entitled “Signpost” she discusses the meaning of names using her son’s as an example. She discusses how her son has grown to live up to his name and suggests that even before our parents knew us, God did. That a parent’s chosen name for their child no matter how it comes about foreshadows who that child is or will be. My name?

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

Devotional Blog:

The Word of God, 03/02/2012, 2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. ~2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

So I figured I should start chipping away at all the dog eared pages in this devotional book that I’ve been neglecting. I keep up on my daily reading but somedays I have enough time to blog and other days I don’t so they end up dog eared for future contemplation. Oddly enough this entry is about ‘bearing each others burdens’ rather than the word of God but when I read it, I realized I needed to address the ‘word of God’ topic first. I’ll explain…

From the devotional: “We all need to make time for Bible study. David writes in Psalm 73:26, ‘My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.’ (NIV)…Only as I make God’s Word a priority do I have anything to give. A Bible study should be a refuge, a safe harbor.”

A week or so ago in a conversation with friends I stated that scripture will never ‘convince’ me of whether someone is ‘right or wrong’. No one will ever ‘win’ an argument with me only using scripture. I think I’ve even stated in previous blogs that I refuse to go tit for tat on Bible verses for various reasons aside from its just plain tedious and I feel its more ‘posturing your verse memorization prowess’, rather than attempting to make a valid point. For the first time now, I am wondering why that is. I am a Christian after all and I believe in God’s word, why isn’t God’s divinely inspired word enough to convince me of someone’s argument?

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

So in a random turn of events I just decided to check this blog…today is July 15, 2013. My last entry was July 16, 2012. Coincidence?

I find it humorous that this blog has taken the form of most of my journals (diaries) where I have fits where I write everyday and periods of no activity until one day I randomly decide to write again. I don’t particularly advertise this blog aside from the facebook linking for family and friends that might be interested and I think you can find it via google searching. But this white screen that I type into is more for reflection than anything else, if others derive benefit from that, great.

Perhaps it’s providence that I’ve decided to check my blog. My last entry was about ‘dreams’ and where I was at. Since then life has been eventful but I still struggle with what will make me happy in my work…similar musings as to my last entry. Since then, I’ve gotten married, been quite productive if not incredibly frustrated at work, been back to Thailand to teach a workshop, been to Europe to attend a workshop, started a teaching blog for things I learn at workshops, started online newsletters for my field so others can tap into what I find on the internet, finished up a teaching fellowship, explored DC during free time… Life is clipping along as it should…

Somethings I’ve figured out in the past year:

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

So another blog on the wedding planning is sorely overdue, I thought I would regale you with the tale of finding a dress. Now I haven’t ‘found’ the dress persay but the adventure of finding one has been interesting to say the least.

I always thought I’d be more excited about finding shoes for the wedding than my actual dress.

I wrote this in high school as an English project and figured I would post it as my tribute to Edgar Allen Poe on his birthday, which is today January 19th. It’s a parody of his poem ‘The Raven’. Now it was an English project so I had to copy the meter and style and everything…looking back I think it was a pretty decent job. That and well…I was an odd teenager, I still am odd…just not a teenager anymore.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

A Dream within a Dream

By: Edgar Allen Poe

Take this kiss upon thy brow!

And in parting from you now,

This much let me avow-

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night or in a day,

In a vision, or in none

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Embarrassed”, 11/15/2011, Proverbs 22:4-16 So I haven’t blogged about the devotions I’ve been reading and yes, I have been reading them because so far they’ve been records on repeat, dealing with issues already discussed in the book…and I’ve only been reading since August. So I’m wondering at this point how many topics she’s going to deal with multiple times. I finally came across some more original ones, like yesterday’s.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Can or Can’t”, 01/02/12, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So about the only thing I have been able to take away from this entry was the first sentence where she quotes her son’s favorite coaching quotes. “Whether you can or you can’t, you are probably right.” A quick internet showed me that this quote is from Henry Ford. She then proceeds to illustrate the point of believing you can do something even if its hard by using a cheerleading competition her son was participating in.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

Devotional Blog: “Get me out of here”, 10/29/2011; Matthew 6:9-15.

Evil. This blog is going to be a small rant…fyi.

In the entry Pam (the author) talks about Adam and Eve and how Eve was tempted by the snake (Satan) to eat of the tree (the ‘infamous’ apple) of the knowledge of good and evil using lies and ‘half’ truths.

“Our flesh wants fulfillment; then our eyes want what we see; then we want something to brag about. Eve fell for the same three things. It feels so good: Her flesh wanted the fruit. It looks so good: Her eyes saw the delicious-looking fruit, and she wanted it. It sounds so good: Then she fells for the big one: ‘You can be like God’. Now that would be something brag about, but it was all lies.”

She paints Eve to be like this apple harlot! I don’t think the Bible talks of Eve’s LUST for the apple or desire to BRAG about her apple exploits. I think there’s a difference between saying the apple looked good to eat and lust. Should she have eaten it, no of course not…but the way the author has described it I have visions of Eve rolling around in a bed of apples…it’s just weird.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Take Responsibility”, 01/25/2012, Romans 13:1-7, Galatians 6:5, 2 Corinthians 5:10

It’s her fault. It’s his fault. It’s their fault. The dog did it…

Kid’s Excuses:

1. One child to another: Whenever you tell a big fat lie to get away with breaking an ornament, vase etc.  Tell your mum, dad etc. that it threw itself off of the mantle piece, table etc and then add in that you always believed that there was something out there!
2. Mom:  Where’s your report card?  You:  Um, mommy I’m really sorry and everything.  But I didn’t do it or anything but you know how I walk to school?  Well, the bell rang and I went to my locker to put it in my backpack and some very mean kids took it and started playing monkey in the middle then someone yelled that there was a big fight so the kids dropped it and ran outside.  Then, I was walking & was looking at it and a dog chased me and got it and chewed it up!  Sorry!
3. I do what the cheerios tell me.
4. When I was little, I cut up my sheets, my excuse was, “Jesus did it!”****
5. The clowns made me do it…I sware!

Excuses given to police officers:

1. One night many years ago I was on patrol and observed a vehicle blow through a red light at a major intersection. There had been plenty of time to stop, yet the vehicle had not even slowed down. I stopped the car and asked the young female driver why she had done that. The girl told me she had just had her brakes repaired, it had been very expensive, and she DIDN’T WANT TO WEAR THEM DOWN! Usually I give people a pass if I haven’t heard their excuse before, but in this case she got the ticket. …………………………………. Submitted by… Dave Hoffman, Sergeant, Naperville IL PD

2. I stopped a car in a rural area of our county for going 80 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. The driver explained that he had a bee flying around his head so he sped up to 80, hoping that the bee couldn’t fly that fast and would not be able to fly out of the back seat area to get at him…..Submitted by…Gary Lenon, Mecosta County Sheriff Department, Michigan.

Amazing what we say to avoid blame not only as children but as adults as well.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

So while I was during Christmas I encountered many friends I have had since moving to the islands when I was 11 (10? 11?–ah doesn’t matter)…and I saw almost all of them between Oahu and Maui and talked to the rest via phone.  And between the people I know from home, all the friends I met and have through school and family–I have realized there are really two types of people. Those who live and those who exist. Not that one is particularly better than the other, just depends on the person.

Devotional Blog: 6/14/2012: “When good isn’t good enough” Romans 8:28 This isn’t out of the book I am going through which coincidentally arrived in the mail from Thailand in our first round of boxes–this is one I am just going to write. If you’ve read my previous blogs in the devotion section or perhaps in my life section or such you’ll know how I was raised. In a faith that stresses undying, unwavering faith in God and that everything works toward his plan and purpose.

Devotional blog:

“You gotta have friends” and “where have you been walking?” 03/22/2012 and 03/23/2012, Psalm 119:45 and Proverbs 27:17

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

~Prov. 27:17

While there are quite a few entries in this book where I have agreed with her advice and position there are also those entries at odds with my sense of logic and spirit. Perhaps this is my lack of understanding…in fact, I guess it IS my lack of understanding. In this entry she encourages us to form friendships/relationships with those that build us up and help us make godly choices. Positive people who believe in you and want the best in you. Now none of this in principle do I disagree with. Absolutely, you want to be friends and have relationships with those that will be supportive and strengthen you. However, given this is a devotional and she mentions having friends that help you make godly choices and where to find them such as at Bible studies or support organizations etc. I am assuming she is encouraging us to have Christian friends and it sounds like this is supposed to be preferred exclusively. This isn’t first time I’ve encountered this type of argument…to only consort with those of your own faith lest you be tempted by the ‘dark side’ whatever it might be. I don’t understand why is it that I can supposedly only ‘learn’ from a Christian friend? I have Christian friends and non-Christian friends, why should I value the opinion or advice of one over the other? Though I may ultimately agree with one set of advice over the other, I still consider both equally.

More on this in a moment but I’d like to combine this with her previous entry about “Where have you been Walking?” In this entry she discusses how we need to be aware as Christians ‘where we walk’ in life and to be careful not to fall into ‘subtle’ steps away from the truth such as “spending more and more time with a persuasive friend who doesn’t acknowledge Christ or his principles; reading magazines that make me feel inferior about my body; listening to songs that glorify casual sex; or even walking to the beach instead of church on Sunday morning.” Again I have a lack of understanding here. Why is hanging out with non-Christian friends a ‘subtle step’ toward what is wrong? Why is walking to the beach instead of church on a Sunday, walking away from God? There are plenty people I know that walk to church three times a week and are far from God while other’s fellowship, pray and seek God in a park, on a beach, washing the dishes and I feel they have a stronger relationship.

My point? These entries suggest we have weak minds and little resolve. I don’t particularly like that.

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

Devotional Blog:

The Word of God, 03/02/2012, 2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. ~2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

So I figured I should start chipping away at all the dog eared pages in this devotional book that I’ve been neglecting. I keep up on my daily reading but somedays I have enough time to blog and other days I don’t so they end up dog eared for future contemplation. Oddly enough this entry is about ‘bearing each others burdens’ rather than the word of God but when I read it, I realized I needed to address the ‘word of God’ topic first. I’ll explain…

From the devotional: “We all need to make time for Bible study. David writes in Psalm 73:26, ‘My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.’ (NIV)…Only as I make God’s Word a priority do I have anything to give. A Bible study should be a refuge, a safe harbor.”

A week or so ago in a conversation with friends I stated that scripture will never ‘convince’ me of whether someone is ‘right or wrong’. No one will ever ‘win’ an argument with me only using scripture. I think I’ve even stated in previous blogs that I refuse to go tit for tat on Bible verses for various reasons aside from its just plain tedious and I feel its more ‘posturing your verse memorization prowess’, rather than attempting to make a valid point. For the first time now, I am wondering why that is. I am a Christian after all and I believe in God’s word, why isn’t God’s divinely inspired word enough to convince me of someone’s argument?

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Spending Time”, 12/27/2011, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

This entry encouraged us to log our time for one week to see where our ‘priorities and passions’ were in our lives.

So a week from Sunday to Saturday (7 days) has 168 hours in it. Of those 168, I was alseep 53.5 hours…an average of 7.6 hrs/day. Although Saturday skews that as I slept 11 hours on Saturday and and if I just look at the work week, I slept an average of 6.9 hours/day. Apparently on the weekends I like my sleep, not to mention as the week progressed I got worse at getting up on time. My alarm goes off at 6am, I managed to get up and go work Monday and Tues at 6:30am. Weds and Thurs that got later and I managed to get up and go to work at 7am…on Friday it was 730am. A lot of wake-up fail!

So 168 hours in a week minus 54.5 sleeping = 113.5 to account for waking hours…which we’ll soon find out isn’t an altogether true statement…doh!

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Confused?…go Back”, 01/24/2012, Jeremiah 24: 6-7

How does one ‘hear’ from God? This is a loaded topic for me…

“I will give them hearts that will recognize me as the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me wholeheartedly” -NIV, Jeremiah 24:7

 

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” -NIV, 1 Kings 19:12

 

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” -NIV, Rev 3:22

Confused? Always. I bumble my path routinely in an effort to ‘hear’ God and know what his plan and purpose for my life is. I say the prayers, I keep so still as to nearly faint from not breathing enough, I close my eyes and meditate during worship, think of things I’ve learned, listen to pastors and mentors more learned than me…

Majority of the time I think I must be on the wrong channel…cause all I ever get is static and I rarely know what exactly it is I am doing wrong.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

Ok after yesterdays sidetrack event of commenting on a blog I’d read entitled “I’m Christian unless you’re gay” (read it if you get a chance), now, back to the book…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Trust”, 11/27/2011, Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Ruth 3:5

In this section the author, Pam, goes into what it means to have a trusting relationship. She opens with something Ruth said in the Bible: “I will do whatever you say”–what guy wouldn’t want to hear that from a woman? Sorry guys, she was saying it to her mother-in-law. I find the concept of trust interesting in that I have some friends that are incredibly trusting and some that have some incredible walls built up…hell you need some seriously specialized climbing gear to get up the smooth face of their walls.

Then you inevitably ask the question ‘is it worth it?’ Which is terrible I know, they are your friend after all. But it is exceedingly frustrating to think you are making progress only to find yourself on a temporary ledge with your friend laughing at you from above…continually saying ‘you don’t know me, you can never know me’. At that point I’d just rather rappel down and call it a day. Of course self-discovery and self-trust is an ongoing process and I’m sure I’ve frustrated many a friend as well, even though I wouldn’t say I put up walls…I think rather its just a fundamental misunderstanding of personalities. You build an image of what you think someone is in your head and when that turns out to be untrue it throws you for a loop. Not because they misled you but because you built this image that wasn’t who they were inside. Its not a matter of ‘good or bad’, its just not who they were and you have to step back and decide if you are going to take the time to dispense with all your, perhaps years of, preconceived notions and really get to know the person for who they are. Sometimes we are able to do that, sometimes circumstances prevent that option.

I used to say I was very ‘guarded’ didn’t really trust anyone–but who am I kidding…its not who I am. At best I had phases of distrust that ended up evaporating as the event that triggered the distrust faded. Personally I’m a pretty open book, people don’t have to work too hard to read me. At first I was insulted because I thought of myself as a chameleon, I could put on whatever face was required and they’d never know ‘me’. So when people said  I was easy to read I was aghast…and here I thought I was this great actress. This was when it was ‘hip’ to be mysterious…ya, no, I’m not mysterious haha. I was in theater from 6th grade up through high school and some in college and didn’t get bad reviews. As an actress, ok I didn’t suck, but as a person–who am I kidding–I suck at hiding my feelings. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t stubborn. Which I know probably drove some of my friends and boyfriends and family insane, knowing something was dreadfully wrong but not being able to truly pry it out of me.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

So you’ve probably noticed by now that (1) I don’t always post every single devotional topic/entry from the book and (2) sometimes they are out of order. I am caught up to the current date in my reading but I choose only to post on those topics I come across that matter to me or that I actually have something to say about. Do you all really want to hear my thoughts on menopause??? Ya I didn’t think so…and it was two days of devotional time in the book. Aside from the fact I couldn’t relate remotely to what she was talking about, I didn’t really feel the need to expound on the subject. Nor do I feel the need to tell you all about when I got my first period. Fair enough? Plus some of her topics that she attributes to the various verses are just well meh or too gooey and I’ve quite frankly nothing to say about them. So with that…lets get on with the topic today.

Topic: “Pursing praise”, 10/8/2011; Proverbs 7:13-27

In this section the idea of ‘pursuing praise and accolades’ is discussed. How some of us are so hungry for recognition we strive for it, we live for the ‘kudos’ of other people and she talks about how spiritually unhealthy that is. Ultimately she states that the only kudos we should look for are from God by living our lives to please him and that what other people say to us shouldn’t matter. Easier said than done is what I was thinking. No one likes to ‘suck’.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Breaking patterns of trauma, 9/15/11, Isaiah 57: 12-14

This entry in the book was ‘interesting’ and amounted to saying ‘get over yourself’ at the end or you are going to seriously $#@! up your kids. The simplicity in which she treats this topic bothered me a little. Now, I agree I just ‘summed’ up the topic above in one sentence but her approach and link to the verse was unclear to me until the end and I still was like…does this make sense in light of her ‘verse of the day’….so I dissected it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Rights and Responsibility, 9/14/11, Colossians 4:2-6

So this was a discussion of role models and if by becoming  role model you give up your ‘rights’ to do certain things…ala movie or music stars having fits, getting into drugs or whatnot. Granted getting into drugs isn’t a ‘right’ for anyone let alone the famous but apparently it’s all the worse because those who are famous become role models whether they like it or not. It reminds me of the quote from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”; which surprisingly enough was not originally coined by Spiderman comics but rather Thomas Francis Gilroy in 1892, it has also been attributed to Voltaire (Voltaire. Jean, Adrien. Beuchot, Quentin and Miger, Pierre, Auguste. “Œuvres de Voltaire, Volume 48”. Lefèvre, 1832). Whether history or marvel comic the statement rings true.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

Disclaimer: The devotion section of this blog is merely my attempt to seek out understanding of what I believe, why I believe and the practical application thereof. I am by no means a ‘perfect’ ‘holy’ ‘religious’ person as commonly evidenced by my previous blogs–but then again, no one–absolutely no one is. But I do have an unabashed faith in God and identify as a Christian. Everyone seeks ‘enlightenment’ their own way depending on their experiences in life and their faith or lack thereof. Agree, disagree–my views are just that…my views and contemplations. Sometimes it helps to write them down.

I’ve never been good at devotions. I grew up in a Christian , first church I went to was Calvary Christian in Costa Mesa, California…I want to say I also went to school there? It was a really long time ago…met my first best friend in school there in pre-school/kindergarten. I recently reconnected with her on facebook after 26 years of silence between us when my family moved.

My younger sister was always amazing at devotions, wrote in her journal diligently always talking to God (praying). That was never ‘me’. I loved books but devotional books were also SO dry, or way to ‘candy-coated’ religious fluff for me to stomach. In my pre-teens I attempted to read the entire Bible in a year–lasted 3 weeks-ish. I was a rather odd pre-teen…I had a rather morbid fascination and read about the Holocaust more than my devotions or the Bible.

So my mom bought me a book “Devotions for Women on The Go” by Stephen Arterburn and Pam Farrel and I’ve started going through it. Now granted I’ve only read like 8 of them and to be honest its a little ‘sunshine out the @$$’ for me, but I will persevere because despite that it is succeeding somewhat in making me think about my own life.

The book is dated, one page of ‘devotion’ per day and I started Sept. 3, 2011, my goal is to get through a year of this and see what happens…if anything, and to generally muse about my faith in comparison to ‘whats out there’ and how others of my belief system and other belief systems see the topics/values covered. This first entry will be long as I play catch up over the last several days. So this’ll end up a walk through my own faith as well I suppose…who knows, lets see shall we?

William Borden was born into great wealth and attended Yale in 1905, but if you do a search on William Borden on the internet you won’t find great business dealings or a discovery of a new drug…he died at 25.  And to many his life was a great waste.

We learn we are lovable or unlovable from other people…

Book: Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

“My friend Kurt used to say finding a wife is a percentage game. He said you have to have two or three relationships going at once, never letting the one girl know about the others…Kurt believed you had to date about twenty girls before you found the one your were going to marry. He just believed it was easier to date them all at once. Kurt ended up marrying a girl from Dallas, everybody says he married her for her money. He is very happy…”

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

Devotional Blog: 12/21/11, Topic: “Workers at Home”, Titus 2: 3-5 I’ve heard this verse used to justify a woman’s calling to ‘stay at ‘ and raise a family as opposed to being independent and working. I’m not going to say much about this books devotional entry except that I like how the author deals with this and I agree with what she says…amazing given I rarely agree with what she has to say.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Home Base”, 12/12/2011, 1 Chronicles 16:43 NIV

So while the devotional entry gave me the idea of this blog…it’s actually got nothing to do with what she wrote in the book and I am citing a different verse. But I have taken her topic title of Home Base because it inspired what I will write about.

