News you won't see in controlled mainstream media.

--POSITIVE THOUGHTS ~~

---**If you must speak ill of someone, write it in sand at the water's edge." ~~
~~~~~~~~~

--"Be happy, and a reason will come along."
---GP/RB
--------
--"Anyone who keeps on learning not only remains young, but becomes constantly more valuable, regardless of physical capacity."

--GP/ Henry Ford ~
~~~~~~~

--"The value of consistent. prayer is not that He will hear us, but that we will hear Him."
--GP/WM
~~~~
-"Waste no more time talking about great souls and how they should be.
Become one yourself!"
--GP/MAA~

---Be Hospital and Kind ~~

--"Be hospitable to one another without grumbling." --[1 Peter 4:9 / NKJV]

---Throughout my long college teaching career, my wife has taken care of the house: cooking, cleaning, caring for the children. Now she is not strong enough to do some things alone. Retired, I am able to help with the hard jobs. mopping floors, cleaning tubs and sinks, unclogging drains. Everything except dusting, because she says, "Men can't see dust."

My favorite domestic duty is cleaning up the dirty dishes. After every meal, we have a "date' at the kitchen sink. She washes, I dry. We don't have--or want --a dishwasher. We enjoy working together as a team. I do the heavy pots and pans that she can't lift. I scrape the encrusted skillet with metal spatula, and I enjoy showing off my strength.
As we work, we rehears the day's events:
"There was a famous author signing books at the library."
"Oh? Anyone I know?"

"Naw, never heard of him."
"There was a big accident at he convenience store. A man drove right through the door."

"I guess parking wasn't convenient enough?"

Standing close to my redhead, I can smell the fragrance of her perfume and see the freckles under her smiling Irish eyes. When she laughs at one of my corny lines, her eyes sparkle.

Done, I head for the TV room to catch the news.

"Thanks for helping out, Danny."
"Well thank you for the delicious meal."
I am thankful to have found a small way of giving back, for all the years she has give to me.

--"Lord, it would be a very lonely world without my Sharon. Thank You for her and the love in our hearts for each other."

--Guideposts/DS~

------LIFE ~~

--Life is a canvas--you fill in the picture.

--About the time you learn to make the most of life, the most of it is gone.

--Life is either what you make of it, or what it makes of you.

--In the great supermarket of life, may the wheels on your grocery cart all move in the same direction.

--Life is like a mirror--we get the best results when we smile at it.

--Life is like a well--the deeper you go in God, the more living you will find.

--Life is like a cafeteria--there are no waiters to bring success to you. You must help yourself.

--**THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS IN LIFE ARE NOT THINGS". ~~

---ZINGERS/ CROFT M PENTZ ~~

--Questions?

--An argument is the longest distance between two points of view.

--Our days are like identical suitcases--all the same size, but some people pack more in them than others.

--Everyone can do something better than anyone else. --reading his own handwriting, for instance.

--Suspenders are just about the oldest form of social security.

--Statistics can be used to support anything --especially statisticians.

Two Excuses for Human Evolution Confusion
BY BRIAN THOMAS, PH.D. * |

Public school textbooks assert that apes and humans emerged from an ape-like animal, whereas Genesis 1 says that God created humans and the different animal kinds right from the start. What difficulties would one expect researchers to encounter as they search for evidence of human evolution if humans never actually evolved? Two excuses in a recent summary of the sad status of human evolution unwittingly verify what the Bible has been saying all along about where humans came from.

Publishing in America’s top journal, Science, Sergio Almécija at the American Museum of Natural History led a small team to report big difficulties with the story that primates and people share an ancestral animal.1 The big problem? Almécija summarized it in a research post, saying, “When you look at the narrative for hominin origins, it’s just a big mess—there’s no consensus whatsoever.”2

This messy lack of consensus is exactly what creation researcher Chris Rupe found as he reviewed hundreds of technical journal articles while writing Contested Bones, the aptly titled book about disputes over ape and human fossils.3 In it, Rupe quotes paleo experts’ disagreements over the status of every fossil candidate. Secular scholars now confirm this chaos.

It’s every expert for himself, spinning his or her unique web of story lines around selected bones. But Almécija’s team strongly defends human evolution as a fact despite the bedlam in their field.

They wrote, “Evolutionary scenarios are appealing because they provide plausible explanations based on current knowledge, but unless grounded in testable hypotheses, they are no more than ‘just-so stories.’”1

Strong enough evidence would leave no room for just-so stories. Could all this room for storytelling arise in the wake of an absence of evidence for human evolution?

If we really evolved from animals, shouldn’t we find enough fossils for objective scientists to reach some level of consensus over? Shouldn’t the fossils dictate which animal morphed into the next in a chain that led to us? The Science report offered at least two reasons—which amount to excuses—for the difficulties that paleo experts face in constructing an anti-Bible human history.

For one excuse, the study authors decry a “highly incomplete and fragmentary nature of the hominoid fossil record.”1 How convenient to claim that the record of the story we want to tell is simply missing the key elements of that story. How can we know that a record is incomplete—let alone “highly incomplete”—if we don’t even have the record?

An alternate hypothesis fits the evidence from fossils that we do have instead of wrapping suppositions around undiscovered fossils. If we never actually evolved, then we wouldn’t have fossils that show human evolution. That would explain what we see, but it’s an impossible stance to take under a religiously held bias that “humans diverged from apes.”1

Another quotation contains a second excuse for the dumpster fire status of paleoanthropology. The study authors wrote, “Besides their fragmentary nature, a persistent challenge is understanding the phylogenetic relationships among fossil apes, which exhibit mosaics of primitive and derived features with no modern analogs.”1

