Psalm 66:20 poster

The above poster is an attempt to do justice to Psalm 66:20, which says "Blessed be God, who has not turned away my prayer, nor his loving kindness from me." (World English Bible, public domain.)

The photo is some member of the rose family, perhaps a crabapple. I'm not good at distinguishing between peaches, pears, apples, cherries, and the like.

Thanks for looking! Blessed be God.

Sunspots 474

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: The Huffington Post has an article telling us that we may be using "I've been blessed" entirely too much.
Computing: (or something) One of my photos was used by a Fox News web page, without my permission. Hardly a shock, and it could have been some other web site (and has been, sometimes.) Here's the original photo. They didn't spell my name correctly, but that happens a lot. Oh, well.
Education: (Or history, or politics) Robert Krulwich posts on people who had a parent, or grandparent, who remembered things from over a century ago -- human wormholes. Interesting.

Politics: (Sort of) National Public Radio reports on the death of the last of the Navajo Code Talkers, who used their own language to communicate secrets for the US military, in World War II. Navajo is so complex, and was so obscure to the Japanese, that they were unable to decipher the communications of the Code Talkers.
Science: Fox News reports on evidence that the moon and the earth have always been separate, but collided a long time ago.
The New York Times on a new procedure -- testing for all the DNA in a diseased person's body, and checking that DNA against all known disease-causing organisms, including parasites.
National Public Radio reports that spiders tune their webs, much like violinists tune their violins, although not for the same reasons.
  Image source (public domain)

Sunspots 460

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:
Christianity: An essay in the Huffington Post tells us why we shouldn't use "I'm blessed," or the equivalent, as much as many of us do.
Computing: Wired tells us that Amazon may be about to release a device that streams video to your TV.
Gizmo's Freeware on what they say is a great free photo editor for iOS and Android devices.
Gizmo's also has an annotated list of 9 free apps that every Android device owner should consider installing.
Politics: (And Christianity) Charles Haynes on the continuing battles to get officially-sanctioned prayer back in schools.
Science: National Public Radio reports that NASA has found 715 new planets.


Image source (public domain)

Merry Christmas? Perhaps not the right word

Some people want others to say "Merry Christmas," as opposed to "Happy Holidays." I can understand that, but I'm not sure that that's the phrase that they really want to use. See here for more on the so-called "War on Christmas."

A search for the use of the word, "merry," in the King James Bible turns up 28 occurrences. A good number of these associate being merry with being at least mildly intoxicated, and in some of those cases, the merry person, or persons, did something foolish while merry.

Dictionaries indicate that merry means happy, having fun, enjoying things. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with being happy, having fun, and enjoying things at Christmas. But I think there's a better, and more appropriate phrase: "Blessed Christmas!" We were blessed by the coming of Christ, who lived as a perfect sacrifice, and died as one, and was resurrected, proving that the sacrifice was accepted. We are blessed!

The angels told the shepherds that Christ's coming brought peace to those who accepted the sacrifice. They also said that His coming brought glory to God. We are blessed.

Blessed Christmas!