“Then all the people left, each for their own , and David returned home to bless his family.”  ~1 Chronicles 16:43 NIV

Since leaving Hawaii for college I always get the question of “so when are you going home next?” Where are you from? Where is home for you? Everytime I get asked this question it prompts me to ponder about ‘what IS home’ exactly. For me, home has always been where my folks are which over the years has changed locations many times. When we are in school we never think to call our college towns ‘home’–I certainly wouldn’t call Parkland, WA (near Tacoma) home–blech! When I moved to Bozeman, MT at first home was Hawaii…”Are you going home for the holidays?”–“Yes, I am going home.” That was years 1, 2 and 3. Around year 4 and in later years in MT I started noticing a change…”Are you going back to Hawaii for Christmas?”…”Yes, I am going back to spend Christmas with my folks.” Had I decided that Hawaii was no longer my home?

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Ok after yesterdays sidetrack event of commenting on a blog I’d read entitled “I’m Christian unless you’re gay” (read it if you get a chance), now, back to the book…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Trust”, 11/27/2011, Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Ruth 3:5

In this section the author, Pam, goes into what it means to have a trusting relationship. She opens with something Ruth said in the Bible: “I will do whatever you say”–what guy wouldn’t want to hear that from a woman? Sorry guys, she was saying it to her mother-in-law. I find the concept of trust interesting in that I have some friends that are incredibly trusting and some that have some incredible walls built up…hell you need some seriously specialized climbing gear to get up the smooth face of their walls.

Then you inevitably ask the question ‘is it worth it?’ Which is terrible I know, they are your friend after all. But it is exceedingly frustrating to think you are making progress only to find yourself on a temporary ledge with your friend laughing at you from above…continually saying ‘you don’t know me, you can never know me’. At that point I’d just rather rappel down and call it a day. Of course self-discovery and self-trust is an ongoing process and I’m sure I’ve frustrated many a friend as well, even though I wouldn’t say I put up walls…I think rather its just a fundamental misunderstanding of personalities. You build an image of what you think someone is in your head and when that turns out to be untrue it throws you for a loop. Not because they misled you but because you built this image that wasn’t who they were inside. Its not a matter of ‘good or bad’, its just not who they were and you have to step back and decide if you are going to take the time to dispense with all your, perhaps years of, preconceived notions and really get to know the person for who they are. Sometimes we are able to do that, sometimes circumstances prevent that option.

I used to say I was very ‘guarded’ didn’t really trust anyone–but who am I kidding…its not who I am. At best I had phases of distrust that ended up evaporating as the event that triggered the distrust faded. Personally I’m a pretty open book, people don’t have to work too hard to read me. At first I was insulted because I thought of myself as a chameleon, I could put on whatever face was required and they’d never know ‘me’. So when people said  I was easy to read I was aghast…and here I thought I was this great actress. This was when it was ‘hip’ to be mysterious…ya, no, I’m not mysterious haha. I was in theater from 6th grade up through high school and some in college and didn’t get bad reviews. As an actress, ok I didn’t suck, but as a person–who am I kidding–I suck at hiding my feelings. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t stubborn. Which I know probably drove some of my friends and boyfriends and family insane, knowing something was dreadfully wrong but not being able to truly pry it out of me.

Devotional Blog: “Family and Finance”, 11/4/2011; 1 Timothy 5:3-4, 8, 16

I took the title above from a quote by Author Unknown: “I am having an out of money experience”. It amused me.

So surprise, surprise this is yet another devotional entry in the book that I see differently than the author perhaps. Family, finances and lending money are huge topics. We all know that one of the biggest problems that can arise in a marriage can be over money or lack of it rather. I’ve seen money tear people and apart sometimes because of greed sometimes because of the emotions attached to the money that may have nothing to do with the money itself.

In the book, Pam talks about the duality of lending money to family that is discussed in the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 12:14 it states “…After all, children should not have to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.” and then in 1 Timothy 5:8 it states: “But those who won’t care for their own relatives, especially those living in the same household have denied what we believe. Such people are worse than unbelievers.” She then goes on to ask what should our responsibility be in terms of using our money to care for relatives/family? Her answer: “When in doubt, do like God recommends: ‘speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice (Proverbs 31:9). He doesn’t allow people to continue in unhealthy patterns, but if they have tried their best and fall short, his long arm of love reaches out.”

I agree with her statements and the verses she used in some respects.

So I’ve gotten a few curious emails as to why only on this blog do I preface it with ‘Devotional Blog’. To answer: there are people who don’t really want to read about thoughts pertaining to faith, the Bible, religion in general so I’ve prefaced this blog so that those who want to skip it can do so easily without having to read it. Also on the right hand side of my blog are links by category topic…so those that want to read about specific topics can do so without having to sort through all the blogs on the front page.

OK, moving on…the following has stemmed from a conversation with a friend about love, grudges and forgiveness.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Forgiveness”, 10/7/11; 1 Peter 4:1-8

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins” -1 Peter 4:8 (NIV)

Who hasn’t been pissed at someone else? A friend, a relative, an immediate family member, the random Thai person that walks .25 miles/hr 3 people abreast blocking your ability to go around them and completely oblivious to your attempts to politely get through them…With friends usually the solution is fairly simple, you get mad at each other, you yell or heatedly talk through it and come to a resolution which hopefully keeps your friendship intact and usually does. Friends usually have a wide flexibility in pissing each other off because of how long you may have known them and the extenuating circumstances of the fight. You are usually willing to give them a voice to explain themselves before writing them off…usually. The same goes with family, or should go with family. There are grudges in my family that have withstood the test of time though–a few going on a a decade plus! Its amazing sometimes to realize how deep a persons anger or hurt goes and often times they don’t voice these problems face to face, leading to decades of silence each party believing themselves justified in their anger and judgement over the other person. And I’m not saying they don’t have good reason, in their position I don’t know what I would do. But today’s passage has made me think more about my own ‘grudges’ and anger at those who’ve insulted me in the past or done hurtful things.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Devotional blog:

“You gotta have friends” and “where have you been walking?” 03/22/2012 and 03/23/2012, Psalm 119:45 and Proverbs 27:17

As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

~Prov. 27:17

While there are quite a few entries in this book where I have agreed with her advice and position there are also those entries at odds with my sense of logic and spirit. Perhaps this is my lack of understanding…in fact, I guess it IS my lack of understanding. In this entry she encourages us to form friendships/relationships with those that build us up and help us make godly choices. Positive people who believe in you and want the best in you. Now none of this in principle do I disagree with. Absolutely, you want to be friends and have relationships with those that will be supportive and strengthen you. However, given this is a devotional and she mentions having friends that help you make godly choices and where to find them such as at Bible studies or support organizations etc. I am assuming she is encouraging us to have Christian friends and it sounds like this is supposed to be preferred exclusively. This isn’t first time I’ve encountered this type of argument…to only consort with those of your own faith lest you be tempted by the ‘dark side’ whatever it might be. I don’t understand why is it that I can supposedly only ‘learn’ from a Christian friend? I have Christian friends and non-Christian friends, why should I value the opinion or advice of one over the other? Though I may ultimately agree with one set of advice over the other, I still consider both equally.

More on this in a moment but I’d like to combine this with her previous entry about “Where have you been Walking?” In this entry she discusses how we need to be aware as Christians ‘where we walk’ in life and to be careful not to fall into ‘subtle’ steps away from the truth such as “spending more and more time with a persuasive friend who doesn’t acknowledge Christ or his principles; reading magazines that make me feel inferior about my body; listening to songs that glorify casual sex; or even walking to the beach instead of church on Sunday morning.” Again I have a lack of understanding here. Why is hanging out with non-Christian friends a ‘subtle step’ toward what is wrong? Why is walking to the beach instead of church on a Sunday, walking away from God? There are plenty people I know that walk to church three times a week and are far from God while other’s fellowship, pray and seek God in a park, on a beach, washing the dishes and I feel they have a stronger relationship.

My point? These entries suggest we have weak minds and little resolve. I don’t particularly like that.

Can people change? When I ask this question I am surprised by the variation in responses I get. I suppose I assumed the general consensus would be “sure, yes”. After all we are all humans with the power of choice and ability to adapt and be flexible in our existence and relationships with others. I don’t think anyone doubts it’s ‘possible’ for someone to change, when I get more specific with the question is when they ‘waffle’.

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Love and Riddles”, 12/6/2011, Song of Songs (Solomon) 2:1-17

So I’ll be jumping around a bit as I play catch up in my devotional blog ‘series’ out of this book. I’m combining two entries in this blog. So Song of Songs or Solomon as its called in some Bibles is quite the ‘lovers’ book. It’s very short, only 8 short chapters (about 4 Bible pages) and sits between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. I kept missing it when I was flipping through my Bible trying to find it. And the book is all about love and how to treat your lover. And how can you not think this books is about desire with verses like:

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth–for your love is more delightful than wine. 1:13 My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.  1:16 My love is mine and I am his… 7:9-12 May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. I belong to my lover and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside let us spend the night in the villages. Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened,and if the pomegrantes are in bloom–there I will give you my love.

In spite of the lack of explicitly religious content, Song of Songs can also be interpreted as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel, or for Christians, Christ and the Church or Christ and the human soul (Cited from Wikipedia).

What struck me was the sincere passion these two characters within this book had for each other. Like all good internet junkies I googled “love”…

Ok after yesterdays sidetrack event of commenting on a blog I’d read entitled “I’m Christian unless you’re gay” (read it if you get a chance), now, back to the book…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Trust”, 11/27/2011, Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Ruth 3:5

In this section the author, Pam, goes into what it means to have a trusting relationship. She opens with something Ruth said in the Bible: “I will do whatever you say”–what guy wouldn’t want to hear that from a woman? Sorry guys, she was saying it to her mother-in-law. I find the concept of trust interesting in that I have some friends that are incredibly trusting and some that have some incredible walls built up…hell you need some seriously specialized climbing gear to get up the smooth face of their walls.

Then you inevitably ask the question ‘is it worth it?’ Which is terrible I know, they are your friend after all. But it is exceedingly frustrating to think you are making progress only to find yourself on a temporary ledge with your friend laughing at you from above…continually saying ‘you don’t know me, you can never know me’. At that point I’d just rather rappel down and call it a day. Of course self-discovery and self-trust is an ongoing process and I’m sure I’ve frustrated many a friend as well, even though I wouldn’t say I put up walls…I think rather its just a fundamental misunderstanding of personalities. You build an image of what you think someone is in your head and when that turns out to be untrue it throws you for a loop. Not because they misled you but because you built this image that wasn’t who they were inside. Its not a matter of ‘good or bad’, its just not who they were and you have to step back and decide if you are going to take the time to dispense with all your, perhaps years of, preconceived notions and really get to know the person for who they are. Sometimes we are able to do that, sometimes circumstances prevent that option.

I used to say I was very ‘guarded’ didn’t really trust anyone–but who am I kidding…its not who I am. At best I had phases of distrust that ended up evaporating as the event that triggered the distrust faded. Personally I’m a pretty open book, people don’t have to work too hard to read me. At first I was insulted because I thought of myself as a chameleon, I could put on whatever face was required and they’d never know ‘me’. So when people said  I was easy to read I was aghast…and here I thought I was this great actress. This was when it was ‘hip’ to be mysterious…ya, no, I’m not mysterious haha. I was in theater from 6th grade up through high school and some in college and didn’t get bad reviews. As an actress, ok I didn’t suck, but as a person–who am I kidding–I suck at hiding my feelings. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t stubborn. Which I know probably drove some of my friends and boyfriends and family insane, knowing something was dreadfully wrong but not being able to truly pry it out of me.

So this past weekend Tyghe and I went to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon) for a frisbee tournament. The city itself is very different than Bangkok, it has more of a European flair/influence in the architecture of many buildings and baguettes on every corner. There are also millions of motorbikes…I think they outnumber cars. Attempting to cross the street was harrowing at first because the cars and bikes never really stop they simply just ‘magically’ part as you walk slow and steady across the street. As soon as you got used to that, walking around became easier. We stayed in Backpacker central which is equivalent to Khao San Road in Bangkok and it was interesting a lot of cool bars and cafes. I had high hopes of doing some exploring there but unfortunately we ran out of time…can only take so much time off work as it is. But we were there to play some frisbee and did we ever!

So here’s a snapshot of the trip/tournament from the point of view of a relative ‘newcomer’ to the frisbee world on her first out of country (I live in Thailand) hat tournament…

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

It was my love and my treasure Short post…sentimental post. Over the past couple years I’ve neglected my love of Gaelic music. I got this love from my Mom who dabbled in learning Gaelic a bit. I remember singing along with some Gaelic songs trying to memorize what the lyrics mean while in high school, college and grad school–out of view of most people haha! My vocabulary is limited to what I learned through the music and I’m sure my pronunciation is pretty poor, but I’m slowly finding my passion for this music again.

So in the world of molecular evolution one of the cu-de-gras-de-analysis programs would have to be BEAST. A power-packed bayesian analysis software that makes phylogenetic trees, calculates the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) and substitution rates, geographic partitioning, can handle copious amounts of data and pretty much squeezes blood from a turnip…walks on water…heals your mother, in short, it’s cool.

Sound awesome? It is. For a more technical in depth discussion and introduction to BEAST software I suggest reading the Wiki and attacking the tutorials with full force as well as reading some awesome books on phylogenetic inference such as The Phylogenetic Handbook. If you are super impatient and channeling your inner terrible twos about phylogenetic analysis then read Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy. It has a nice introduction and literal button for button how tos on different software packages including Bayesian ones. When you’ve finished your tantrum, enter the adult world and read Felsenstein or the phylogenetic handbook mentioned above. Now that you’ve been introduced to phylogenetic inference and genetic analysis with forays into evolution over time…jump into BEAST. Although the BEAST wiki and manual are still navigate-able without that background but you’ll be scratching your head a bit and heading to google for answers.

So I’ve gotten a lot of requests to know how my Saturday, August 21st went…

We’d decided to go zip lining with my Thai friend Fon and another friend from frisbee AnnaRae. It was actually a pretty perfect day to head out, cloudy but not raining which was amazing considering it’s been raining pretty constantly here. It was fairly cool even…well as cool as Bangkok, Thailand can get (86 degrees and 88% humidity). We headed north-east to ChonBuri to a tour called Fly with the Gibbons and after a brief introduction and getting geared up we were off on a 24 platform romp through the jungle…

Our guide couldn’t say my name, Mel, so I became Miaw (Cat in Thai) and everytime I came to the platform prior to sailing off it, he felt the need to meow several times. Around platform 19 we asked if I was married, I said no, he asked it I had a boyfriend…I said you see the 6’5 man that you just sent off to the next platform? Him. He called Tyghe Yak (but don’t pronounce the ‘k’ really and say it with emphasis on the ‘a’ sound), it means giant apparently.  He then proceeded to ‘marry’ AnnaRae on the next platform where you could go two at a time. AnnaRae said she’d fly over there with him and he surmised that now it would mean they were married.

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Can or Can’t”, 01/02/12, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So about the only thing I have been able to take away from this entry was the first sentence where she quotes her son’s favorite coaching quotes. “Whether you can or you can’t, you are probably right.” A quick internet showed me that this quote is from Henry Ford. She then proceeds to illustrate the point of believing you can do something even if its hard by using a cheerleading competition her son was participating in.

Devotioanl Blog:

“Looking for love in all the wrong places”, “You Can”, “There is a Plan”; 6/23/2012, 6/22/2012, 3/12/2012; 1 Peter 4:8, Luke 13:12, Jeremiah 29:11

You ever hear the joke that you should listen to country songs backwards? Why? Because then they become exceedingly happier…you get your house back, your dog back, your woman back, your tires un-slashed and your guitar un-smashed.

I’ve noticed a trend in many entries of this book. In many examples of people’s lives that she uses…when it rains it doesn’t just pour–it’s a fricken hurricane and it’s not ‘waves of life’ that hit people, it’s a damn tsunami!

Devotional Blog:

“Lights Flashing”, 6/21/2012, 1 Corinthians 4:5

Ok, back to the book after quite the hiatus.

When the Lord comes, he will bring our deepest secrets to light and will reveal our private motives… ~1 Corinthians 4:5

Well now isn’t that a scary thought? How many secrets does one carry throughout life? How many thoughts do we think would we be ashamed of if someone were to actually crawl into our head and listen to. Thankfully people can’t crawl into each others heads and truly hear the thoughts that roll through them.

Funny thing is, growing up this verse made us wary of the ‘big’ secrets…infidelity, sex before marriage, stealing, physically hurting someone etc. Our pastors would often times use the image of a huge projector screen showing all our sins and evil thoughts to the world for all our family and friends to see. Oh the embarrassment! Oh the judgement! Oh the pain we would cause ourselves and other people with our hidden sins that haven’t been brought to light and forgiven. I used to live in fear as a kid, paranoia even that when I died God would put me on a stage and broadcast my entire ‘evil’ life of every little thing I’d ever done that wasn’t 100% ‘saintly’, down to beating the crap out of a stuffed animal because I was angry. Yes, as a child I occasionally beat the crap out of dolls and stuffed animals out of frustration. I ripped pages out of my journals and threw tantrums in my room out of sight and earshot of anyone. Much of my anger and frustration growing up I kept inside, in fact all of it I kept inside. And while these ‘tantrums’ and stuffed animal beatings seem harmless enough at first sight, my thoughts got darker as I grew up.

What about the little ‘secrets’ the thoughts no one hears about, the thoughts that will never be voiced but are nonetheless there… the dark thoughts.

Devotional Blog: 6/14/2012: “When good isn’t good enough” Romans 8:28 This isn’t out of the book I am going through which coincidentally arrived in the mail from Thailand in our first round of boxes–this is one I am just going to write. If you’ve read my previous blogs in the devotion section or perhaps in my life section or such you’ll know how I was raised. In a faith that stresses undying, unwavering faith in God and that everything works toward his plan and purpose.

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Confused?…go Back”, 01/24/2012, Jeremiah 24: 6-7

How does one ‘hear’ from God? This is a loaded topic for me…

“I will give them hearts that will recognize me as the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me wholeheartedly” -NIV, Jeremiah 24:7

 

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” -NIV, 1 Kings 19:12

 

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” -NIV, Rev 3:22

Confused? Always. I bumble my path routinely in an effort to ‘hear’ God and know what his plan and purpose for my life is. I say the prayers, I keep so still as to nearly faint from not breathing enough, I close my eyes and meditate during worship, think of things I’ve learned, listen to pastors and mentors more learned than me…

Majority of the time I think I must be on the wrong channel…cause all I ever get is static and I rarely know what exactly it is I am doing wrong.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

Devotional Blog: 12/21/11, Topic: “Workers at Home”, Titus 2: 3-5 I’ve heard this verse used to justify a woman’s calling to ‘stay at ‘ and raise a family as opposed to being independent and working. I’m not going to say much about this books devotional entry except that I like how the author deals with this and I agree with what she says…amazing given I rarely agree with what she has to say.

Unofficial Devotional Blog: (not in book, but I’m gonna write it anyway)

Topic: “love, judgement, right and wrong” (verses…many, see below)

Since I started this devotional ‘section’ to my blog I’ve talked about a lot of different topics introduced to me by this rather ‘fluffy’ devotional book that I’ve been making my way through. And I actually was going to write another entry based in that book but as I opened the link to start a new blog…all this came flowing out instead. For an introduction to how this all got started in all the ‘devotion’ stuff see the first blog about my attempt at keeping regular devotions and analyzing my faith. Topics ranged in this book from finding your ‘hidden sin (blog post)’, leadership and mentorship (blog 1, blog 2), family and finances (blog), wishing for a different life (blog), acceptance (blog), love and forgiveness (blog), relationships with non-believers (blog), trauma (blog), life purpose/being saved for something I wrote on the anniversary of ⁹⁄₁₁ (blog) and many of the things I’ve said, done or written have gotten me pegged throughout life as a ‘lukewarm Christian’.