To understand phylogenetic relationships means to decide which creature evolved into the next. And nobody agrees on an order. For every expert that claims human ancestry for their discovery, another expert sees that discovery as an evolutionary dead-end or the like.

Claims of “primitive” and “derived” (read, “more recently evolved”) are arbitrary and—of course—hotly contested, but what makes a “mosaic?” Each extinct ape fossil is supposedly made up of a “mosaic of…features.” Different reports use “mosaic” in different ways. Sometimes workers use it to refer to mixtures of ape bones and human bones that they pretend belonged together.

For example, those who promoted Australopithecus sediba as a missing link candidate referred to its “mosaic” of ape-like and human-like bones.4 However, more careful comparisons of sediba bones found them to match either ape or human remains.5,6 Those bones never did belong to the same skeleton.
But in cases where the bones actually articulate, “mosaic” can refer to body parts that fit and function with one another. Think of a Roman mosaic’s tile fragments, each expertly tailored to form a whole picture. In other words, these fossil discoveries show body parts that look like someone shaped them to mesh with one another into a whole and working creature—whether ape or human.

Whether a mosaic fossil consists of a jumble of ape and human bones that don’t belong together or a system of articulated bones like those in modern humans or apes, it shows no evolutionary transition or pattern.
This fits biblical creation’s idea of separately created kinds just fineTwo excuses for the “big mess” of human evolution unwittingly uphold God’s account of creation. The fossil record only looks incomplete to those who expect it to contain pre-human fossils. And mosaics of either mixtures from different kinds or well-fitted bones from one kind or another follow from Genesis creation ~

---BEAUTIFULLY BROKEN ~

--"I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery"
---[Psalm 31:12] --

--OUR bus finally arrived at our much-anticipated destination--archaeological dig in Israel where we would actually do some excavation work of our own. The site's director explained that anything we might unearth had been untouched for thousands of years. After an extended time, we were led to a workstation where those broken pieces--from huge vases shattered long, long ago--were being put back together.

The picture was crystal clear. Those artisans reconstruction centuries-old broken pottery were a beautiful representation of the God who loves to fix broken things. In Psalm 31:12, David wrote, "I am forgotten as though I were dead; I have become like broken pottery." Though no occasion is given for the writing of the psalm, David's life difficulties often found voice in his laments--just like this one. The song describes him as being broken down by danger, enemies, and despair.

So, where did he turn for help: In verse 16, David cries out to God, "Let your face shine on your servant' save me in you unfailing love."

The God who was the object of David's trust is the same One who still fixes broken things today. All He asks is that we call out to Him and trust in His unfailing love. .


--"God of my help, I thank You for all the times I've fallen and been broken--times when You've put me back together. I praise and bless Your holy Name."
--ODB/BC~

His compassions fail not. They are new every morning. " --[ Lamentation 3:22-23 / KJV

--My Aunt at one hundred years old, doesn't string her present moments together together as she used to . She says her memory's getting 'thin' That's hard for her to accept when her reasoning still works fine.
Each experience is first-of-its kind for Aunt Bette, a "fresh first" Whether a trees seen dozens of times, a neighbor she's greeted, of a gift weeks ago, she extends her full delight as if it's entirely new. Watching her is like riding a Ferris wheel and rediscovering the same exhilarating sights every time it goes around.

One of my favorite "fresh fruits" is the pie that her daughter Margie gives her. Every morning Aunt Betty surprised to find pie on her kitchen counter. "Where'd this come from?" she asks. When she learns it's from Margy, she get's another surprise , "How dear of her." she responds.

--Why do I allow my daily life to become dull with familiarity Why can't I catch a ride on the Ferris wheel ands see the same things new enthusiasm? How long since I've felt stirred by God's gifts of sound and movement of sun an drain and sky and rain and sky, of friends and faith purpose?

Aunt Betty's wheel of "fresh fruits" is a purpose is a sweet spin of gratitude, and joy eagerness . It's the best ride going whether you're one or one hundred.'--"Creator God, lead me in circles of recurring wonder for that seem commonplace.
--ODB/ CK`

--HIS AMAZING HELP ~~

--"[God] spreads the snow like wool. --[Psalm 147:16]

---The sheriff marveled at the prayers, estimating "hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of prayers" were lifted to God for help as the East Troublesome Fire raged through the mountains of Colorado in the fall of 2020. Living up to it's name, the blaze consumed 100,000 acres in twelve hours, roaring through tinder-dry forests, burning three hundred homes to the ground, and threatening entire towns, in its path. Then came "the Godsend," as one meteorolgist called it. No, not rain. A timely snowfall. It fell across the fire zone, arriving early for that time of year--dropping up to a foot or more of wet snow--slowing the fire and, and in some places, stopping it.

Such merciful help seemed too amazing to explain. Does God hear our prayers for snow? And rain too? The Bible records his many answers, including after Elijah's hope for rain (1 Kings 18:41-46). A servant of great faith, Elijah understood God's sovereignty, including over the weather. As Psalm 147 says of God, "He supplies the earth with rain" (v.8). "He spreads the snow like wool....Who can withstand his icy blast? (vv. 16-17).

Elijah could hear "the sound of a heavy rain" before clouds even formed (1 Kings 18:41). Is our faith in His power that strong? God invites our trust, no matter His answer. We can look to Him for His amazing help.~~

--"Amazing God, I bow at Your feet humbled by Your merciful help whenever it comes. Thank You for encouraging my faith with Your sovereign power throughout the earth."

--ODB/PR