Monday, Sept 1, 2008

On the lowcarb front:

My stats for today:
Type: Treadmill and weights
Route: Workout room
Time: 30
Average heart rate: Don't know, I pushed the wrong button and zeroed out
Maximum heart rate: see above
Calories burned: 221
I’m up 1 pounds from last Monday
Happy Labor Day everyone! I never got that walk in yesterday, but I did get a bit of a workout. I spent the afternoon cleaning out my soap/candle workroom. It is really shaping up! Anna came over and helped me break down boxes and bring the trash up to the garage. Now I need to rearrange where I will be working. I have to measure out oils so I have moved all of the soaping stuff to the side table. I didn't like where it was because it is always messy and you can see it the minute you come in the back door. We have been investing in rolling carts for craft shows and they double as storage. We just load the carts and they fit nicely under the tables.

Evening update:
Oy, my back and my legs are killing me. My workroom is looking so good that I decided to get my hard oils measured out. On a day like today, it's much easier to handle them - particularly the cocoa butter. Well, I got 15 batches of the hard oils measured out and then just decided to finish off the batches with the liquid oils. So I spent 3 hours measuring out 9 different oils into 15 buckets. That should last me a few months as I have cut my soaping schedule back to 1 batch a week. I have quite a bit of soap cured for the coming shows so I don't really need to do 2 batches per week. That will leave me more time for stockings which I hope I'm going to need. We are counting on our stocking sales to subsidize our primitives business for the rest of the year.

I still have a couple of stockings to make, laundry to finish, bills to pay, and retirement papers to complete. And tomorrow is the first day of school.

Gospel
Lk 4:16-30
Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had grown up,
and went according to his custom
into the synagogue on the sabbath day.
He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.

Rolling up the scroll,
he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them,
“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And all spoke highly of him
and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They also asked, “Is this not the son of Joseph?”
He said to them, “Surely you will quote me this proverb,
‘Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here in your native place
the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.’”
And he said,
“Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
Indeed, I tell you,
there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years
and a severe famine spread over the entire land.
It was to none of these that Elijah was sent,
but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.
Again, there were many lepers in Israel
during the time of Elisha the prophet;
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
When the people in the synagogue heard this,
they were all filled with fury.
They rose up, drove him out of the town,
and led him to the brow of the hill
on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong.
But he passed through the midst of them and went away.

Thoughts from the cornfield:
This pasaage has always fascinated me. I listened this morning to a reflection on this reading that told how the people listening to Jesus are awestruck and fascinated with his words until he points out that God sent prophets and healing to people who were not Jews - who were, in fact, pagans. The priest went on to say that it is hard to hear that God loves people who are not like us - Muslims, Pentecostals, Mormons. It's easy enough for us to say that we are all God's children, but when it plays out in real life, that's a different story.

I am thinking of a homily we heard at Mass just before the Presidential primaries. It was couched in terms of the priest relating a story where a friend asked him if Mormons were Christians. Father said that his answer was to speak of baptism and what we believe about baptism. This was, of course, to lead us to the conclusion that Mormons are not Christians. Oh, and by the way, the unspoken elephant in the room was the fact that Mitt Romney was a contender for the presidential nomination. The underlying (and thinly veiled) political motive for this homily was not lost on most of us. The subliminal message was "don't vote for a Mormon." But the Bible very clearly states that those who are not against us are with us. So you see, religious elitism did not exist solely in Jesus' time, it is alive and well in the Church today. Let those who have ears, hear.



God bless the troops!