I read a blog post entitled “I’m Christian unless you are Gay” written by a guy whose blog I follow because he has interesting things to say. Since it’s been written it’s gotten 74K plus facebook ‘likes’ and has been shared I’m sure countless times to ‘mixed’ reviews sometimes. I am one of those that shared this post on facebook and now I am sharing it here with my own take. I encourage you to read his post (linked above) in its entirety as well as some of the responses to the post both negative and positive. He’s caused quite the firestorm and some of the responses were very powerful.

After reading his post and all the responses…two quotes stuck with me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Not a Hint”, 11/19/2001, Ephesians 5: 3-7

The author has the uncanny ability to piss me off in some of these entries. Perhaps one page or less isn’t enough space for her to fully explain what she means by what she says. Or perhaps she intends to bother her readers and sound a bit high and mighty.  I’m not saying her choice of verses and topics aren’t good ones…though not all of them I can relate with, hence do not write about. I suppose I wish she was a little more encompasing in her topics. No I don’t want her to sugar coat ‘sin’ as she defines it but I’d like it if she didn’t freak out ‘new’ Christians who might pick up her book and think–holy ‘$%!@’ and question Christianitys sincerity. I’ll explain further.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mentor Me”, 11/16/2011, Proverbs 9:9-12

I don’t know how many times since starting my postdoc that I’ve desired minions. Cohorts in my pursuit of viral evolution and ecology. Kindred spirits clad in lab coats and laced with the smell of phenol chloroform. Ok…really I just need people to help me with lab work that I like doing but I have less and less time to do as analysis and writing alone consumes me sometimes. But in return I’d like to mentor.

I mentored a very motivated undergraduate student while in grad school and she turned out quite apt and successful so I figure I did something right…and I tried at all costs to minimize her interactions with my boss who also happened to be her academic mentor. He had the uncanny ability to make many women (including myself at times) who worked in his lab want to staple things to his head and leave in a hail of frustrated cuss words and gunfire.

I mentioned in my last post that many topics in this book seem to be on repeat and I realize I posted a blog earlier on ‘leadership’ but I think this is different…the idea of leadership and mentorship. Ideally they should go hand in hand and I aspire to that but many times they don’t. There are many leaders that are terrible mentors and mentors that if you put them in charge of something wouldn’t know left from right practically speaking–rather they are gurus of ‘sense’. They are often the ones that you want to quote a lot because they inspire you, even if practically speaking they may not get a whole lot done.

Leaders you follow, mentors you quote. And if you have someone that is both, then  you get the great leaders of our time. But they all had to start somewhere.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Embarrassed”, 11/15/2011, Proverbs 22:4-16 So I haven’t blogged about the devotions I’ve been reading and yes, I have been reading them because so far they’ve been records on repeat, dealing with issues already discussed in the book…and I’ve only been reading since August. So I’m wondering at this point how many topics she’s going to deal with multiple times. I finally came across some more original ones, like yesterday’s.

Devotional Blog: “Family and Finance”, 11/4/2011; 1 Timothy 5:3-4, 8, 16

I took the title above from a quote by Author Unknown: “I am having an out of money experience”. It amused me.

So surprise, surprise this is yet another devotional entry in the book that I see differently than the author perhaps. Family, finances and lending money are huge topics. We all know that one of the biggest problems that can arise in a marriage can be over money or lack of it rather. I’ve seen money tear people and apart sometimes because of greed sometimes because of the emotions attached to the money that may have nothing to do with the money itself.

In the book, Pam talks about the duality of lending money to family that is discussed in the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 12:14 it states “…After all, children should not have to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.” and then in 1 Timothy 5:8 it states: “But those who won’t care for their own relatives, especially those living in the same household have denied what we believe. Such people are worse than unbelievers.” She then goes on to ask what should our responsibility be in terms of using our money to care for relatives/family? Her answer: “When in doubt, do like God recommends: ‘speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice (Proverbs 31:9). He doesn’t allow people to continue in unhealthy patterns, but if they have tried their best and fall short, his long arm of love reaches out.”

I agree with her statements and the verses she used in some respects.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

So you’ve probably noticed by now that (1) I don’t always post every single devotional topic/entry from the book and (2) sometimes they are out of order. I am caught up to the current date in my reading but I choose only to post on those topics I come across that matter to me or that I actually have something to say about. Do you all really want to hear my thoughts on menopause??? Ya I didn’t think so…and it was two days of devotional time in the book. Aside from the fact I couldn’t relate remotely to what she was talking about, I didn’t really feel the need to expound on the subject. Nor do I feel the need to tell you all about when I got my first period. Fair enough? Plus some of her topics that she attributes to the various verses are just well meh or too gooey and I’ve quite frankly nothing to say about them. So with that…lets get on with the topic today.

Topic: “Pursing praise”, 10/8/2011; Proverbs 7:13-27

In this section the idea of ‘pursuing praise and accolades’ is discussed. How some of us are so hungry for recognition we strive for it, we live for the ‘kudos’ of other people and she talks about how spiritually unhealthy that is. Ultimately she states that the only kudos we should look for are from God by living our lives to please him and that what other people say to us shouldn’t matter. Easier said than done is what I was thinking. No one likes to ‘suck’.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Breaking patterns of trauma, 9/15/11, Isaiah 57: 12-14

This entry in the book was ‘interesting’ and amounted to saying ‘get over yourself’ at the end or you are going to seriously $#@! up your kids. The simplicity in which she treats this topic bothered me a little. Now, I agree I just ‘summed’ up the topic above in one sentence but her approach and link to the verse was unclear to me until the end and I still was like…does this make sense in light of her ‘verse of the day’….so I dissected it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Rights and Responsibility, 9/14/11, Colossians 4:2-6

So this was a discussion of role models and if by becoming  role model you give up your ‘rights’ to do certain things…ala movie or music stars having fits, getting into drugs or whatnot. Granted getting into drugs isn’t a ‘right’ for anyone let alone the famous but apparently it’s all the worse because those who are famous become role models whether they like it or not. It reminds me of the quote from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”; which surprisingly enough was not originally coined by Spiderman comics but rather Thomas Francis Gilroy in 1892, it has also been attributed to Voltaire (Voltaire. Jean, Adrien. Beuchot, Quentin and Miger, Pierre, Auguste. “Œuvres de Voltaire, Volume 48”. Lefèvre, 1832). Whether history or marvel comic the statement rings true.

Disclaimer: The devotion section of this blog is merely my attempt to seek out understanding of what I believe, why I believe and the practical application thereof. I am by no means a ‘perfect’ ‘holy’ ‘religious’ person as commonly evidenced by my previous blogs–but then again, no one–absolutely no one is. But I do have an unabashed faith in God and identify as a Christian. Everyone seeks ‘enlightenment’ their own way depending on their experiences in life and their faith or lack thereof. Agree, disagree–my views are just that…my views and contemplations. Sometimes it helps to write them down.

I’ve never been good at devotions. I grew up in a Christian , first church I went to was Calvary Christian in Costa Mesa, California…I want to say I also went to school there? It was a really long time ago…met my first best friend in school there in pre-school/kindergarten. I recently reconnected with her on facebook after 26 years of silence between us when my family moved.

My younger sister was always amazing at devotions, wrote in her journal diligently always talking to God (praying). That was never ‘me’. I loved books but devotional books were also SO dry, or way to ‘candy-coated’ religious fluff for me to stomach. In my pre-teens I attempted to read the entire Bible in a year–lasted 3 weeks-ish. I was a rather odd pre-teen…I had a rather morbid fascination and read about the Holocaust more than my devotions or the Bible.

So my mom bought me a book “Devotions for Women on The Go” by Stephen Arterburn and Pam Farrel and I’ve started going through it. Now granted I’ve only read like 8 of them and to be honest its a little ‘sunshine out the @$$’ for me, but I will persevere because despite that it is succeeding somewhat in making me think about my own life.

The book is dated, one page of ‘devotion’ per day and I started Sept. 3, 2011, my goal is to get through a year of this and see what happens…if anything, and to generally muse about my faith in comparison to ‘whats out there’ and how others of my belief system and other belief systems see the topics/values covered. This first entry will be long as I play catch up over the last several days. So this’ll end up a walk through my own faith as well I suppose…who knows, lets see shall we?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Confused?…go Back”, 01/24/2012, Jeremiah 24: 6-7

How does one ‘hear’ from God? This is a loaded topic for me…

“I will give them hearts that will recognize me as the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me wholeheartedly” -NIV, Jeremiah 24:7

 

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” -NIV, 1 Kings 19:12

 

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” -NIV, Rev 3:22

Confused? Always. I bumble my path routinely in an effort to ‘hear’ God and know what his plan and purpose for my life is. I say the prayers, I keep so still as to nearly faint from not breathing enough, I close my eyes and meditate during worship, think of things I’ve learned, listen to pastors and mentors more learned than me…

Majority of the time I think I must be on the wrong channel…cause all I ever get is static and I rarely know what exactly it is I am doing wrong.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

So I am procrastinating on a piece of analysis right now that would basically seal my fate for my Ph.D. time-wise here in Bozeman.  Following a surprisingly productive meeting with my advisor, this morning it turns out that I am 90% sure I will not finish ontime…and all the Ph.D. students said “surprise surprise…” Yeah I know, no student ever finishes ontime…but man I had hopes. I am allowed to hope now aren’t I?

This seems like the longest Ph.D. in the history of LIFE itself!

Mmmm…hungry time for lunch… lunch, pork and vegis with sauce and rice hair in food… hmmmm…my hair or their hair *pulls hair from food* their hair *flicks hair onto ground, keeps eating*–meh pause i wonder how many microbes are on a typical piece of hair i wonder how many microbes are on my hair i wash my hair does she wash her hair *looks at lady serving food* maybe I should culture/test my hair

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So if you read any number of reviews on this book, say in Goodreads for Amazon it seems readers have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book. The vast majority–of those at least writing reviews loved it. I myself grew hot and cold during the course of reading it. It deals with such an interesting subject and important awful time in history and it felt to me like it was written to go straight to movie–tragic and ‘feel good’ all at the same time, great movie fodder. But does that necessarily make good fiction? And low and behold where is this book now? In movies! I’ll be interested to see how they interpret the book in the movie. I have a rule of reading books before I see them in the movies as much as I can…and I’m not one of those people where the movie has to have every last exhaustive detail from the book for it to be ‘good’. I’m always interested in adaptations. And I think Kathryn Stockett makes a good point in her quote:

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”

To say the least, its a little discussed area of history…how ‘the maid’ feels. I found myself more excited about her blurb at the end about her physical experiences growing up in the 60’s in Mississippi and I found myself more compelled and wishing she’d written about that rather than this book. But to be fair I have always been more partial to non-fiction unless it’s a literary ‘classic’ ala Wuthering Heights or the Secret Garden. Is this book a ‘classic’? Um…no. It’s not bad…but it’s kind of a let down. I wish she’d developed some characters more and played down others. But I recognize the difficulty she must’ve faced writing characters she could not relate too.

I loved the relationship the author built between Aibileen and the little girl Mae Mobeley, my favorite part of the book and an important one as no child is ever born racist, it’s taught–many times harshly. And my favorite parts of the book had Mae in them. When she starts school her teacher Miss. Taylor shames her to no end because she drew a black child as something that makes her happy. Aibileen had been teaching her that there is ‘no color’, we are all the same and can love each other as such. While Mae is playing with her little brother she makes her little brother be the ‘black child’ and tells him no matter what she does he has to sit there and take it or he’ll go to ‘jail’ and then she proceeds to throw dolls at him, pour crayons on him then tells him lets play back of the bus like Rosa Parks etc…Mae’s father watches this and asks her who taught her this and she lies and says it was her teacher, when in fact it was Aibileen that’d been telling her stories…’secret’ stories.

Surprisingly the ending was not what I was expecting which is good, but I’m not sure I liked it either…I dunno, it was both sad and hopeful I suppose.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Embarrassed”, 11/15/2011, Proverbs 22:4-16 So I haven’t blogged about the devotions I’ve been reading and yes, I have been reading them because so far they’ve been records on repeat, dealing with issues already discussed in the book…and I’ve only been reading since August. So I’m wondering at this point how many topics she’s going to deal with multiple times. I finally came across some more original ones, like yesterday’s.

Devotional Blog:

The Word of God, 03/02/2012, 2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. ~2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

So I figured I should start chipping away at all the dog eared pages in this devotional book that I’ve been neglecting. I keep up on my daily reading but somedays I have enough time to blog and other days I don’t so they end up dog eared for future contemplation. Oddly enough this entry is about ‘bearing each others burdens’ rather than the word of God but when I read it, I realized I needed to address the ‘word of God’ topic first. I’ll explain…

From the devotional: “We all need to make time for Bible study. David writes in Psalm 73:26, ‘My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.’ (NIV)…Only as I make God’s Word a priority do I have anything to give. A Bible study should be a refuge, a safe harbor.”

A week or so ago in a conversation with friends I stated that scripture will never ‘convince’ me of whether someone is ‘right or wrong’. No one will ever ‘win’ an argument with me only using scripture. I think I’ve even stated in previous blogs that I refuse to go tit for tat on Bible verses for various reasons aside from its just plain tedious and I feel its more ‘posturing your verse memorization prowess’, rather than attempting to make a valid point. For the first time now, I am wondering why that is. I am a Christian after all and I believe in God’s word, why isn’t God’s divinely inspired word enough to convince me of someone’s argument?

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

I knew Thanksgiving was celebrated in the USA and Canada but I didn’t know they celebrated Thanksgiving in Liberia, apparently it coincides with the Church’s harvest day. Interesting. I wonder if there’s a history of celebrating Thanksgiving there or if this was a one time 2010 venture.

This year given I have been taken in many times for holidays we are hosting Thanksgiving at our place. Though, I am not making a turkey as they are scarce and expensive in Thailand. Thais do not celebrate Thanksgiving but its always nice to have an excuse to go to someone’s house to eat and partake in general merriment celebrating what American children learn as our ‘dinner with the Indians’. Indians who we then learn later in school, we decimated with smallpox, measles, typhus and plague among other diseases and war. DOH!

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So if you read any number of reviews on this book, say in Goodreads for Amazon it seems readers have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book. The vast majority–of those at least writing reviews loved it. I myself grew hot and cold during the course of reading it. It deals with such an interesting subject and important awful time in history and it felt to me like it was written to go straight to movie–tragic and ‘feel good’ all at the same time, great movie fodder. But does that necessarily make good fiction? And low and behold where is this book now? In movies! I’ll be interested to see how they interpret the book in the movie. I have a rule of reading books before I see them in the movies as much as I can…and I’m not one of those people where the movie has to have every last exhaustive detail from the book for it to be ‘good’. I’m always interested in adaptations. And I think Kathryn Stockett makes a good point in her quote:

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”

To say the least, its a little discussed area of history…how ‘the maid’ feels. I found myself more excited about her blurb at the end about her physical experiences growing up in the 60’s in Mississippi and I found myself more compelled and wishing she’d written about that rather than this book. But to be fair I have always been more partial to non-fiction unless it’s a literary ‘classic’ ala Wuthering Heights or the Secret Garden. Is this book a ‘classic’? Um…no. It’s not bad…but it’s kind of a let down. I wish she’d developed some characters more and played down others. But I recognize the difficulty she must’ve faced writing characters she could not relate too.

I loved the relationship the author built between Aibileen and the little girl Mae Mobeley, my favorite part of the book and an important one as no child is ever born racist, it’s taught–many times harshly. And my favorite parts of the book had Mae in them. When she starts school her teacher Miss. Taylor shames her to no end because she drew a black child as something that makes her happy. Aibileen had been teaching her that there is ‘no color’, we are all the same and can love each other as such. While Mae is playing with her little brother she makes her little brother be the ‘black child’ and tells him no matter what she does he has to sit there and take it or he’ll go to ‘jail’ and then she proceeds to throw dolls at him, pour crayons on him then tells him lets play back of the bus like Rosa Parks etc…Mae’s father watches this and asks her who taught her this and she lies and says it was her teacher, when in fact it was Aibileen that’d been telling her stories…’secret’ stories.

Surprisingly the ending was not what I was expecting which is good, but I’m not sure I liked it either…I dunno, it was both sad and hopeful I suppose.

FIRST and foremost it was anonymous info gathering, no way to link anyone to anything here–anon posts were used. AND I have the authors permission and enthusiastic support in fact to share this information from his paper/poster.

The Authors: JA Fries (Computer Science Graduate Student), TY Ho (Comp Sci graduate student), PM Polgreen (his boss and assistant prof at Univ of Iowa), AM Serge.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

Well…I am now back from my trip to D.C. I got my fill of museums, dancing, city life, good (expensive) food, and monuments. All in all, not bad for a break. I will only describe one experience here.

I went to the Holocaust Museum. It was unbelievable well done. A lot of reading but absolutely amazing. I think that everyone should go through it despite the fears of going into a museum about such a depressing subject. It started with Hilter and Nazism’s rise to power and the political and economic situation of Germany at the time, goes through the inital arrests, then the Jews situation, into the Final Solution, and ends with a Final Chapter. You go in and they give you an ID card of someone who actually went through the Holocaust, it goes through their lives, and how they survived or did not survive the slaughter…**

Unofficial Devotional Blog: (not in book, but I’m gonna write it anyway)

Topic: “love, judgement, right and wrong” (verses…many, see below)

Since I started this devotional ‘section’ to my blog I’ve talked about a lot of different topics introduced to me by this rather ‘fluffy’ devotional book that I’ve been making my way through. And I actually was going to write another entry based in that book but as I opened the link to start a new blog…all this came flowing out instead. For an introduction to how this all got started in all the ‘devotion’ stuff see the first blog about my attempt at keeping regular devotions and analyzing my faith. Topics ranged in this book from finding your ‘hidden sin (blog post)’, leadership and mentorship (blog 1, blog 2), family and finances (blog), wishing for a different life (blog), acceptance (blog), love and forgiveness (blog), relationships with non-believers (blog), trauma (blog), life purpose/being saved for something I wrote on the anniversary of ⁹⁄₁₁ (blog) and many of the things I’ve said, done or written have gotten me pegged throughout life as a ‘lukewarm Christian’.

I read a blog post entitled “I’m Christian unless you are Gay” written by a guy whose blog I follow because he has interesting things to say. Since it’s been written it’s gotten 74K plus facebook ‘likes’ and has been shared I’m sure countless times to ‘mixed’ reviews sometimes. I am one of those that shared this post on facebook and now I am sharing it here with my own take. I encourage you to read his post (linked above) in its entirety as well as some of the responses to the post both negative and positive. He’s caused quite the firestorm and some of the responses were very powerful.

After reading his post and all the responses…two quotes stuck with me.

I knew Thanksgiving was celebrated in the USA and Canada but I didn’t know they celebrated Thanksgiving in Liberia, apparently it coincides with the Church’s harvest day. Interesting. I wonder if there’s a history of celebrating Thanksgiving there or if this was a one time 2010 venture.

This year given I have been taken in many times for holidays we are hosting Thanksgiving at our place. Though, I am not making a turkey as they are scarce and expensive in Thailand. Thais do not celebrate Thanksgiving but its always nice to have an excuse to go to someone’s house to eat and partake in general merriment celebrating what American children learn as our ‘dinner with the Indians’. Indians who we then learn later in school, we decimated with smallpox, measles, typhus and plague among other diseases and war. DOH!

