My pledge for 2009: pursue justice, show mercy, and walk humbly with my God

We had an opportunity this weekend to write a post for Beliefnet about our declaration of service for 2009. The posts are in conjunction with the Huffington Post.

The truth is, I'd already been thinking about my pledge to service for 2009. It's not a coincidence then that someone made me declare it publicily, because now I can't hide from it.

See, I read the Bible last year, from cover to cover. It's the first time in all my years as a Christian that I did that. I didn't use any commentaries, I didn't stop and find answers to my questions. I just read and made notes, and filled a journal with things I didn't understand.

And in the end, I was struck by how, more than anything, God talks about justice, mercy, compassion, and humility. About how our service is actually our worship. About how God demands mercy before sacrifice.

What good is it to offer God my entire paycheck, if on the way to the church I passed by and ignored someone in need.

And so my pledge for 2009: pursue justice, show mercy, and humbly serve God.

You can read my entire declaration of service on my Gospel Soundcheck blog Beliefnet.com.

Sparrow murder

My backyard is the scene of carnage this afternoon. I went out with Scout and noticed a pool of blood, with dozens of little feathers scattered in a several foot area.

Yesterday I noticed a few drops of blood in the snow near one of the feeders. When I showed it to David he reminded me that he'd seen a hawk in our backyard this week and suggested that maybe it was preying on the little birds flocking to our yard every day to devour pounds of bird seed.

We live in a village where our houses are literally just feet from each other, with lots of people and activity. I asked him if he was sure it was a hawk and not a pigeon.

He's an outdoorsy guy. He knows a hawk when he sees one.

I laughed and said maybe it could get rid of the neighborhood cats peeing in our yard. But I didn't really mean it. In fact, I didn't even really believe there was a hawk in our neighborhood.

But this little murder proves that something is out there preying on the chickadees and sparrows. The feeders are just outside my office window, but I can't see them unless I actually get up and look out. I did notice Murphy in the window earlier, hyped-up at something outside But he does that whenever the squirrels crawl into the feeder and taunt him from the other side of the glass. I've gotten up to look out a dozen times today, and this time I didn't bother. Looks like I might have stopped the murder in progress.

Sigh. It's the cycle of life. Hawks need to eat just as much as sparrows, and if I was a hawk I'd hang out in the trees in our yard, too. Yesterday there were 5 squirrels and about 50 birds in our little postage-sized yard. For a bird of prey, it's an all you can eat buffet.

So what do I do? Stop feeding the birds, who have been coming here for years to drain the feeders empty on a daily basis? Or keep feeding them and make them targets?

Dogvotional goes big(ger) time

Oh goodie! An editor at one of the sites I write for asked me to do a piece expanding on my dogvotional, 10 Life Lessons I Learned From My Dog.

You know how I love to write about my dog, and how I'm supposed to be working on this book. This will force me to write what are essentially 10 short dogvotionals, and move me along on my path to writing the whole stinking book!

Up on my soapbox: You're wearing too much cologne

So I'm at the grocery store a little while ago, and some guy gets behind me in line and he's doused himself in cologne. I mean, this guy really stinks. And it's that horribly sweet, nauseating cologne that's so popular with these days for guys. I wanted to barf. It was all I could do to pay for my groceries and get out of there while holding my breath. The poor cashier probably thought I was a total snot.

I once had to sit next to a guy wearing the same cologne on an airplane. I held my breath for five hours and we were almost ready to land when the pilot came on and said the runways were backed up so we had to circle for a while. Like another half hour. I felt the bile rising in my throat and I wanted to cry. I had a headache for two days afterwards.

Please, please people. Enough with the colognes and perfumes and other stinky stuff you pour all over yourself. You don't smell good. You reek. You make other people want to throw up. No matter how much cologne you pour on, you're not any more attractive, or slimmer, or talented, or richer. You're just smellier.

What I'm Reading 2009

(Title, author, date I finished the book)

1. Beautiful Boy, by David Sheff, 1/4/09
2. The Innocent Man, by John Grisham 1/8/09
3. How Dogs Think, by Stanley Coren 1/11/09
4. The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain 1/21/09
5. Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 1/22/09
6. Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella 2/8/09

A picture of the past

I've spent much of the last 24 hours hunched over a little machine that converts slides to digital pics and saves them on your computer. It's a lovely piece of technology, except for the fact that it takes several minutes for the picture to save. It's tedious and tiring.

My dad was here yesterday and helped pick out some slides to copy first, but he left at 10:15 pm so I kept going until 1 am. I picked up again this afternoon and added a bunch of pics from my parents' wedding (no photos from the divorce, that I can find anyway). It helps to have someone putting the slides back into the trays. This afternoon, I ended up with several piles of slides and no idea where they went. I also had to go back and rescan some pictures, and I had no idea which boxes my dad had gotten the slides from.

I've long thought that I was the primary focus of my father's camera habit; that probably is because when I was young my Aunt Gloria doted on me, and filled albums with photos of me me me. If she did, I figured everyone else must think I'm prime photography material. But in the slide trays, there are tons of pictures of my sister. Most of them with my dad. I wonder where I was? There are a few of me. In one slide tray, my dad had more pictures of his jeep than me.

I found a picture of my second dog, Jasper. My first dog was a beagle named Ringo. I know he got sick and died, or at least that's what they told me. When we moved into our new house in 1971, we got Jasper. I remember him coming home, I remember him sleeping in the laundry piles, but I don't really remember much else. I know he didn't stick around long. We had a series of dogs, or dog attempts, I should say. Probably explains why I'm so attached to my dog now.

It's interesting to look at at pictures of my childhood. Despite what they say now, there must have been a time when my parents were happy. My sister and I look pretty chipper, anyway, at least as far as the slide trays I've gotten through.

Movies I Watched 2009

Since I keep track of the books I read every year, I thought I'd also log in movies as well.

1. Madison, starring Jim Caviezel 1/1/09
2. Alfred Hitchock's Rope 1/1/09
3. Frequency, starring Jim Caviezel 1/4/09