Musings of a Snickerdoodle

Soon after I stopped feeling this intense love and presence of God, I started grasping for things that normally brought that passion back.  I would drive almost an hour away to find churches with great worship bands and speakers……I knew on some level that there was something off about the way I was approaching this, but I felt like I needed to do whatever it took to get that feeling back.  And then one day it struck me:  my faith had stopped being about God and had become about how I felt.  That was really selfish of me.  It shouldn't have mattered how I felt if I trusted that God was real.  At that point the best thing for someone like me was to remove those feelings so that my faith would once again become about God, not myself. ….the end result was that I began learning how  to center my life around God with or without the feelings that I once had…….To make Christianity purely about feelings is to make it about ourselves rather than God.  God ...

I saw that there was a book on hermeneutics coming out by Abner Chou.  I thought his name sounded familiar, looked it up and remembered that I had listened to a message by him a while back, critiquing the Christocentric hermeneutic and thought that it was pretty good.  Therefore I wanted to see how Chou would tackle hermeneutics overall in a book. This book, The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers: Learning to Interpret Scripture from the Prophets and Apostles is written from the perspective that the Bible has a "built-in hermeneutic".   We don't have to come up with our own. I loved that Chou points out that we don't need to go searching the hermeneutical methods of the nations in the days that the books of the Bible were written, rather we search the Bible to see how the text interprets itself.   But sadly, overall I did not like the book.   Let me explain why.   First, I didn't like how the author keeps saying that the prophets were th...

This book complies and sorts the wisdom of the whole book of Proverbs by topic. So you can look up wisdom on Anger, Conflict, Deception, the Heart, Money, Laziness…etc.  The version I have is a beautifully bound hardcover.  With an elegant design using shades of tan. The inside is very nice and elegant as well. I really like the emphasis, in the introduction to this compilation, though wisdom is an excellent thing to have, on it's own it will not bring you happiness and salvation.   "King Solomon, the man   responsible for most of the sayings in this book, was considered the wisest man in history…..Even so, Solomon disregarded some of the wisdom God gave him…"   We need more than just knowledge of the right, we need the right Person to make us holy and put His law in our hearts.   What I didn't quite get in the intro, though, was the statement that "The entire message of the Bible, including this book of Proverbs, is summarized like this:….(aft...

Lies Women Believe by Nancy Demoss Wolgemuth is a book that goes through various lies that women believe about reality and counters them.  Dealing specifically with many of the lies women believe about God, themselves, sin, priorities, sexuality, marriage, children, emotions and circumstances, this book is designed as a gentle, but firm exhortation to wake women up to see the truth. I get the impression that many of the women's writings of today cater to women's excuses, unbelief and overall selfishness. We don't need to build up our self-love, "the truth is that we do love ourselves" , we need to learn to deny ourselves.   "Our most common malady is not having a low view [of] ourselves, but having a low view of God." I also loved how the author pointed out that the thought, "I can't help the way I am" because of - fill in the blank-,   is a lie.   She uses Eve as an example: it was not Eve's circumstances that accounted...

The Baker Compact Dictionary of Biblical Studies is a dictionary that seeks to provide definitions and explanations for words that you will find in many books and articles that delve into the study of the text of the Bible.   It gives definitions and brief overviews of places, scholarly terminology, prominent people whose works are mentioned in theological books. It was pretty interesting to just sit and read through a lot of the information in the book, to learn a lot of new things and even to glean some extra helpful information about events, people and places that I already knew a few things about.   If I came across something that I've already become acquainted with I felt sort of reluctant to read those parts, thinking something along the lines of, "this is just a dictionary, what more could it tell me about that?" But I was surprised at some of the extra information I gleaned.   For example,   I have done a bit of reading on the "Counsel of Jamnia...

I knew a little about the famous Israeli rescue of hostages held in Entebbe but didn't know a lot.  'Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, The Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History' by Saul David was an interesting way to learn about it.  David takes you through each day, in 'real time', as it were, bringing you back and forth from the hostages and terrorists to Israeli diplomats and military men, international political leaders and others,   continually switching locations to give you a perspective of what was going on in these significant places and among the various significant people throughout each of these 8 days of tension.   It was quite interesting,   and very informative.   I did not know that hijackings were such a common thing in the late 60s into the early 70s.   And that they were mainly to make demands of Israel! Nor did I know that there were Japanese terrorists fighting for the Pal...

In my opinion, this book is worth having just for the convection oven information at the beginning. It explains, not only how different convection ovens work, but also how to adapt recipes designed to be cooked in conventional ones. It has several recipes, organized into sections like, "Breakfast and Brunch", "Appetizers and Snacks", "Poultry", "Breads" and so on. Each recipe gives a brief description of the food, at times even explaining how the convection oven cooks it to perfection, and also lists which types of Convection Ovens the recipe works best with, Full-Size, Countertop, Halogen…etc. And which setting to use, BAKE or ROAST. The one thing I think that this cookbook could be improved by is having pictures of each recipe.  But many of the titles and descriptions of the foods sound tasty just to read about, so it's not too important. There are many (in my opinion) easy to follow recipes, like  Juicy-Oven-Grilled Bacon ...