So I can’t claim complete originality of this idea, I was inspired by a facebook post from a colleague of mine Dr. Jennifer Biddle who consequently is my personal nomination (see below). In the resource strapped world of research in general and in fields that bounce routinely between NIH and NSF funding, like my field: Infectious Disease Ecology (is it ecology? is it medical? is it ecology? is it medical?) innovation is key! But lets not snub the other fields of science where innovation is key! I simply address this field because it’s my field. Any nominations are welcome! Also for those working in the developing world where money can be even scarcer it pays to ‘figure shit out–old school’.

Remember the days when grandpa would walk to school, uphill in the snow both ways and amused himself for hours with nothing but a stick and a string? Where we learned how to ‘make life happen’ with nothing but a few coins in our pockets…things have gotten expensive nowadays! Then the 1980’s came a long and who should present himself but MacGyver…my fiance currently owns every episode of MacGyver created. Then man who could set off bombs with bubble gum, attack and defeat countless terrorists and other assorted bad guys with baking soda and a swiss army knife. The man was scientific ‘magic’ if you will.

So in honor of the world of money strapped scientific research I’d like to open nominations for who you believe to be the MacGyver of your field and why with links to their professional profiles if you so desire. Let’s laud the achievements of our innovative colleagues and strive for their ingenuity borne out of sheer force of will and desperation–“do I buy food or that sequencing kit…” Yes I am guilty of placing a sequencing kit above food at times…but I drew the line at mouth pipeting and just bought some damn pipets!

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mentor Me”, 11/16/2011, Proverbs 9:9-12

I don’t know how many times since starting my postdoc that I’ve desired minions. Cohorts in my pursuit of viral evolution and ecology. Kindred spirits clad in lab coats and laced with the smell of phenol chloroform. Ok…really I just need people to help me with lab work that I like doing but I have less and less time to do as analysis and writing alone consumes me sometimes. But in return I’d like to mentor.

I mentored a very motivated undergraduate student while in grad school and she turned out quite apt and successful so I figure I did something right…and I tried at all costs to minimize her interactions with my boss who also happened to be her academic mentor. He had the uncanny ability to make many women (including myself at times) who worked in his lab want to staple things to his head and leave in a hail of frustrated cuss words and gunfire.

I mentioned in my last post that many topics in this book seem to be on repeat and I realize I posted a blog earlier on ‘leadership’ but I think this is different…the idea of leadership and mentorship. Ideally they should go hand in hand and I aspire to that but many times they don’t. There are many leaders that are terrible mentors and mentors that if you put them in charge of something wouldn’t know left from right practically speaking–rather they are gurus of ‘sense’. They are often the ones that you want to quote a lot because they inspire you, even if practically speaking they may not get a whole lot done.

Leaders you follow, mentors you quote. And if you have someone that is both, then  you get the great leaders of our time. But they all had to start somewhere.

Unofficial Devotional Blog: (not in book, but I’m gonna write it anyway)

Topic: “love, judgement, right and wrong” (verses…many, see below)

Since I started this devotional ‘section’ to my blog I’ve talked about a lot of different topics introduced to me by this rather ‘fluffy’ devotional book that I’ve been making my way through. And I actually was going to write another entry based in that book but as I opened the link to start a new blog…all this came flowing out instead. For an introduction to how this all got started in all the ‘devotion’ stuff see the first blog about my attempt at keeping regular devotions and analyzing my faith. Topics ranged in this book from finding your ‘hidden sin (blog post)’, leadership and mentorship (blog 1, blog 2), family and finances (blog), wishing for a different life (blog), acceptance (blog), love and forgiveness (blog), relationships with non-believers (blog), trauma (blog), life purpose/being saved for something I wrote on the anniversary of ⁹⁄₁₁ (blog) and many of the things I’ve said, done or written have gotten me pegged throughout life as a ‘lukewarm Christian’.

I read a blog post entitled “I’m Christian unless you are Gay” written by a guy whose blog I follow because he has interesting things to say. Since it’s been written it’s gotten 74K plus facebook ‘likes’ and has been shared I’m sure countless times to ‘mixed’ reviews sometimes. I am one of those that shared this post on facebook and now I am sharing it here with my own take. I encourage you to read his post (linked above) in its entirety as well as some of the responses to the post both negative and positive. He’s caused quite the firestorm and some of the responses were very powerful.

After reading his post and all the responses…two quotes stuck with me.

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

So this past weekend I got to attempt to get in touch with my inner entomologist…sort of. I went up to the AFRIMS entomology facility in the North at Kamphaeng Phet. Their main purpose is to wait for patient blood samples collected from the villages to come back positive for Dengue virus then they mobilize and head out to the village. They enroll and collected mosquitoes from houses within a 200 m radius of the index house that has the patient. They use backpack aspirators to collect the mosquitoes record information about the house and give it a unique ID. Back at the lab, mosquitoes are sorted into their respective species, Ae. aegypti females being of most interest, and dissected as we are only interested in their head and thorax for Dengue PCR/isolation. The goal being cluster studies of Dengue in patients and mosquitoes and to track movement from village to village. Then I come in with my all-powerful, mostly open source programs and attempt to correlate/track the genetics vs. epidemiology of host/vector.

A month in Thailand…amazing how quickly adaptable a person can become given continuously changing circumstances. I work in the Virology Dept of a U.S. military medical science institute (AFRIMS). My focus, dengue virus with perhaps occasional forays into malaria and avian influenza. Being raised in Hawaii and having traveled abroad to Central and South America I thought I was prepared for inevitable massacre of heat and humidity. Alas, nothing can prepare you for the literal melting of your body the moment you step onto the tarmac at Suvarnabhumi airport. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’ve decided to enter Thailand at the hottest time of year. No it’s actually perfectly in keeping in a life where I decided to go to graduate school in Montana, moving from Hawaii in mid-January and stepping off the plane to 10 below zero. Apparently I live for extremes.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mentor Me”, 11/16/2011, Proverbs 9:9-12

I don’t know how many times since starting my postdoc that I’ve desired minions. Cohorts in my pursuit of viral evolution and ecology. Kindred spirits clad in lab coats and laced with the smell of phenol chloroform. Ok…really I just need people to help me with lab work that I like doing but I have less and less time to do as analysis and writing alone consumes me sometimes. But in return I’d like to mentor.

I mentored a very motivated undergraduate student while in grad school and she turned out quite apt and successful so I figure I did something right…and I tried at all costs to minimize her interactions with my boss who also happened to be her academic mentor. He had the uncanny ability to make many women (including myself at times) who worked in his lab want to staple things to his head and leave in a hail of frustrated cuss words and gunfire.

I mentioned in my last post that many topics in this book seem to be on repeat and I realize I posted a blog earlier on ‘leadership’ but I think this is different…the idea of leadership and mentorship. Ideally they should go hand in hand and I aspire to that but many times they don’t. There are many leaders that are terrible mentors and mentors that if you put them in charge of something wouldn’t know left from right practically speaking–rather they are gurus of ‘sense’. They are often the ones that you want to quote a lot because they inspire you, even if practically speaking they may not get a whole lot done.

Leaders you follow, mentors you quote. And if you have someone that is both, then  you get the great leaders of our time. But they all had to start somewhere.

So the husband pointed out that it’s been over a year since my last post and perhaps I was due to start blogging again. Oddly, the past few years since coming back to the US from Bangkok – specifically to Maryland/DC I just haven’t really been inspired to blog…as I’m sure you can tell from the copious lack of posts freakishly apparent on this blog. It’s difficult for me to write without a reason.

So in a random turn of events I just decided to check this blog…today is July 15, 2013. My last entry was July 16, 2012. Coincidence?

I find it humorous that this blog has taken the form of most of my journals (diaries) where I have fits where I write everyday and periods of no activity until one day I randomly decide to write again. I don’t particularly advertise this blog aside from the facebook linking for family and friends that might be interested and I think you can find it via google searching. But this white screen that I type into is more for reflection than anything else, if others derive benefit from that, great.

Perhaps it’s providence that I’ve decided to check my blog. My last entry was about ‘dreams’ and where I was at. Since then life has been eventful but I still struggle with what will make me happy in my work…similar musings as to my last entry. Since then, I’ve gotten married, been quite productive if not incredibly frustrated at work, been back to Thailand to teach a workshop, been to Europe to attend a workshop, started a teaching blog for things I learn at workshops, started online newsletters for my field so others can tap into what I find on the internet, finished up a teaching fellowship, explored DC during free time… Life is clipping along as it should…

Somethings I’ve figured out in the past year:

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

Devotioanl Blog:

“Looking for love in all the wrong places”, “You Can”, “There is a Plan”; 6/23/2012, 6/22/2012, 3/12/2012; 1 Peter 4:8, Luke 13:12, Jeremiah 29:11

You ever hear the joke that you should listen to country songs backwards? Why? Because then they become exceedingly happier…you get your house back, your dog back, your woman back, your tires un-slashed and your guitar un-smashed.

I’ve noticed a trend in many entries of this book. In many examples of people’s lives that she uses…when it rains it doesn’t just pour–it’s a fricken hurricane and it’s not ‘waves of life’ that hit people, it’s a damn tsunami!

Devotional Blog:

“Lights Flashing”, 6/21/2012, 1 Corinthians 4:5

Ok, back to the book after quite the hiatus.

When the Lord comes, he will bring our deepest secrets to light and will reveal our private motives… ~1 Corinthians 4:5

Well now isn’t that a scary thought? How many secrets does one carry throughout life? How many thoughts do we think would we be ashamed of if someone were to actually crawl into our head and listen to. Thankfully people can’t crawl into each others heads and truly hear the thoughts that roll through them.

Funny thing is, growing up this verse made us wary of the ‘big’ secrets…infidelity, sex before marriage, stealing, physically hurting someone etc. Our pastors would often times use the image of a huge projector screen showing all our sins and evil thoughts to the world for all our family and friends to see. Oh the embarrassment! Oh the judgement! Oh the pain we would cause ourselves and other people with our hidden sins that haven’t been brought to light and forgiven. I used to live in fear as a kid, paranoia even that when I died God would put me on a stage and broadcast my entire ‘evil’ life of every little thing I’d ever done that wasn’t 100% ‘saintly’, down to beating the crap out of a stuffed animal because I was angry. Yes, as a child I occasionally beat the crap out of dolls and stuffed animals out of frustration. I ripped pages out of my journals and threw tantrums in my room out of sight and earshot of anyone. Much of my anger and frustration growing up I kept inside, in fact all of it I kept inside. And while these ‘tantrums’ and stuffed animal beatings seem harmless enough at first sight, my thoughts got darker as I grew up.

What about the little ‘secrets’ the thoughts no one hears about, the thoughts that will never be voiced but are nonetheless there… the dark thoughts.

Now to be fair, this was a particularly hectic week and the ‘busiest’ my desk has been but upon reflection it pretty much sums up my existence as a postdoc…”semi-organized chaos”. Click on the picture to enlarge. What you don’t see is the 3 pairs of shoes under the desk along with 2 bags and flat rate mailing boxes. On the cubicle wall out of view are several postcards from friends in Boston, Jackson, WY–now Australia and Great Falls, MT, 3D dengue sequence structures and a post it note to pay bills–the line between normality and nerd is definitely a blurry one.

Devotional Blog:

Burdens, 03/02/2012, Galatians 6:1-5, Romans 15:1-7

Are you a worry wort? I can be. I can worry about the most inane irrelevant things sometimes. Things I cannot control I worry about…I’m absolutely ridiculous sometimes, keeping myself awake at night worrying about things that are utterly pointless to worry about. And I worry about them at the MOST inopportune times as well…such as when I am taking off in a plane and I’m like–huh what if we crash? It’s really dumb as the statistics support me getting  pwnd by so many other causes before dying in a plane crash (1 in 7,032-lifetime odds, Source).

I find it funny that in the same source I have a 1 in 120,864 chance of dying by being pwnd by someones dog. In their wording–“bitten or struck by dog”. Ya that’s right, don’t you just hate it when Mitzy comes up to you and ‘bitch slaps’ you, haha, really bad joke–but really one day, her strike could kill you!

I digress…I think I’ve made my point about pointless worrying.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Take Responsibility”, 01/25/2012, Romans 13:1-7, Galatians 6:5, 2 Corinthians 5:10

It’s her fault. It’s his fault. It’s their fault. The dog did it…

Kid’s Excuses:

1. One child to another: Whenever you tell a big fat lie to get away with breaking an ornament, vase etc.  Tell your mum, dad etc. that it threw itself off of the mantle piece, table etc and then add in that you always believed that there was something out there!
2. Mom:  Where’s your report card?  You:  Um, mommy I’m really sorry and everything.  But I didn’t do it or anything but you know how I walk to school?  Well, the bell rang and I went to my locker to put it in my backpack and some very mean kids took it and started playing monkey in the middle then someone yelled that there was a big fight so the kids dropped it and ran outside.  Then, I was walking & was looking at it and a dog chased me and got it and chewed it up!  Sorry!
3. I do what the cheerios tell me.
4. When I was little, I cut up my sheets, my excuse was, “Jesus did it!”****
5. The clowns made me do it…I sware!

Excuses given to police officers:

1. One night many years ago I was on patrol and observed a vehicle blow through a red light at a major intersection. There had been plenty of time to stop, yet the vehicle had not even slowed down. I stopped the car and asked the young female driver why she had done that. The girl told me she had just had her brakes repaired, it had been very expensive, and she DIDN’T WANT TO WEAR THEM DOWN! Usually I give people a pass if I haven’t heard their excuse before, but in this case she got the ticket. …………………………………. Submitted by… Dave Hoffman, Sergeant, Naperville IL PD

2. I stopped a car in a rural area of our county for going 80 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. The driver explained that he had a bee flying around his head so he sped up to 80, hoping that the bee couldn’t fly that fast and would not be able to fly out of the back seat area to get at him…..Submitted by…Gary Lenon, Mecosta County Sheriff Department, Michigan.

Amazing what we say to avoid blame not only as children but as adults as well.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

So I don’t believe in resolutions because inevitably its not something that’s kept and its a waste of mind space…so I don’t do them. This year I opted to reflect on last year so I dug into my facebook (timeline is handy for this indeed) as well as some of the other emails, blogs or things that I’ve done to get a feel for last year…

Here are the highlights, anecdotes from my facebook wall, blog, reading, general musings, links etc:

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Breaking patterns of trauma, 9/15/11, Isaiah 57: 12-14

This entry in the book was ‘interesting’ and amounted to saying ‘get over yourself’ at the end or you are going to seriously $#@! up your kids. The simplicity in which she treats this topic bothered me a little. Now, I agree I just ‘summed’ up the topic above in one sentence but her approach and link to the verse was unclear to me until the end and I still was like…does this make sense in light of her ‘verse of the day’….so I dissected it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

So while I was during Christmas I encountered many friends I have had since moving to the islands when I was 11 (10? 11?–ah doesn’t matter)…and I saw almost all of them between Oahu and Maui and talked to the rest via phone.  And between the people I know from home, all the friends I met and have through school and family–I have realized there are really two types of people. Those who live and those who exist. Not that one is particularly better than the other, just depends on the person.

I’m back from Brazil! I am not going to relate the specifics of my trip if you want to know that stuff check out the blog I kept: http://springinbrazil.blogspot.com but suffice it to say it was absolutely amazing. When I decided to go to Brazil I went to refocus and clarify somethings in my life about my future and where I am supposed to be following the completion of my thesis.

So yesterday at 8:29 am (according to facebook) I posted an article from the Economist entitled: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic and it’s quite interesting the responses I’ve been getting. The article is at: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223.

Some people whole heartedly agreed with the article, others were slightly offended at the insinuation that 5-8 years of labor was all for naught.

I thought the article was quite dispiriting and portrayed obtaining a PhD as this ‘waste of intellect/life’ and honestly you’d be hard pressed to find any PhD student that doesn’t think that at some point during their degree process. If you don’t believe me, check out PhD comics (www.phdcomics.com) where their tag line is: “Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in academia.” They even mention graduate education as learning the ‘dark arts.’ I was and still am an avid reader of the comic.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

So while I was during Christmas I encountered many friends I have had since moving to the islands when I was 11 (10? 11?–ah doesn’t matter)…and I saw almost all of them between Oahu and Maui and talked to the rest via phone.  And between the people I know from home, all the friends I met and have through school and family–I have realized there are really two types of people. Those who live and those who exist. Not that one is particularly better than the other, just depends on the person.

I’m back from Brazil! I am not going to relate the specifics of my trip if you want to know that stuff check out the blog I kept: http://springinbrazil.blogspot.com but suffice it to say it was absolutely amazing. When I decided to go to Brazil I went to refocus and clarify somethings in my life about my future and where I am supposed to be following the completion of my thesis.

I decided to repost this from ProMed because I thought it was interesting…who comes up with these disease names!? When I saw it in my inbox of course I had visions of cult activities involving longan fruit in the jungles of Vietnam…yes I have an active imagination.

Witch’s broom gets its name from a deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest. [Source]

A quick shout out to ProMed which is a great resource for hearing about disease outbreaks of known or unknown etiology around the world…check it out!

But really, Longan fruit is quite prevalent in Thailand as well and it is quite delicious. So, fantastical imagination aside, see below, feel free to read the culti-c disease activities plaguing Longan in Vietnam!

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

It was my love and my treasure Short post…sentimental post. Over the past couple years I’ve neglected my love of Gaelic music. I got this love from my Mom who dabbled in learning Gaelic a bit. I remember singing along with some Gaelic songs trying to memorize what the lyrics mean while in high school, college and grad school–out of view of most people haha! My vocabulary is limited to what I learned through the music and I’m sure my pronunciation is pretty poor, but I’m slowly finding my passion for this music again.

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Love and Riddles”, 12/6/2011, Song of Songs (Solomon) 2:1-17

So I’ll be jumping around a bit as I play catch up in my devotional blog ‘series’ out of this book. I’m combining two entries in this blog. So Song of Songs or Solomon as its called in some Bibles is quite the ‘lovers’ book. It’s very short, only 8 short chapters (about 4 Bible pages) and sits between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. I kept missing it when I was flipping through my Bible trying to find it. And the book is all about love and how to treat your lover. And how can you not think this books is about desire with verses like:

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth–for your love is more delightful than wine. 1:13 My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.  1:16 My love is mine and I am his… 7:9-12 May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. I belong to my lover and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside let us spend the night in the villages. Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened,and if the pomegrantes are in bloom–there I will give you my love.

In spite of the lack of explicitly religious content, Song of Songs can also be interpreted as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel, or for Christians, Christ and the Church or Christ and the human soul (Cited from Wikipedia).

What struck me was the sincere passion these two characters within this book had for each other. Like all good internet junkies I googled “love”…

Unofficial Devotional Blog: (not in book, but I’m gonna write it anyway)

Topic: “love, judgement, right and wrong” (verses…many, see below)

Since I started this devotional ‘section’ to my blog I’ve talked about a lot of different topics introduced to me by this rather ‘fluffy’ devotional book that I’ve been making my way through. And I actually was going to write another entry based in that book but as I opened the link to start a new blog…all this came flowing out instead. For an introduction to how this all got started in all the ‘devotion’ stuff see the first blog about my attempt at keeping regular devotions and analyzing my faith. Topics ranged in this book from finding your ‘hidden sin (blog post)’, leadership and mentorship (blog 1, blog 2), family and finances (blog), wishing for a different life (blog), acceptance (blog), love and forgiveness (blog), relationships with non-believers (blog), trauma (blog), life purpose/being saved for something I wrote on the anniversary of ⁹⁄₁₁ (blog) and many of the things I’ve said, done or written have gotten me pegged throughout life as a ‘lukewarm Christian’.

I read a blog post entitled “I’m Christian unless you are Gay” written by a guy whose blog I follow because he has interesting things to say. Since it’s been written it’s gotten 74K plus facebook ‘likes’ and has been shared I’m sure countless times to ‘mixed’ reviews sometimes. I am one of those that shared this post on facebook and now I am sharing it here with my own take. I encourage you to read his post (linked above) in its entirety as well as some of the responses to the post both negative and positive. He’s caused quite the firestorm and some of the responses were very powerful.

After reading his post and all the responses…two quotes stuck with me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

So I’ve gotten a few curious emails as to why only on this blog do I preface it with ‘Devotional Blog’. To answer: there are people who don’t really want to read about thoughts pertaining to faith, the Bible, religion in general so I’ve prefaced this blog so that those who want to skip it can do so easily without having to read it. Also on the right hand side of my blog are links by category topic…so those that want to read about specific topics can do so without having to sort through all the blogs on the front page.

OK, moving on…the following has stemmed from a conversation with a friend about love, grudges and forgiveness.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Forgiveness”, 10/7/11; 1 Peter 4:1-8

“Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins” -1 Peter 4:8 (NIV)

Who hasn’t been pissed at someone else? A friend, a relative, an immediate family member, the random Thai person that walks .25 miles/hr 3 people abreast blocking your ability to go around them and completely oblivious to your attempts to politely get through them…With friends usually the solution is fairly simple, you get mad at each other, you yell or heatedly talk through it and come to a resolution which hopefully keeps your friendship intact and usually does. Friends usually have a wide flexibility in pissing each other off because of how long you may have known them and the extenuating circumstances of the fight. You are usually willing to give them a voice to explain themselves before writing them off…usually. The same goes with family, or should go with family. There are grudges in my family that have withstood the test of time though–a few going on a a decade plus! Its amazing sometimes to realize how deep a persons anger or hurt goes and often times they don’t voice these problems face to face, leading to decades of silence each party believing themselves justified in their anger and judgement over the other person. And I’m not saying they don’t have good reason, in their position I don’t know what I would do. But today’s passage has made me think more about my own ‘grudges’ and anger at those who’ve insulted me in the past or done hurtful things.

We learn we are lovable or unlovable from other people…

Book: Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

“My friend Kurt used to say finding a wife is a percentage game. He said you have to have two or three relationships going at once, never letting the one girl know about the others…Kurt believed you had to date about twenty girls before you found the one your were going to marry. He just believed it was easier to date them all at once. Kurt ended up marrying a girl from Dallas, everybody says he married her for her money. He is very happy…”

So I can’t claim complete originality of this idea, I was inspired by a facebook post from a colleague of mine Dr. Jennifer Biddle who consequently is my personal nomination (see below). In the resource strapped world of research in general and in fields that bounce routinely between NIH and NSF funding, like my field: Infectious Disease Ecology (is it ecology? is it medical? is it ecology? is it medical?) innovation is key! But lets not snub the other fields of science where innovation is key! I simply address this field because it’s my field. Any nominations are welcome! Also for those working in the developing world where money can be even scarcer it pays to ‘figure shit out–old school’.

Remember the days when grandpa would walk to school, uphill in the snow both ways and amused himself for hours with nothing but a stick and a string? Where we learned how to ‘make life happen’ with nothing but a few coins in our pockets…things have gotten expensive nowadays! Then the 1980’s came a long and who should present himself but MacGyver…my fiance currently owns every episode of MacGyver created. Then man who could set off bombs with bubble gum, attack and defeat countless terrorists and other assorted bad guys with baking soda and a swiss army knife. The man was scientific ‘magic’ if you will.

So in honor of the world of money strapped scientific research I’d like to open nominations for who you believe to be the MacGyver of your field and why with links to their professional profiles if you so desire. Let’s laud the achievements of our innovative colleagues and strive for their ingenuity borne out of sheer force of will and desperation–“do I buy food or that sequencing kit…” Yes I am guilty of placing a sequencing kit above food at times…but I drew the line at mouth pipeting and just bought some damn pipets!

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain A hassle that’s totally worth it.   So I figured it might be helpful to post my adventure getting up to Machu Picchu in January 2015 because it’s not as straightforward as one would desire for such a trip.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

So if you read any number of reviews on this book, say in Goodreads for Amazon it seems readers have a ‘love/hate’ relationship with this book. The vast majority–of those at least writing reviews loved it. I myself grew hot and cold during the course of reading it. It deals with such an interesting subject and important awful time in history and it felt to me like it was written to go straight to movie–tragic and ‘feel good’ all at the same time, great movie fodder. But does that necessarily make good fiction? And low and behold where is this book now? In movies! I’ll be interested to see how they interpret the book in the movie. I have a rule of reading books before I see them in the movies as much as I can…and I’m not one of those people where the movie has to have every last exhaustive detail from the book for it to be ‘good’. I’m always interested in adaptations. And I think Kathryn Stockett makes a good point in her quote:

“Everyone knows how we white people feel, the glorified Mammy figure who dedicates her whole life to a white family. Margaret Mitchell covered that. But no one ever asked Mammy how she felt about it.”

To say the least, its a little discussed area of history…how ‘the maid’ feels. I found myself more excited about her blurb at the end about her physical experiences growing up in the 60’s in Mississippi and I found myself more compelled and wishing she’d written about that rather than this book. But to be fair I have always been more partial to non-fiction unless it’s a literary ‘classic’ ala Wuthering Heights or the Secret Garden. Is this book a ‘classic’? Um…no. It’s not bad…but it’s kind of a let down. I wish she’d developed some characters more and played down others. But I recognize the difficulty she must’ve faced writing characters she could not relate too.

I loved the relationship the author built between Aibileen and the little girl Mae Mobeley, my favorite part of the book and an important one as no child is ever born racist, it’s taught–many times harshly. And my favorite parts of the book had Mae in them. When she starts school her teacher Miss. Taylor shames her to no end because she drew a black child as something that makes her happy. Aibileen had been teaching her that there is ‘no color’, we are all the same and can love each other as such. While Mae is playing with her little brother she makes her little brother be the ‘black child’ and tells him no matter what she does he has to sit there and take it or he’ll go to ‘jail’ and then she proceeds to throw dolls at him, pour crayons on him then tells him lets play back of the bus like Rosa Parks etc…Mae’s father watches this and asks her who taught her this and she lies and says it was her teacher, when in fact it was Aibileen that’d been telling her stories…’secret’ stories.

Surprisingly the ending was not what I was expecting which is good, but I’m not sure I liked it either…I dunno, it was both sad and hopeful I suppose.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mentor Me”, 11/16/2011, Proverbs 9:9-12

I don’t know how many times since starting my postdoc that I’ve desired minions. Cohorts in my pursuit of viral evolution and ecology. Kindred spirits clad in lab coats and laced with the smell of phenol chloroform. Ok…really I just need people to help me with lab work that I like doing but I have less and less time to do as analysis and writing alone consumes me sometimes. But in return I’d like to mentor.

I mentored a very motivated undergraduate student while in grad school and she turned out quite apt and successful so I figure I did something right…and I tried at all costs to minimize her interactions with my boss who also happened to be her academic mentor. He had the uncanny ability to make many women (including myself at times) who worked in his lab want to staple things to his head and leave in a hail of frustrated cuss words and gunfire.

I mentioned in my last post that many topics in this book seem to be on repeat and I realize I posted a blog earlier on ‘leadership’ but I think this is different…the idea of leadership and mentorship. Ideally they should go hand in hand and I aspire to that but many times they don’t. There are many leaders that are terrible mentors and mentors that if you put them in charge of something wouldn’t know left from right practically speaking–rather they are gurus of ‘sense’. They are often the ones that you want to quote a lot because they inspire you, even if practically speaking they may not get a whole lot done.

Leaders you follow, mentors you quote. And if you have someone that is both, then  you get the great leaders of our time. But they all had to start somewhere.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

We learn we are lovable or unlovable from other people…

Book: Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller

“My friend Kurt used to say finding a wife is a percentage game. He said you have to have two or three relationships going at once, never letting the one girl know about the others…Kurt believed you had to date about twenty girls before you found the one your were going to marry. He just believed it was easier to date them all at once. Kurt ended up marrying a girl from Dallas, everybody says he married her for her money. He is very happy…”

Yes I just linked getting married with Darth Vader, I’m officially an un-recoverable geek; I’ll explain further down…

So I got engaged last August 2010 on the top of a building in Thailand, interested? read here. Amidst the flurry of people who were happy for me and those who were substantially peeved they didn’t hear from me personally but rather through facebook–doh!–even when you think you are ‘winning’ by using social networking, you’re not; accept that now. Anyway, I started mulling the “oh crap, now I’ve actually got to plan this…from Thailand…in a state I don’t live in, where I have no family–although I do have a couple friends.” But, never fear…I have a year or more to do it. If you didn’t know I live in Thailand…read here….and here…and here…and if you’ve decided you’d like to be my stalker check here. Yes I actually live and work in Thailand.

I never dressed up as a bride as a child…not once. I liked to get white dresses dirty. All through elementary, junior high and high school, not once did I ever give weight to the thought of getting married. My type also wasn’t exactly in ‘high demand’ either, so that might have had something to do with it. I went through phases of being too immature, too geeky or that girl who your friends with but the thought of anything more makes you heave ho-ho’s or twinkies or whatever the heck you had for lunch that day.

FIRST and foremost it was anonymous info gathering, no way to link anyone to anything here–anon posts were used. AND I have the authors permission and enthusiastic support in fact to share this information from his paper/poster.

The Authors: JA Fries (Computer Science Graduate Student), TY Ho (Comp Sci graduate student), PM Polgreen (his boss and assistant prof at Univ of Iowa), AM Serge.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

Devotional Blog: 12/21/11, Topic: “Workers at Home”, Titus 2: 3-5 I’ve heard this verse used to justify a woman’s calling to ‘stay at ‘ and raise a family as opposed to being independent and working. I’m not going to say much about this books devotional entry except that I like how the author deals with this and I agree with what she says…amazing given I rarely agree with what she has to say.

Devotional Blog: “Get me out of here”, 10/29/2011; Matthew 6:9-15.

Evil. This blog is going to be a small rant…fyi.

In the entry Pam (the author) talks about Adam and Eve and how Eve was tempted by the snake (Satan) to eat of the tree (the ‘infamous’ apple) of the knowledge of good and evil using lies and ‘half’ truths.

“Our flesh wants fulfillment; then our eyes want what we see; then we want something to brag about. Eve fell for the same three things. It feels so good: Her flesh wanted the fruit. It looks so good: Her eyes saw the delicious-looking fruit, and she wanted it. It sounds so good: Then she fells for the big one: ‘You can be like God’. Now that would be something brag about, but it was all lies.”

She paints Eve to be like this apple harlot! I don’t think the Bible talks of Eve’s LUST for the apple or desire to BRAG about her apple exploits. I think there’s a difference between saying the apple looked good to eat and lust. Should she have eaten it, no of course not…but the way the author has described it I have visions of Eve rolling around in a bed of apples…it’s just weird.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mentor Me”, 11/16/2011, Proverbs 9:9-12

I don’t know how many times since starting my postdoc that I’ve desired minions. Cohorts in my pursuit of viral evolution and ecology. Kindred spirits clad in lab coats and laced with the smell of phenol chloroform. Ok…really I just need people to help me with lab work that I like doing but I have less and less time to do as analysis and writing alone consumes me sometimes. But in return I’d like to mentor.

I mentored a very motivated undergraduate student while in grad school and she turned out quite apt and successful so I figure I did something right…and I tried at all costs to minimize her interactions with my boss who also happened to be her academic mentor. He had the uncanny ability to make many women (including myself at times) who worked in his lab want to staple things to his head and leave in a hail of frustrated cuss words and gunfire.

I mentioned in my last post that many topics in this book seem to be on repeat and I realize I posted a blog earlier on ‘leadership’ but I think this is different…the idea of leadership and mentorship. Ideally they should go hand in hand and I aspire to that but many times they don’t. There are many leaders that are terrible mentors and mentors that if you put them in charge of something wouldn’t know left from right practically speaking–rather they are gurus of ‘sense’. They are often the ones that you want to quote a lot because they inspire you, even if practically speaking they may not get a whole lot done.

Leaders you follow, mentors you quote. And if you have someone that is both, then  you get the great leaders of our time. But they all had to start somewhere.

So I can’t claim complete originality of this idea, I was inspired by a facebook post from a colleague of mine Dr. Jennifer Biddle who consequently is my personal nomination (see below). In the resource strapped world of research in general and in fields that bounce routinely between NIH and NSF funding, like my field: Infectious Disease Ecology (is it ecology? is it medical? is it ecology? is it medical?) innovation is key! But lets not snub the other fields of science where innovation is key! I simply address this field because it’s my field. Any nominations are welcome! Also for those working in the developing world where money can be even scarcer it pays to ‘figure shit out–old school’.

Remember the days when grandpa would walk to school, uphill in the snow both ways and amused himself for hours with nothing but a stick and a string? Where we learned how to ‘make life happen’ with nothing but a few coins in our pockets…things have gotten expensive nowadays! Then the 1980’s came a long and who should present himself but MacGyver…my fiance currently owns every episode of MacGyver created. Then man who could set off bombs with bubble gum, attack and defeat countless terrorists and other assorted bad guys with baking soda and a swiss army knife. The man was scientific ‘magic’ if you will.

So in honor of the world of money strapped scientific research I’d like to open nominations for who you believe to be the MacGyver of your field and why with links to their professional profiles if you so desire. Let’s laud the achievements of our innovative colleagues and strive for their ingenuity borne out of sheer force of will and desperation–“do I buy food or that sequencing kit…” Yes I am guilty of placing a sequencing kit above food at times…but I drew the line at mouth pipeting and just bought some damn pipets!

Devotional Blog: “Family and Finance”, 11/4/2011; 1 Timothy 5:3-4, 8, 16

I took the title above from a quote by Author Unknown: “I am having an out of money experience”. It amused me.

So surprise, surprise this is yet another devotional entry in the book that I see differently than the author perhaps. Family, finances and lending money are huge topics. We all know that one of the biggest problems that can arise in a marriage can be over money or lack of it rather. I’ve seen money tear people and apart sometimes because of greed sometimes because of the emotions attached to the money that may have nothing to do with the money itself.

In the book, Pam talks about the duality of lending money to family that is discussed in the Bible. In 2 Corinthians 12:14 it states “…After all, children should not have to save up for their parents, but parents for their children.” and then in 1 Timothy 5:8 it states: “But those who won’t care for their own relatives, especially those living in the same household have denied what we believe. Such people are worse than unbelievers.” She then goes on to ask what should our responsibility be in terms of using our money to care for relatives/family? Her answer: “When in doubt, do like God recommends: ‘speak up for the poor and helpless, and see that they get justice (Proverbs 31:9). He doesn’t allow people to continue in unhealthy patterns, but if they have tried their best and fall short, his long arm of love reaches out.”

I agree with her statements and the verses she used in some respects.

Devotional Blog: “Signpost”, 10/24/2011, Psalm 71:14-17 In this entry entitled “Signpost” she discusses the meaning of names using her son’s as an example. She discusses how her son has grown to live up to his name and suggests that even before our parents knew us, God did. That a parent’s chosen name for their child no matter how it comes about foreshadows who that child is or will be. My name?

So kudos to my cousin Lauren and my friend Heather for reminding me I still haven’t posted about Nepal…but the Masala tea I sent them did make it to them…woohoo! Sometimes mail even from a US APO address may take a lifetime to reach its destination, it might as well have been put on the slow boat to China for all I know…except maybe that wouldn’t work–China is actually quite close to me. But you get the idea.

So back in August I traveled to Kathmandu, Nepal to attend a conference/workshop on Flu in SE Asia and it was quite interesting. Though the majority of the workshop didn’t really deal with my specific field I did learn a lot about epidemiology and analysis that goes with that kind of data which is supplemental and valuable to know. So that was neat.

The first day I arrived I was really tired and though I arrived in the afternoon I had little energy to venture beyond the hotel, Dwarika’s Hotel. I made it as far as the intersection. I don’t know what I expected, it was a lot more chaotic than I’d expected and there were tons of people. In my head I was thinking…damn if I can’t handle this how would I ever survive going anywhere in India?! Haha. I think it was just a lot to take in at first. The hotel was amazing, thank God for per diems and conference discounts that allowed me to stay there, it really was beautiful.

And just a note: In keeping with the chaos that Nepal was this blog is written in an organized chronological manner with absolute chaos with regard to the pictures and text. I’d like to think its my underlying ‘motif’ or ‘commentary’ on the crazy…but alas, I am not that smart to have thought that up prior. Instead its more a result of my lack in ability to use wordpress to post pictures in a non-chaotic format with respect to the text. I got better toward the end though.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

Devotioanl Blog:

“Looking for love in all the wrong places”, “You Can”, “There is a Plan”; 6/23/2012, 6/22/2012, 3/12/2012; 1 Peter 4:8, Luke 13:12, Jeremiah 29:11

You ever hear the joke that you should listen to country songs backwards? Why? Because then they become exceedingly happier…you get your house back, your dog back, your woman back, your tires un-slashed and your guitar un-smashed.

I’ve noticed a trend in many entries of this book. In many examples of people’s lives that she uses…when it rains it doesn’t just pour–it’s a fricken hurricane and it’s not ‘waves of life’ that hit people, it’s a damn tsunami!

I started wanting to write this blog based on one of the devotional entries in the book about what would happen if you took the ‘Christ’ out of Christmas. My mind wandered into wikipedia reading about the history of Christmas itself. My mental wanderings continued into various conversations with friends and acquaintances talking about the mesh of pagan and religious traditions mixed into Christmas nowadays. Then of course that leads to the blatant commercialism that Christmas has become. I’ve only to travel 2 minutes by skytrain to see the influence of Christmas in Bangkok, a Buddhist country. Though they don’t officially celebrate the holiday itself by days off work, they encourage gift giving and the market places are bedecked in lights, fake trees, cardboard snowmen and other such holiday decor.

The rest of my mental wanderings are hazy at best and clarified eventually into a deluge of memories–as though I was being visited by the ghost of Christmas past…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Love and Riddles”, 12/6/2011, Song of Songs (Solomon) 2:1-17

So I’ll be jumping around a bit as I play catch up in my devotional blog ‘series’ out of this book. I’m combining two entries in this blog. So Song of Songs or Solomon as its called in some Bibles is quite the ‘lovers’ book. It’s very short, only 8 short chapters (about 4 Bible pages) and sits between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. I kept missing it when I was flipping through my Bible trying to find it. And the book is all about love and how to treat your lover. And how can you not think this books is about desire with verses like:

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth–for your love is more delightful than wine. 1:13 My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.  1:16 My love is mine and I am his… 7:9-12 May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. I belong to my lover and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside let us spend the night in the villages. Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened,and if the pomegrantes are in bloom–there I will give you my love.

In spite of the lack of explicitly religious content, Song of Songs can also be interpreted as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel, or for Christians, Christ and the Church or Christ and the human soul (Cited from Wikipedia).

What struck me was the sincere passion these two characters within this book had for each other. Like all good internet junkies I googled “love”…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mentor Me”, 11/16/2011, Proverbs 9:9-12

I don’t know how many times since starting my postdoc that I’ve desired minions. Cohorts in my pursuit of viral evolution and ecology. Kindred spirits clad in lab coats and laced with the smell of phenol chloroform. Ok…really I just need people to help me with lab work that I like doing but I have less and less time to do as analysis and writing alone consumes me sometimes. But in return I’d like to mentor.

I mentored a very motivated undergraduate student while in grad school and she turned out quite apt and successful so I figure I did something right…and I tried at all costs to minimize her interactions with my boss who also happened to be her academic mentor. He had the uncanny ability to make many women (including myself at times) who worked in his lab want to staple things to his head and leave in a hail of frustrated cuss words and gunfire.

I mentioned in my last post that many topics in this book seem to be on repeat and I realize I posted a blog earlier on ‘leadership’ but I think this is different…the idea of leadership and mentorship. Ideally they should go hand in hand and I aspire to that but many times they don’t. There are many leaders that are terrible mentors and mentors that if you put them in charge of something wouldn’t know left from right practically speaking–rather they are gurus of ‘sense’. They are often the ones that you want to quote a lot because they inspire you, even if practically speaking they may not get a whole lot done.

Leaders you follow, mentors you quote. And if you have someone that is both, then  you get the great leaders of our time. But they all had to start somewhere.

I’m back from Brazil! I am not going to relate the specifics of my trip if you want to know that stuff check out the blog I kept: http://springinbrazil.blogspot.com but suffice it to say it was absolutely amazing. When I decided to go to Brazil I went to refocus and clarify somethings in my life about my future and where I am supposed to be following the completion of my thesis.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain A hassle that’s totally worth it.   So I figured it might be helpful to post my adventure getting up to Machu Picchu in January 2015 because it’s not as straightforward as one would desire for such a trip.

Devotional Blog: Topic: “Can or Can’t”, 01/02/12, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18 So about the only thing I have been able to take away from this entry was the first sentence where she quotes her son’s favorite coaching quotes. “Whether you can or you can’t, you are probably right.” A quick internet showed me that this quote is from Henry Ford. She then proceeds to illustrate the point of believing you can do something even if its hard by using a cheerleading competition her son was participating in.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

Devotional Blog:

So you’ve probably noticed by now that (1) I don’t always post every single devotional topic/entry from the book and (2) sometimes they are out of order. I am caught up to the current date in my reading but I choose only to post on those topics I come across that matter to me or that I actually have something to say about. Do you all really want to hear my thoughts on menopause??? Ya I didn’t think so…and it was two days of devotional time in the book. Aside from the fact I couldn’t relate remotely to what she was talking about, I didn’t really feel the need to expound on the subject. Nor do I feel the need to tell you all about when I got my first period. Fair enough? Plus some of her topics that she attributes to the various verses are just well meh or too gooey and I’ve quite frankly nothing to say about them. So with that…lets get on with the topic today.

Topic: “Pursing praise”, 10/8/2011; Proverbs 7:13-27

In this section the idea of ‘pursuing praise and accolades’ is discussed. How some of us are so hungry for recognition we strive for it, we live for the ‘kudos’ of other people and she talks about how spiritually unhealthy that is. Ultimately she states that the only kudos we should look for are from God by living our lives to please him and that what other people say to us shouldn’t matter. Easier said than done is what I was thinking. No one likes to ‘suck’.

I thought this was funny…and I could relate to some of the ‘evaluations’ so I thought I would share. These quotes were taken from federal employee evaluations, crazily enough. I wonder if advisers/bosses knew that their employees could read the evaluations they’d still write things this harsh? Probably. Her women would follow her anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity. Since my last report she has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.

So I am procrastinating on a piece of analysis right now that would basically seal my fate for my Ph.D. time-wise here in Bozeman.  Following a surprisingly productive meeting with my advisor, this morning it turns out that I am 90% sure I will not finish ontime…and all the Ph.D. students said “surprise surprise…” Yeah I know, no student ever finishes ontime…but man I had hopes. I am allowed to hope now aren’t I?

This seems like the longest Ph.D. in the history of LIFE itself!

So yesterday at 8:29 am (according to facebook) I posted an article from the Economist entitled: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic and it’s quite interesting the responses I’ve been getting. The article is at: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223.

Some people whole heartedly agreed with the article, others were slightly offended at the insinuation that 5-8 years of labor was all for naught.

I thought the article was quite dispiriting and portrayed obtaining a PhD as this ‘waste of intellect/life’ and honestly you’d be hard pressed to find any PhD student that doesn’t think that at some point during their degree process. If you don’t believe me, check out PhD comics (www.phdcomics.com) where their tag line is: “Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in academia.” They even mention graduate education as learning the ‘dark arts.’ I was and still am an avid reader of the comic.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

As the title suggests I walked into the office this morning to two computers…both shut off. Now no one touches my desk especially when I have analysis running and we had a huge storm last night with lightening and wind and although Bangkok is a ‘1st’ world entity of itself some days the fact of the matter is, I live in a 3rd world country that is 98% agriculture. The result?

So in the world of molecular evolution one of the cu-de-gras-de-analysis programs would have to be BEAST. A power-packed bayesian analysis software that makes phylogenetic trees, calculates the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) and substitution rates, geographic partitioning, can handle copious amounts of data and pretty much squeezes blood from a turnip…walks on water…heals your mother, in short, it’s cool.

Sound awesome? It is. For a more technical in depth discussion and introduction to BEAST software I suggest reading the Wiki and attacking the tutorials with full force as well as reading some awesome books on phylogenetic inference such as The Phylogenetic Handbook. If you are super impatient and channeling your inner terrible twos about phylogenetic analysis then read Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy. It has a nice introduction and literal button for button how tos on different software packages including Bayesian ones. When you’ve finished your tantrum, enter the adult world and read Felsenstein or the phylogenetic handbook mentioned above. Now that you’ve been introduced to phylogenetic inference and genetic analysis with forays into evolution over time…jump into BEAST. Although the BEAST wiki and manual are still navigate-able without that background but you’ll be scratching your head a bit and heading to google for answers.

I wrote this in high school as an English project and figured I would post it as my tribute to Edgar Allen Poe on his birthday, which is today January 19th. It’s a parody of his poem ‘The Raven’. Now it was an English project so I had to copy the meter and style and everything…looking back I think it was a pretty decent job. That and well…I was an odd teenager, I still am odd…just not a teenager anymore.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

So after combing the myspace, facebook and personal archives I have compiled everything now onto this site with handy category tags listed to the right. If you are interested in a particular topic click a tag and you are off! So if posts are entitled and have a repost note and date you know its my invocations from a previous life…most likely my Ph.D. life; which you may find highly amusing or slightly depressing.

Devotional Blog:

So you’ve probably noticed by now that (1) I don’t always post every single devotional topic/entry from the book and (2) sometimes they are out of order. I am caught up to the current date in my reading but I choose only to post on those topics I come across that matter to me or that I actually have something to say about. Do you all really want to hear my thoughts on menopause??? Ya I didn’t think so…and it was two days of devotional time in the book. Aside from the fact I couldn’t relate remotely to what she was talking about, I didn’t really feel the need to expound on the subject. Nor do I feel the need to tell you all about when I got my first period. Fair enough? Plus some of her topics that she attributes to the various verses are just well meh or too gooey and I’ve quite frankly nothing to say about them. So with that…lets get on with the topic today.

Topic: “Pursing praise”, 10/8/2011; Proverbs 7:13-27

In this section the idea of ‘pursuing praise and accolades’ is discussed. How some of us are so hungry for recognition we strive for it, we live for the ‘kudos’ of other people and she talks about how spiritually unhealthy that is. Ultimately she states that the only kudos we should look for are from God by living our lives to please him and that what other people say to us shouldn’t matter. Easier said than done is what I was thinking. No one likes to ‘suck’.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Confused?…go Back”, 01/24/2012, Jeremiah 24: 6-7

How does one ‘hear’ from God? This is a loaded topic for me…

“I will give them hearts that will recognize me as the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me wholeheartedly” -NIV, Jeremiah 24:7

 

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” -NIV, 1 Kings 19:12

 

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” -NIV, Rev 3:22

Confused? Always. I bumble my path routinely in an effort to ‘hear’ God and know what his plan and purpose for my life is. I say the prayers, I keep so still as to nearly faint from not breathing enough, I close my eyes and meditate during worship, think of things I’ve learned, listen to pastors and mentors more learned than me…

Majority of the time I think I must be on the wrong channel…cause all I ever get is static and I rarely know what exactly it is I am doing wrong.

As the title suggests I walked into the office this morning to two computers…both shut off. Now no one touches my desk especially when I have analysis running and we had a huge storm last night with lightening and wind and although Bangkok is a ‘1st’ world entity of itself some days the fact of the matter is, I live in a 3rd world country that is 98% agriculture. The result?

So I am procrastinating on a piece of analysis right now that would basically seal my fate for my Ph.D. time-wise here in Bozeman.  Following a surprisingly productive meeting with my advisor, this morning it turns out that I am 90% sure I will not finish ontime…and all the Ph.D. students said “surprise surprise…” Yeah I know, no student ever finishes ontime…but man I had hopes. I am allowed to hope now aren’t I?

This seems like the longest Ph.D. in the history of LIFE itself!

I decided to repost this from ProMed because I thought it was interesting…who comes up with these disease names!? When I saw it in my inbox of course I had visions of cult activities involving longan fruit in the jungles of Vietnam…yes I have an active imagination.

Witch’s broom gets its name from a deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest. [Source]

A quick shout out to ProMed which is a great resource for hearing about disease outbreaks of known or unknown etiology around the world…check it out!

But really, Longan fruit is quite prevalent in Thailand as well and it is quite delicious. So, fantastical imagination aside, see below, feel free to read the culti-c disease activities plaguing Longan in Vietnam!

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

So I’ve gotten a lot of requests to know how my Saturday, August 21st went…

We’d decided to go zip lining with my Thai friend Fon and another friend from frisbee AnnaRae. It was actually a pretty perfect day to head out, cloudy but not raining which was amazing considering it’s been raining pretty constantly here. It was fairly cool even…well as cool as Bangkok, Thailand can get (86 degrees and 88% humidity). We headed north-east to ChonBuri to a tour called Fly with the Gibbons and after a brief introduction and getting geared up we were off on a 24 platform romp through the jungle…

Our guide couldn’t say my name, Mel, so I became Miaw (Cat in Thai) and everytime I came to the platform prior to sailing off it, he felt the need to meow several times. Around platform 19 we asked if I was married, I said no, he asked it I had a boyfriend…I said you see the 6’5 man that you just sent off to the next platform? Him. He called Tyghe Yak (but don’t pronounce the ‘k’ really and say it with emphasis on the ‘a’ sound), it means giant apparently.  He then proceeded to ‘marry’ AnnaRae on the next platform where you could go two at a time. AnnaRae said she’d fly over there with him and he surmised that now it would mean they were married.

So in a random turn of events I just decided to check this blog…today is July 15, 2013. My last entry was July 16, 2012. Coincidence?

I find it humorous that this blog has taken the form of most of my journals (diaries) where I have fits where I write everyday and periods of no activity until one day I randomly decide to write again. I don’t particularly advertise this blog aside from the facebook linking for family and friends that might be interested and I think you can find it via google searching. But this white screen that I type into is more for reflection than anything else, if others derive benefit from that, great.

Perhaps it’s providence that I’ve decided to check my blog. My last entry was about ‘dreams’ and where I was at. Since then life has been eventful but I still struggle with what will make me happy in my work…similar musings as to my last entry. Since then, I’ve gotten married, been quite productive if not incredibly frustrated at work, been back to Thailand to teach a workshop, been to Europe to attend a workshop, started a teaching blog for things I learn at workshops, started online newsletters for my field so others can tap into what I find on the internet, finished up a teaching fellowship, explored DC during free time… Life is clipping along as it should…

Somethings I’ve figured out in the past year:

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

Devotional Blog: 6/14/2012: “When good isn’t good enough” Romans 8:28 This isn’t out of the book I am going through which coincidentally arrived in the mail from Thailand in our first round of boxes–this is one I am just going to write. If you’ve read my previous blogs in the devotion section or perhaps in my life section or such you’ll know how I was raised. In a faith that stresses undying, unwavering faith in God and that everything works toward his plan and purpose.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Confused?…go Back”, 01/24/2012, Jeremiah 24: 6-7

How does one ‘hear’ from God? This is a loaded topic for me…

“I will give them hearts that will recognize me as the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me wholeheartedly” -NIV, Jeremiah 24:7

 

“After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” -NIV, 1 Kings 19:12

 

“He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.” -NIV, Rev 3:22

Confused? Always. I bumble my path routinely in an effort to ‘hear’ God and know what his plan and purpose for my life is. I say the prayers, I keep so still as to nearly faint from not breathing enough, I close my eyes and meditate during worship, think of things I’ve learned, listen to pastors and mentors more learned than me…

Majority of the time I think I must be on the wrong channel…cause all I ever get is static and I rarely know what exactly it is I am doing wrong.

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Who is God to you?, ⁹⁄₁₈-¹⁹⁄₂₀₁₁, Ezekiel 34:25-31 and Psalm 34: 8-14

So I grew up your ‘typical’ Christian kid or perhaps ‘typical’ isn’t the right word since I was raised more on the pentecostal/evangelical side and many other Christian sects think we’re pretty nuts…fair enough. I grew up in with a Christian bent toward pentecostal/evangelical due to where my parents chose to go to church. We started out in Calvary Christian, fairly conservative along with Cornerstone Christian churches then moved into the Vineyard ‘movement’ which was akin to house churches (they were usually small) and they popped up in random places whereever there was space…a strip mall vacant store, a school gym, another churches rec room, someones . To me the Vineyard churches felt very odd…sort of like the ‘hippy movement’ for Christianity. But this was my perception as a young child…

On a side note: It was in a Vineyard Sunday school where I learned about communion and received a piece a bread which is supposed to symbolize the body of Christ/Jesus…at which point I turned to my friend and squeezed the bread to ‘make it talk’ telling my friend ‘jesus loves you’…my sunday school teacher was not amused…

We attended such churches til I was 11 and moved to Hawaii. In Hawaii we attended a First Assembly church which was really small and has since expanded enormously to have satellite chapels all over the Pacific Rim and a congregation that I’ve seen attend at most 1,500 people–yowza! When we first started going I think 50 people on average…maybe 75-80 would attend. The church went from being a First Assembly Church to breaking off into it’s own entity now called King’s Cathedral headed by Pastor James Marocco, a man with several degrees including a Ph.D. from reputable universities such as USC. The man knows his history and theology.

Why do I say all this? Because this is what I grew up in. I didn’t question my faith growing up, it just was what it was. People lifting their hands and dancing in church? Ok…sure. People getting prayed for and ‘falling out in the spirit’…ok no worries. People receiving prophecy from pastors or prophets…this was all on par with my upbringing and it wasn’t ‘alien’ to me, though I’m sure all of this in one place might freak out a non-Christian or Christian with more sedate upbring in the faith. Our church in Hawaii wasn’t like this to begin with, they went through a series of ‘revivals’ and before y’all have nightmares of some backwoods area of a southern state…it wasn’t like that–I think.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

So while I was during Christmas I encountered many friends I have had since moving to the islands when I was 11 (10? 11?–ah doesn’t matter)…and I saw almost all of them between Oahu and Maui and talked to the rest via phone.  And between the people I know from home, all the friends I met and have through school and family–I have realized there are really two types of people. Those who live and those who exist. Not that one is particularly better than the other, just depends on the person.

I’m back from Brazil! I am not going to relate the specifics of my trip if you want to know that stuff check out the blog I kept: http://springinbrazil.blogspot.com but suffice it to say it was absolutely amazing. When I decided to go to Brazil I went to refocus and clarify somethings in my life about my future and where I am supposed to be following the completion of my thesis.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

So in a random turn of events I just decided to check this blog…today is July 15, 2013. My last entry was July 16, 2012. Coincidence?

I find it humorous that this blog has taken the form of most of my journals (diaries) where I have fits where I write everyday and periods of no activity until one day I randomly decide to write again. I don’t particularly advertise this blog aside from the facebook linking for family and friends that might be interested and I think you can find it via google searching. But this white screen that I type into is more for reflection than anything else, if others derive benefit from that, great.

Perhaps it’s providence that I’ve decided to check my blog. My last entry was about ‘dreams’ and where I was at. Since then life has been eventful but I still struggle with what will make me happy in my work…similar musings as to my last entry. Since then, I’ve gotten married, been quite productive if not incredibly frustrated at work, been back to Thailand to teach a workshop, been to Europe to attend a workshop, started a teaching blog for things I learn at workshops, started online newsletters for my field so others can tap into what I find on the internet, finished up a teaching fellowship, explored DC during free time… Life is clipping along as it should…

Somethings I’ve figured out in the past year:

William Borden was born into great wealth and attended Yale in 1905, but if you do a search on William Borden on the internet you won’t find great business dealings or a discovery of a new drug…he died at 25.  And to many his life was a great waste.

Well…I am now back from my trip to D.C. I got my fill of museums, dancing, city life, good (expensive) food, and monuments. All in all, not bad for a break. I will only describe one experience here.

I went to the Holocaust Museum. It was unbelievable well done. A lot of reading but absolutely amazing. I think that everyone should go through it despite the fears of going into a museum about such a depressing subject. It started with Hilter and Nazism’s rise to power and the political and economic situation of Germany at the time, goes through the inital arrests, then the Jews situation, into the Final Solution, and ends with a Final Chapter. You go in and they give you an ID card of someone who actually went through the Holocaust, it goes through their lives, and how they survived or did not survive the slaughter…**

In time you will find that to be happy with someone else, you first need to not need that person, you will find also that the person you love, or think you love, who doesn’t want to have anything to do with you, is not the person for your life. You will learn to like yourself, to take care of yourself, principally to like who likes you. The secret is not to chase after butterflies; it’s to take care of the garden so that they come to you.

All your life you live so close to truth it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye. And when something nudges it into outline, it’s like being ambushed by a grotesque.

~Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Devotional Blog: 10/22/2011, 10/26/2011, and 10/28/2011; “Being true to yourself” and “Fact and fiction”; Romans 12: 12-18, Acts 2: 32-39, and 2 Peter 1:15-21

I’m lumping these entries together because they speak of similar things regarding how we see ourselves compared to others, how others make us feel about ourselves and the alternate realities we concoct of a life ‘we want’ rather than the life we are supposed to be living.

So the husband pointed out that it’s been over a year since my last post and perhaps I was due to start blogging again. Oddly, the past few years since coming back to the US from Bangkok – specifically to Maryland/DC I just haven’t really been inspired to blog…as I’m sure you can tell from the copious lack of posts freakishly apparent on this blog. It’s difficult for me to write without a reason.

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Take Responsibility”, 01/25/2012, Romans 13:1-7, Galatians 6:5, 2 Corinthians 5:10

It’s her fault. It’s his fault. It’s their fault. The dog did it…

Kid’s Excuses:

1. One child to another: Whenever you tell a big fat lie to get away with breaking an ornament, vase etc.  Tell your mum, dad etc. that it threw itself off of the mantle piece, table etc and then add in that you always believed that there was something out there!
2. Mom:  Where’s your report card?  You:  Um, mommy I’m really sorry and everything.  But I didn’t do it or anything but you know how I walk to school?  Well, the bell rang and I went to my locker to put it in my backpack and some very mean kids took it and started playing monkey in the middle then someone yelled that there was a big fight so the kids dropped it and ran outside.  Then, I was walking & was looking at it and a dog chased me and got it and chewed it up!  Sorry!
3. I do what the cheerios tell me.
4. When I was little, I cut up my sheets, my excuse was, “Jesus did it!”****
5. The clowns made me do it…I sware!

Excuses given to police officers:

1. One night many years ago I was on patrol and observed a vehicle blow through a red light at a major intersection. There had been plenty of time to stop, yet the vehicle had not even slowed down. I stopped the car and asked the young female driver why she had done that. The girl told me she had just had her brakes repaired, it had been very expensive, and she DIDN’T WANT TO WEAR THEM DOWN! Usually I give people a pass if I haven’t heard their excuse before, but in this case she got the ticket. …………………………………. Submitted by… Dave Hoffman, Sergeant, Naperville IL PD

2. I stopped a car in a rural area of our county for going 80 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. The driver explained that he had a bee flying around his head so he sped up to 80, hoping that the bee couldn’t fly that fast and would not be able to fly out of the back seat area to get at him…..Submitted by…Gary Lenon, Mecosta County Sheriff Department, Michigan.

Amazing what we say to avoid blame not only as children but as adults as well.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Love and Riddles”, 12/6/2011, Song of Songs (Solomon) 2:1-17

So I’ll be jumping around a bit as I play catch up in my devotional blog ‘series’ out of this book. I’m combining two entries in this blog. So Song of Songs or Solomon as its called in some Bibles is quite the ‘lovers’ book. It’s very short, only 8 short chapters (about 4 Bible pages) and sits between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. I kept missing it when I was flipping through my Bible trying to find it. And the book is all about love and how to treat your lover. And how can you not think this books is about desire with verses like:

1:2 Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth–for your love is more delightful than wine. 1:13 My lover is to me a sachet of myrrh resting between my breasts.  1:16 My love is mine and I am his… 7:9-12 May the wine go straight to my lover, flowing gently over lips and teeth. I belong to my lover and his desire is for me. Come, my lover, let us go to the countryside let us spend the night in the villages. Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vines have budded, if their blossoms have opened,and if the pomegrantes are in bloom–there I will give you my love.

In spite of the lack of explicitly religious content, Song of Songs can also be interpreted as an allegorical representation of the relationship of God and Israel, or for Christians, Christ and the Church or Christ and the human soul (Cited from Wikipedia).

What struck me was the sincere passion these two characters within this book had for each other. Like all good internet junkies I googled “love”…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Slippery Slopes, 9/22/11, John 15:1-11

So I realize the author only has a page to get these topics aired out given this is an ‘on the go’ devotional, but this one…

Excerpt: “In my twenty-plus years of ministry, I have seen the slippery slope in many a woman’s life. She didn’t ‘mean’ to have an affair. She didn’t think a few glasses of wine would lead to alcoholism…”

And then she spends the rest of the section on women who ‘unequally yoke’ themselves to unbeliever men and how that leads to a slippery slope of marrying a non-believer and how that’s not right…I could tell she was trying to find a way into this topic specifically so she could spend the majority of her time there. Now I have grown up staunchily ingrained with this belief system. Don’t unequally yoke, don’t date a non-believer, don’t associate with non-believer men…And Christianity isn’t the only faith to somewhat ‘demonize’ (ok that’s a strong word) relationships with the non-believer. Infidels to islamic extremists, it doesn’t even have to be religion–mixing of cultures historically was taboo as well. An Indian buddy of mine during my internship at Yale said that his family specifically told him in college to ‘have as much fun as he wanted’ but marry an Indian girl. During the 1940’s in Russia it was unthinkable for a Jew to marry a Christian…and many of these values/divides between religions and cultures remain today.

This whole manner of thinking rather religious or cultural –I really hate it.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Take Responsibility”, 01/25/2012, Romans 13:1-7, Galatians 6:5, 2 Corinthians 5:10

It’s her fault. It’s his fault. It’s their fault. The dog did it…

Kid’s Excuses:

1. One child to another: Whenever you tell a big fat lie to get away with breaking an ornament, vase etc.  Tell your mum, dad etc. that it threw itself off of the mantle piece, table etc and then add in that you always believed that there was something out there!
2. Mom:  Where’s your report card?  You:  Um, mommy I’m really sorry and everything.  But I didn’t do it or anything but you know how I walk to school?  Well, the bell rang and I went to my locker to put it in my backpack and some very mean kids took it and started playing monkey in the middle then someone yelled that there was a big fight so the kids dropped it and ran outside.  Then, I was walking & was looking at it and a dog chased me and got it and chewed it up!  Sorry!
3. I do what the cheerios tell me.
4. When I was little, I cut up my sheets, my excuse was, “Jesus did it!”****
5. The clowns made me do it…I sware!

Excuses given to police officers:

1. One night many years ago I was on patrol and observed a vehicle blow through a red light at a major intersection. There had been plenty of time to stop, yet the vehicle had not even slowed down. I stopped the car and asked the young female driver why she had done that. The girl told me she had just had her brakes repaired, it had been very expensive, and she DIDN’T WANT TO WEAR THEM DOWN! Usually I give people a pass if I haven’t heard their excuse before, but in this case she got the ticket. …………………………………. Submitted by… Dave Hoffman, Sergeant, Naperville IL PD

2. I stopped a car in a rural area of our county for going 80 MPH in a 55 MPH zone. The driver explained that he had a bee flying around his head so he sped up to 80, hoping that the bee couldn’t fly that fast and would not be able to fly out of the back seat area to get at him…..Submitted by…Gary Lenon, Mecosta County Sheriff Department, Michigan.

Amazing what we say to avoid blame not only as children but as adults as well.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Rights and Responsibility, 9/14/11, Colossians 4:2-6

So this was a discussion of role models and if by becoming  role model you give up your ‘rights’ to do certain things…ala movie or music stars having fits, getting into drugs or whatnot. Granted getting into drugs isn’t a ‘right’ for anyone let alone the famous but apparently it’s all the worse because those who are famous become role models whether they like it or not. It reminds me of the quote from Spiderman: “With great power comes great responsibility”; which surprisingly enough was not originally coined by Spiderman comics but rather Thomas Francis Gilroy in 1892, it has also been attributed to Voltaire (Voltaire. Jean, Adrien. Beuchot, Quentin and Miger, Pierre, Auguste. “Œuvres de Voltaire, Volume 48”. Lefèvre, 1832). Whether history or marvel comic the statement rings true.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Mark It”, 10/21/2011, Joshua 4:15-24

First I have a confession…I’d forgotten that Joshua was a book in the Bible! Horrible of me! Raised in this faith and when I saw the verse for the day I did a double take and asked myself–“This is a book in the Bible?…DOH!”. Bible literacy fail. Yes, I know the story of the fall of Jericho is in this book but for some reason I had it in my head that this story was in Deuteronomy–don’t ask why, I don’t know. So, in all fairness when was the last time I heard of this book? Eighth grade Bible history class at Bellevue Christian School where I attended one semester, does that excuse it? Probably not, but its what I’m going with.

The book of Joshua is about the Israelites journey into the promised land. When the crossed the Jordan, the Lord dried up the Jordan momentarily so they could pass. God then asked Joshua (who was leading them, he was the right hand of Moses by the way), anyway he asked Joshua to pick 12 men to take 1 stone each from the riverbed of the Jordan = 12 stones. When they’d stopped at Gilgal the western border of Jericho God told him to set up the stones as a reminder for generations to come that the Lord had pushed the waters back for their forefathers to walk on dry land into the promised land.

Pam, the author talking about ‘marking’ things that matter in our lives to solidify a memory in a solid shape of sorts, like making a stepping stone and putting into a garden then adding stepping stones. Thinking back I can remember all my ‘mementos’, my ‘mark it moments’ and when I got them, how I got them and where they are today and why they mattered. Compared to other families we had a more mobile life growing up so some of these ‘moments’ are no longer with me so I carry them in my heart instead…in no particular order…just as they come to me.

So I’ve gotten a lot of requests to know how my Saturday, August 21st went…

We’d decided to go zip lining with my Thai friend Fon and another friend from frisbee AnnaRae. It was actually a pretty perfect day to head out, cloudy but not raining which was amazing considering it’s been raining pretty constantly here. It was fairly cool even…well as cool as Bangkok, Thailand can get (86 degrees and 88% humidity). We headed north-east to ChonBuri to a tour called Fly with the Gibbons and after a brief introduction and getting geared up we were off on a 24 platform romp through the jungle…

Our guide couldn’t say my name, Mel, so I became Miaw (Cat in Thai) and everytime I came to the platform prior to sailing off it, he felt the need to meow several times. Around platform 19 we asked if I was married, I said no, he asked it I had a boyfriend…I said you see the 6’5 man that you just sent off to the next platform? Him. He called Tyghe Yak (but don’t pronounce the ‘k’ really and say it with emphasis on the ‘a’ sound), it means giant apparently.  He then proceeded to ‘marry’ AnnaRae on the next platform where you could go two at a time. AnnaRae said she’d fly over there with him and he surmised that now it would mean they were married.

Devotional Blog:

Christian ‘Culture’, Depravity and Salvation, 2/29/2012, Ephesians 2:8-9

I love meeting new people, hearing new points of view listening to life adventures, life realizations and commiserating on mutual experiences. So 2012 is a leap year and there was no entry in my devotional book for this day so this is my own devotional. Honestly I do have any number of pages in the book dog eared to write about as I am fantastically behind in my posting, but I find I enjoy writing more when I am writing about something that is currently bothering or inspiring me. Enter today’s topic.

I had the pleasure of meeting someone with a very similar upbringing to myself and we bantered back and forth about being children having grown up in the church. Children who grew up in the church, most likely said their ‘salvation’ prayer at a young age, went through the ‘Christian’ motions growing up, sunday school, youth camp, retreats, revivals, door to door evangelism, whatnot. We ‘shunned’ the people we were supposed to shun or hate, we accepted the people that fit into the Christian box and we were encouraged that the greatest calling in life is that of ministry. Christian culture surrounded us, we memorized verses, held our hands up in deference to God during worship, allowed people to pray for us, we prayed for people, we knew all the ins and outs of the culture and we really didn’t have an understanding of what true ‘salvation’ was…but of course we were saved…weren’t we?

This past weekend Tyghe and I went to the beach thankful for the ability to escape flooding Bangkok, play some frisbee and enjoy the beach. We went to Phuket, a highly built up island in southern Thailand that is run for the most part by the Thai mafia from what we’ve been told and perhaps has links with Russian mafia as well–given the influx of so many Russian tourists, and all three languages (Russian, English and Thai) present on the island, it wouldn’t surprise me. In essence many who travel to Phuket accept the fact they will be overcharged for everything…absolutely everything. But I am not going to talk about our holiday…Tyghe will do a great job of that on his blog so see that for the vacay story and I believe he mentions what I will talk about. His blog will be a great sum up with pictures–the happy stuff which was indeed happy and I had a great time in that respect. Instead I will highlight one not so awesome experience as it resulted in an interesting topic related to faith. This is not a ‘devotional blog entry’…it’s a life entry…life based on faith.

Mmmm…hungry time for lunch… lunch, pork and vegis with sauce and rice hair in food… hmmmm…my hair or their hair *pulls hair from food* their hair *flicks hair onto ground, keeps eating*–meh pause i wonder how many microbes are on a typical piece of hair i wonder how many microbes are on my hair i wash my hair does she wash her hair *looks at lady serving food* maybe I should culture/test my hair

Devotional Blog:

“Lights Flashing”, 6/21/2012, 1 Corinthians 4:5

Ok, back to the book after quite the hiatus.

When the Lord comes, he will bring our deepest secrets to light and will reveal our private motives… ~1 Corinthians 4:5

Well now isn’t that a scary thought? How many secrets does one carry throughout life? How many thoughts do we think would we be ashamed of if someone were to actually crawl into our head and listen to. Thankfully people can’t crawl into each others heads and truly hear the thoughts that roll through them.

Funny thing is, growing up this verse made us wary of the ‘big’ secrets…infidelity, sex before marriage, stealing, physically hurting someone etc. Our pastors would often times use the image of a huge projector screen showing all our sins and evil thoughts to the world for all our family and friends to see. Oh the embarrassment! Oh the judgement! Oh the pain we would cause ourselves and other people with our hidden sins that haven’t been brought to light and forgiven. I used to live in fear as a kid, paranoia even that when I died God would put me on a stage and broadcast my entire ‘evil’ life of every little thing I’d ever done that wasn’t 100% ‘saintly’, down to beating the crap out of a stuffed animal because I was angry. Yes, as a child I occasionally beat the crap out of dolls and stuffed animals out of frustration. I ripped pages out of my journals and threw tantrums in my room out of sight and earshot of anyone. Much of my anger and frustration growing up I kept inside, in fact all of it I kept inside. And while these ‘tantrums’ and stuffed animal beatings seem harmless enough at first sight, my thoughts got darker as I grew up.

What about the little ‘secrets’ the thoughts no one hears about, the thoughts that will never be voiced but are nonetheless there… the dark thoughts.

So it’s been a good while since I have posted anything as I’ve been attending a conference in Philadelphia, PA put on by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. Following the denouement of the conference I found myself at El Vez restaurant, awesome restaurant by the way, just down from my hotel sipping on a very strong (apparently) pomegranate margarita and going over my notes whilst eating lunch. And for those of you following my blog and know I’m fasting–before you cry foul, this week I’m off it due to a number of reasons but will promptly re-initiate when I return to Bangkok. When one is fasting for a year…actually turns out to be a little longer, I have to allow myself a certain modicum of sanity. Or rather preserve what I have. In anycase, back to matter at hand…

So I’ve been at this conference for the past week and it’s proven very informative though I feel like a small genetic fish swimming in a sea of immunology and epidemiology which is a bit disconcerting, especially since I come from a completely environmental background with minimal medical/clinical knowledge.

Now I am a genetic data cruncher who enjoys population level analysis with some mathematical modelling thrown in for good measure…

I know right? The personal ad practically writes itself.

Unofficial Devotional Blog: (not in book, but I’m gonna write it anyway)

Topic: “love, judgement, right and wrong” (verses…many, see below)

Since I started this devotional ‘section’ to my blog I’ve talked about a lot of different topics introduced to me by this rather ‘fluffy’ devotional book that I’ve been making my way through. And I actually was going to write another entry based in that book but as I opened the link to start a new blog…all this came flowing out instead. For an introduction to how this all got started in all the ‘devotion’ stuff see the first blog about my attempt at keeping regular devotions and analyzing my faith. Topics ranged in this book from finding your ‘hidden sin (blog post)’, leadership and mentorship (blog 1, blog 2), family and finances (blog), wishing for a different life (blog), acceptance (blog), love and forgiveness (blog), relationships with non-believers (blog), trauma (blog), life purpose/being saved for something I wrote on the anniversary of ⁹⁄₁₁ (blog) and many of the things I’ve said, done or written have gotten me pegged throughout life as a ‘lukewarm Christian’.

I read a blog post entitled “I’m Christian unless you are Gay” written by a guy whose blog I follow because he has interesting things to say. Since it’s been written it’s gotten 74K plus facebook ‘likes’ and has been shared I’m sure countless times to ‘mixed’ reviews sometimes. I am one of those that shared this post on facebook and now I am sharing it here with my own take. I encourage you to read his post (linked above) in its entirety as well as some of the responses to the post both negative and positive. He’s caused quite the firestorm and some of the responses were very powerful.

After reading his post and all the responses…two quotes stuck with me.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Not a Hint”, 11/19/2001, Ephesians 5: 3-7

The author has the uncanny ability to piss me off in some of these entries. Perhaps one page or less isn’t enough space for her to fully explain what she means by what she says. Or perhaps she intends to bother her readers and sound a bit high and mighty.  I’m not saying her choice of verses and topics aren’t good ones…though not all of them I can relate with, hence do not write about. I suppose I wish she was a little more encompasing in her topics. No I don’t want her to sugar coat ‘sin’ as she defines it but I’d like it if she didn’t freak out ‘new’ Christians who might pick up her book and think–holy ‘$%!@’ and question Christianitys sincerity. I’ll explain further.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Spending Time”, 12/27/2011, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

This entry encouraged us to log our time for one week to see where our ‘priorities and passions’ were in our lives.

So a week from Sunday to Saturday (7 days) has 168 hours in it. Of those 168, I was alseep 53.5 hours…an average of 7.6 hrs/day. Although Saturday skews that as I slept 11 hours on Saturday and and if I just look at the work week, I slept an average of 6.9 hours/day. Apparently on the weekends I like my sleep, not to mention as the week progressed I got worse at getting up on time. My alarm goes off at 6am, I managed to get up and go work Monday and Tues at 6:30am. Weds and Thurs that got later and I managed to get up and go to work at 7am…on Friday it was 730am. A lot of wake-up fail!

So 168 hours in a week minus 54.5 sleeping = 113.5 to account for waking hours…which we’ll soon find out isn’t an altogether true statement…doh!

As the title suggests I walked into the office this morning to two computers…both shut off. Now no one touches my desk especially when I have analysis running and we had a huge storm last night with lightening and wind and although Bangkok is a ‘1st’ world entity of itself some days the fact of the matter is, I live in a 3rd world country that is 98% agriculture. The result?

So in the world of molecular evolution one of the cu-de-gras-de-analysis programs would have to be BEAST. A power-packed bayesian analysis software that makes phylogenetic trees, calculates the time to the most recent common ancestor (tMRCA) and substitution rates, geographic partitioning, can handle copious amounts of data and pretty much squeezes blood from a turnip…walks on water…heals your mother, in short, it’s cool.

Sound awesome? It is. For a more technical in depth discussion and introduction to BEAST software I suggest reading the Wiki and attacking the tutorials with full force as well as reading some awesome books on phylogenetic inference such as The Phylogenetic Handbook. If you are super impatient and channeling your inner terrible twos about phylogenetic analysis then read Phylogenetic Trees Made Easy. It has a nice introduction and literal button for button how tos on different software packages including Bayesian ones. When you’ve finished your tantrum, enter the adult world and read Felsenstein or the phylogenetic handbook mentioned above. Now that you’ve been introduced to phylogenetic inference and genetic analysis with forays into evolution over time…jump into BEAST. Although the BEAST wiki and manual are still navigate-able without that background but you’ll be scratching your head a bit and heading to google for answers.

Devotioanl Blog:

“Looking for love in all the wrong places”, “You Can”, “There is a Plan”; 6/23/2012, 6/22/2012, 3/12/2012; 1 Peter 4:8, Luke 13:12, Jeremiah 29:11

You ever hear the joke that you should listen to country songs backwards? Why? Because then they become exceedingly happier…you get your house back, your dog back, your woman back, your tires un-slashed and your guitar un-smashed.

I’ve noticed a trend in many entries of this book. In many examples of people’s lives that she uses…when it rains it doesn’t just pour–it’s a fricken hurricane and it’s not ‘waves of life’ that hit people, it’s a damn tsunami!

So this past weekend I got to attempt to get in touch with my inner entomologist…sort of. I went up to the AFRIMS entomology facility in the North at Kamphaeng Phet. Their main purpose is to wait for patient blood samples collected from the villages to come back positive for Dengue virus then they mobilize and head out to the village. They enroll and collected mosquitoes from houses within a 200 m radius of the index house that has the patient. They use backpack aspirators to collect the mosquitoes record information about the house and give it a unique ID. Back at the lab, mosquitoes are sorted into their respective species, Ae. aegypti females being of most interest, and dissected as we are only interested in their head and thorax for Dengue PCR/isolation. The goal being cluster studies of Dengue in patients and mosquitoes and to track movement from village to village. Then I come in with my all-powerful, mostly open source programs and attempt to correlate/track the genetics vs. epidemiology of host/vector.

FIRST and foremost it was anonymous info gathering, no way to link anyone to anything here–anon posts were used. AND I have the authors permission and enthusiastic support in fact to share this information from his paper/poster.

The Authors: JA Fries (Computer Science Graduate Student), TY Ho (Comp Sci graduate student), PM Polgreen (his boss and assistant prof at Univ of Iowa), AM Serge.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything… Amazing how quickly life can go from a single path to a different path in mere days. It would be nice if the paths in our lives to success was straight and we merely had to find the right puzzle pieces in the path…

I knew Thanksgiving was celebrated in the USA and Canada but I didn’t know they celebrated Thanksgiving in Liberia, apparently it coincides with the Church’s harvest day. Interesting. I wonder if there’s a history of celebrating Thanksgiving there or if this was a one time 2010 venture.

This year given I have been taken in many times for holidays we are hosting Thanksgiving at our place. Though, I am not making a turkey as they are scarce and expensive in Thailand. Thais do not celebrate Thanksgiving but its always nice to have an excuse to go to someone’s house to eat and partake in general merriment celebrating what American children learn as our ‘dinner with the Indians’. Indians who we then learn later in school, we decimated with smallpox, measles, typhus and plague among other diseases and war. DOH!

So yesterday at 8:29 am (according to facebook) I posted an article from the Economist entitled: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic and it’s quite interesting the responses I’ve been getting. The article is at: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223.

Some people whole heartedly agreed with the article, others were slightly offended at the insinuation that 5-8 years of labor was all for naught.

I thought the article was quite dispiriting and portrayed obtaining a PhD as this ‘waste of intellect/life’ and honestly you’d be hard pressed to find any PhD student that doesn’t think that at some point during their degree process. If you don’t believe me, check out PhD comics (www.phdcomics.com) where their tag line is: “Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in academia.” They even mention graduate education as learning the ‘dark arts.’ I was and still am an avid reader of the comic.

I wrote this in high school as an English project and figured I would post it as my tribute to Edgar Allen Poe on his birthday, which is today January 19th. It’s a parody of his poem ‘The Raven’. Now it was an English project so I had to copy the meter and style and everything…looking back I think it was a pretty decent job. That and well…I was an odd teenager, I still am odd…just not a teenager anymore.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Spending Time”, 12/27/2011, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

This entry encouraged us to log our time for one week to see where our ‘priorities and passions’ were in our lives.

So a week from Sunday to Saturday (7 days) has 168 hours in it. Of those 168, I was alseep 53.5 hours…an average of 7.6 hrs/day. Although Saturday skews that as I slept 11 hours on Saturday and and if I just look at the work week, I slept an average of 6.9 hours/day. Apparently on the weekends I like my sleep, not to mention as the week progressed I got worse at getting up on time. My alarm goes off at 6am, I managed to get up and go work Monday and Tues at 6:30am. Weds and Thurs that got later and I managed to get up and go to work at 7am…on Friday it was 730am. A lot of wake-up fail!

So 168 hours in a week minus 54.5 sleeping = 113.5 to account for waking hours…which we’ll soon find out isn’t an altogether true statement…doh!

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Pretty Good Company”, 12/29/11, John 12: 20-28

Happy Birthday Edgar Allen Poe, Born January 19, 1809. Odd way to start a devotional post complete with topic title and Bible verse by saying happy birthday to a man whose poetry and stories are often of the macabre gothic nature and depressing, but now that I’ve piqued your curiosity, stick with me…

Today’s entry is about walking into the dreams that God has given us in our lives. The visions, the promises, the hopes…and perhaps not getting to see or experience the fruits of our labors, our suffering, our patience. The author (Pam) goes onto to say, ‘you are not alone’. You are not the only one to receive great promises only to never see them come to pass in your lifetime or as Moses did, stand at the border and watch your people walk into the promise led by another man. How heinously frustrating. You do everything you believe God is telling you to do, you walk through the doors, you invest time, faith, money, more time, more faith….you sit and watch as others experience the joy that comes from their dreams or promises coming to pass and you sit. You sit, telling yourself to be patient, telling yourself God has not forgotten you, telling yourself that you want things in God’s timing. Then you look up and you say God WHEN is your timing!!!???  And you cry out…you cry out.

So this past weekend Tyghe and I went to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon) for a frisbee tournament. The city itself is very different than Bangkok, it has more of a European flair/influence in the architecture of many buildings and baguettes on every corner. There are also millions of motorbikes…I think they outnumber cars. Attempting to cross the street was harrowing at first because the cars and bikes never really stop they simply just ‘magically’ part as you walk slow and steady across the street. As soon as you got used to that, walking around became easier. We stayed in Backpacker central which is equivalent to Khao San Road in Bangkok and it was interesting a lot of cool bars and cafes. I had high hopes of doing some exploring there but unfortunately we ran out of time…can only take so much time off work as it is. But we were there to play some frisbee and did we ever!

So here’s a snapshot of the trip/tournament from the point of view of a relative ‘newcomer’ to the frisbee world on her first out of country (I live in Thailand) hat tournament…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Cultivating the quiet”, 01/08/12, Psalm 23: 1-6

Hey…I’m into January in this book…well actually I’m backlogged and still have some blogs from December’s month in the book to write but I kind of just dog-ear them and will get to them, eventually.

Interestingly this one came up. In a previous entry in the book the author had encouraged us to spend our time productively and not waste it and I wrote a blog about how taking moments to ‘space out’ and how valuable that can be for ones mental health. Now in this entry she encourages moments of quiet stating that a ‘quiet heart is a receptive heart’. 1 Peter 3:4 states, pulling from the previous verse–beauty…”should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.” Pslam 23: 2 states: “He lets me rest in green meadows; he leads me beside peaceful streams…”

Flipping through the book this morning to find an entry dog-earred to write about I came across this and it hit a nerve for me. In the past few weeks my life has taken a tremendous turn.

A month in Thailand…amazing how quickly adaptable a person can become given continuously changing circumstances. I work in the Virology Dept of a U.S. military medical science institute (AFRIMS). My focus, dengue virus with perhaps occasional forays into malaria and avian influenza. Being raised in Hawaii and having traveled abroad to Central and South America I thought I was prepared for inevitable massacre of heat and humidity. Alas, nothing can prepare you for the literal melting of your body the moment you step onto the tarmac at Suvarnabhumi airport. I suppose it doesn’t help that I’ve decided to enter Thailand at the hottest time of year. No it’s actually perfectly in keeping in a life where I decided to go to graduate school in Montana, moving from Hawaii in mid-January and stepping off the plane to 10 below zero. Apparently I live for extremes.

Devotional Blog:

Topic: Breaking patterns of trauma, 9/15/11, Isaiah 57: 12-14

This entry in the book was ‘interesting’ and amounted to saying ‘get over yourself’ at the end or you are going to seriously $#@! up your kids. The simplicity in which she treats this topic bothered me a little. Now, I agree I just ‘summed’ up the topic above in one sentence but her approach and link to the verse was unclear to me until the end and I still was like…does this make sense in light of her ‘verse of the day’….so I dissected it.

I wrote this in high school as an English project and figured I would post it as my tribute to Edgar Allen Poe on his birthday, which is today January 19th. It’s a parody of his poem ‘The Raven’. Now it was an English project so I had to copy the meter and style and everything…looking back I think it was a pretty decent job. That and well…I was an odd teenager, I still am odd…just not a teenager anymore.

Ok after yesterdays sidetrack event of commenting on a blog I’d read entitled “I’m Christian unless you’re gay” (read it if you get a chance), now, back to the book…

Devotional Blog:

Topic: “Trust”, 11/27/2011, Jeremiah 31:1-6 and Ruth 3:5

In this section the author, Pam, goes into what it means to have a trusting relationship. She opens with something Ruth said in the Bible: “I will do whatever you say”–what guy wouldn’t want to hear that from a woman? Sorry guys, she was saying it to her mother-in-law. I find the concept of trust interesting in that I have some friends that are incredibly trusting and some that have some incredible walls built up…hell you need some seriously specialized climbing gear to get up the smooth face of their walls.

Then you inevitably ask the question ‘is it worth it?’ Which is terrible I know, they are your friend after all. But it is exceedingly frustrating to think you are making progress only to find yourself on a temporary ledge with your friend laughing at you from above…continually saying ‘you don’t know me, you can never know me’. At that point I’d just rather rappel down and call it a day. Of course self-discovery and self-trust is an ongoing process and I’m sure I’ve frustrated many a friend as well, even though I wouldn’t say I put up walls…I think rather its just a fundamental misunderstanding of personalities. You build an image of what you think someone is in your head and when that turns out to be untrue it throws you for a loop. Not because they misled you but because you built this image that wasn’t who they were inside. Its not a matter of ‘good or bad’, its just not who they were and you have to step back and decide if you are going to take the time to dispense with all your, perhaps years of, preconceived notions and really get to know the person for who they are. Sometimes we are able to do that, sometimes circumstances prevent that option.

I used to say I was very ‘guarded’ didn’t really trust anyone–but who am I kidding…its not who I am. At best I had phases of distrust that ended up evaporating as the event that triggered the distrust faded. Personally I’m a pretty open book, people don’t have to work too hard to read me. At first I was insulted because I thought of myself as a chameleon, I could put on whatever face was required and they’d never know ‘me’. So when people said  I was easy to read I was aghast…and here I thought I was this great actress. This was when it was ‘hip’ to be mysterious…ya, no, I’m not mysterious haha. I was in theater from 6th grade up through high school and some in college and didn’t get bad reviews. As an actress, ok I didn’t suck, but as a person–who am I kidding–I suck at hiding my feelings. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t stubborn. Which I know probably drove some of my friends and boyfriends and family insane, knowing something was dreadfully wrong but not being able to truly pry it out of me.

So yesterday at 8:29 am (according to facebook) I posted an article from the Economist entitled: Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic and it’s quite interesting the responses I’ve been getting. The article is at: http://www.economist.com/node/17723223.

Some people whole heartedly agreed with the article, others were slightly offended at the insinuation that 5-8 years of labor was all for naught.

I thought the article was quite dispiriting and portrayed obtaining a PhD as this ‘waste of intellect/life’ and honestly you’d be hard pressed to find any PhD student that doesn’t think that at some point during their degree process. If you don’t believe me, check out PhD comics (www.phdcomics.com) where their tag line is: “Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD) is the comic strip about life (or lack thereof) in academia.” They even mention graduate education as learning the ‘dark arts.’ I was and still am an avid reader of the comic.

So this past weekend Tyghe and I went to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City (a.k.a. Saigon) for a frisbee tournament. The city itself is very different than Bangkok, it has more of a European flair/influence in the architecture of many buildings and baguettes on every corner. There are also millions of motorbikes…I think they outnumber cars. Attempting to cross the street was harrowing at first because the cars and bikes never really stop they simply just ‘magically’ part as you walk slow and steady across the street. As soon as you got used to that, walking around became easier. We stayed in Backpacker central which is equivalent to Khao San Road in Bangkok and it was interesting a lot of cool bars and cafes. I had high hopes of doing some exploring there but unfortunately we ran out of time…can only take so much time off work as it is. But we were there to play some frisbee and did we ever!

So here’s a snapshot of the trip/tournament from the point of view of a relative ‘newcomer’ to the frisbee world on her first out of country (I live in Thailand) hat tournament…

I decided to repost this from ProMed because I thought it was interesting…who comes up with these disease names!? When I saw it in my inbox of course I had visions of cult activities involving longan fruit in the jungles of Vietnam…yes I have an active imagination.

Witch’s broom gets its name from a deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest. [Source]

A quick shout out to ProMed which is a great resource for hearing about disease outbreaks of known or unknown etiology around the world…check it out!

But really, Longan fruit is quite prevalent in Thailand as well and it is quite delicious. So, fantastical imagination aside, see below, feel free to read the culti-c disease activities plaguing Longan in Vietnam!

Devotional Blog:

Topic: A reason you are ‘here’… 9/11/11: 1 Timothy 2:1-7

I thought it uncanny and eerie that I should read about this today…it being the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy. Last week in my perpetual hunt for books I came across several accounts of ⁹⁄₁₁, no doubt because the anniversary was coming up so they were encouraging people to read the first person accounts and stories surrounding that day. There are a lot of first person accounts from survivors and from those who watched and tried to help. BBC wrote an article asking the question “Is there a novel that defines the ⁹⁄₁₁ decade?” and sums up the novels and stories that have come out of ⁹⁄₁₁ since it happened. I ended up downloading to my Kindle “102 Minutes” by Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn which has had incredibly high ratings about the collapse of the world trade centers towers and “Who they Were” by Robert Schaler, which discusses those who ‘jumped’ from the towers during that day and others which forensics teams struggled to identify; which has received mixed reviews. It is widely supported that “Tower Stories: An Oral History of ⁹⁄₁₁” is also one of the best books about what happened as well.

Simple perusing of the news pops up hundreds of accounts from survivors all of whom struggle with memories from that day, people, friends, family they lost and why they survived…why them. Artie Van Why wasn’t actually in the towers but in a building next to them, him and co-worker ran out to see what happened then ran toward the towers to help amidst falling debris and people. He says that he always thought that when you fall from high enough you are dead before you hit the ground…but he realized that these people were very much alive holding their arms out as if to cushion the impact as they fell. When the towers collapsed they all ran…he made it, his co-worker did not. [his story here].

Survivors of any terrible experience grapple with survivors guilt…the perpetual question of why me? Why did I survive. I am sure soldiers go through this trauma as well after coming from a fight where they saw fellow soldiers fall and die. The documentary Restrepo deals with this in their portrayal of a group of Marines who were sent to the most dangerous part of Afghanistan, The Korengal Valley, for deployment…not all came back.

Survivors of the holocaust oftentimes will tackle the emotions and convictions that come with being the only survivor in their family and having witnessed such atrocities enacted on them and their friends. I wrote about this in an earlier blog after having visited the Holocaust museum in D.C.

Though we all might not ascribe to the same belief I am sure many of us wonder about our purpose for being here, why we survive things while others do not, how watching someone die makes you realize how infinitesimal your life can seem and how easily it can be snuffed out. There are those of us that ascribe survival and such as “God’s providence”…we have a purpose in life and we will not be taken, not die, til that purpose is completed. This is the general thinking. But as soon as that purpose has been accomplished–poof…time for snuffing and many accept that, although the prospect of death is still hard to grapple with. Not so much because it’s ‘death’…I think many people are more terrified of ‘how’ they might die than actual death itself.

In the end, for those left behind or those that survived, the question remains…were you saved/spared for a reason? Do you have a purpose to accomplish greater than yourself though you may not know it?

Well…I am now back from my trip to D.C. I got my fill of museums, dancing, city life, good (expensive) food, and monuments. All in all, not bad for a break. I will only describe one experience here.

I went to the Holocaust Museum. It was unbelievable well done. A lot of reading but absolutely amazing. I think that everyone should go through it despite the fears of going into a museum about such a depressing subject. It started with Hilter and Nazism’s rise to power and the political and economic situation of Germany at the time, goes through the inital arrests, then the Jews situation, into the Final Solution, and ends with a Final Chapter. You go in and they give you an ID card of someone who actually went through the Holocaust, it goes through their lives, and how they survived or did not survive the slaughter…**

So another blog on the wedding planning is sorely overdue, I thought I would regale you with the tale of finding a dress. Now I haven’t ‘found’ the dress persay but the adventure of finding one has been interesting to say the least.

I always thought I’d be more excited about finding shoes for the wedding than my actual dress.

So another blog on the wedding planning is sorely overdue, I thought I would regale you with the tale of finding a dress. Now I haven’t ‘found’ the dress persay but the adventure of finding one has been interesting to say the least.

I always thought I’d be more excited about finding shoes for the wedding than my actual dress.

I decided to repost this from ProMed because I thought it was interesting…who comes up with these disease names!? When I saw it in my inbox of course I had visions of cult activities involving longan fruit in the jungles of Vietnam…yes I have an active imagination.

Witch’s broom gets its name from a deformity in a woody plant, typically a tree, where the natural structure of the plant is changed. A dense mass of shoots grows from a single point, with the resulting structure resembling a broom or a bird’s nest. [Source]

A quick shout out to ProMed which is a great resource for hearing about disease outbreaks of known or unknown etiology around the world…check it out!

But really, Longan fruit is quite prevalent in Thailand as well and it is quite delicious. So, fantastical imagination aside, see below, feel free to read the culti-c disease activities plaguing Longan in Vietnam!

Devotional Blog: 12/21/11, Topic: “Workers at Home”, Titus 2: 3-5 I’ve heard this verse used to justify a woman’s calling to ‘stay at ‘ and raise a family as opposed to being independent and working. I’m not going to say much about this books devotional entry except that I like how the author deals with this and I agree with what she says…amazing given I rarely agree with what she has to say.

Devotional Blog: “Get me out of here”, 10/29/2011; Matthew 6:9-15.

Evil. This blog is going to be a small rant…fyi.

In the entry Pam (the author) talks about Adam and Eve and how Eve was tempted by the snake (Satan) to eat of the tree (the ‘infamous’ apple) of the knowledge of good and evil using lies and ‘half’ truths.

“Our flesh wants fulfillment; then our eyes want what we see; then we want something to brag about. Eve fell for the same three things. It feels so good: Her flesh wanted the fruit. It looks so good: Her eyes saw the delicious-looking fruit, and she wanted it. It sounds so good: Then she fells for the big one: ‘You can be like God’. Now that would be something brag about, but it was all lies.”

She paints Eve to be like this apple harlot! I don’t think the Bible talks of Eve’s LUST for the apple or desire to BRAG about her apple exploits. I think there’s a difference between saying the apple looked good to eat and lust. Should she have eaten it, no of course not…but the way the author has described it I have visions of Eve rolling around in a bed of apples…it’s just weird.

Devotional Blog:

The Word of God, 03/02/2012, 2 Timothy 3:16

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. ~2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)

So I figured I should start chipping away at all the dog eared pages in this devotional book that I’ve been neglecting. I keep up on my daily reading but somedays I have enough time to blog and other days I don’t so they end up dog eared for future contemplation. Oddly enough this entry is about ‘bearing each others burdens’ rather than the word of God but when I read it, I realized I needed to address the ‘word of God’ topic first. I’ll explain…

From the devotional: “We all need to make time for Bible study. David writes in Psalm 73:26, ‘My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.’ (NIV)…Only as I make God’s Word a priority do I have anything to give. A Bible study should be a refuge, a safe harbor.”

A week or so ago in a conversation with friends I stated that scripture will never ‘convince’ me of whether someone is ‘right or wrong’. No one will ever ‘win’ an argument with me only using scripture. I think I’ve even stated in previous blogs that I refuse to go tit for tat on Bible verses for various reasons aside from its just plain tedious and I feel its more ‘posturing your verse memorization prowess’, rather than attempting to make a valid point. For the first time now, I am wondering why that is. I am a Christian after all and I believe in God’s word, why isn’t God’s divinely inspired word enough to convince me of someone’s argument?

Devotional Blog:

“Regroup”, 7/15/2012, Proverbs 9:9

So last weekend I was talking to my mom and last night I was talking to my sister and with both conversations I found myself pondering my choice of ‘life path’. If you’ve read previous entries in this section of my blog you will know that I’ve said that I’ve always just walked through the paths I feel like God has opened to me assuming that’s direction he wants me to go. It is after all the only path that’s opened up, so I just walk through it. Did I think ‘this’ is where my path was leading? Actually no.

I thought this was funny…and I could relate to some of the ‘evaluations’ so I thought I would share. These quotes were taken from federal employee evaluations, crazily enough. I wonder if advisers/bosses knew that their employees could read the evaluations they’d still write things this harsh? Probably. Her women would follow her anywhere, but only out of morbid curiosity. Since my last report she has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.

So I’ve gotten a lot of requests to know how my Saturday, August 21st went…

We’d decided to go zip lining with my Thai friend Fon and another friend from frisbee AnnaRae. It was actually a pretty perfect day to head out, cloudy but not raining which was amazing considering it’s been raining pretty constantly here. It was fairly cool even…well as cool as Bangkok, Thailand can get (86 degrees and 88% humidity). We headed north-east to ChonBuri to a tour called Fly with the Gibbons and after a brief introduction and getting geared up we were off on a 24 platform romp through the jungle…

Our guide couldn’t say my name, Mel, so I became Miaw (Cat in Thai) and everytime I came to the platform prior to sailing off it, he felt the need to meow several times. Around platform 19 we asked if I was married, I said no, he asked it I had a boyfriend…I said you see the 6’5 man that you just sent off to the next platform? Him. He called Tyghe Yak (but don’t pronounce the ‘k’ really and say it with emphasis on the ‘a’ sound), it means giant apparently.  He then proceeded to ‘marry’ AnnaRae on the next platform where you could go two at a time. AnnaRae said she’d fly over there with him and he surmised that now it would mean they were married.