Christmas Spirit for Family & Friends 2010

A video I created in honor of my family for this Christmas. If you're in this video , you're family. (also, don't be afraid to share this with as many other family members as you want because I don't have everyone's email and I would hate to think someone felt left out.)
All my love, LAURA-LEE (Rahn)

Guns Of Navarone,

GarageTV - Guns Of Navarone, The (trl.) (03:41)

There have been very few times in my life where I believe a film transcends the medium it is in. Where you actually think, "If this is the only film they ever made, it would be still worth all the time, energy and effort to invent the film process. There's nothing about it I would change."
The "Guns of Navarone" is one of those movies for me.

Still Kicking

I`ve barely been on my computer at all lately and I thought it was time to say something. Anything at all. Especially since the name of this blog is "Laura-Lee Was Here". The fact remains is that I have been sick all the time and when I finally get my head above water (healthwise), then Mom gets sick and she gets way worse than anything I could ever stand if I had to endure the amount of pain that she does.
Lately I feel sleepy and tired all the time. I have actually fallen asleep in the middle of one of my own sentences. I have so much going on in my head, so many things I want to say, and a comment on just about everything and yet I have not even the energy to pull out a pen and paper, let alone boot up my computer (as fast and as beautiful as it is). I couldn't even begin to tell you how far behind I am in my chores and housework. I've wanted a haircut for two months and now I feel lucky if I'm strong enough to wash it at least once a week (which usually doesn't happen that frequently). How can I feel like I'm actually contributing to society or my family or friends or my Lord? Sometimes I force myself out of bed to do the smallest thing so that I feel I have meritted the amount of oxygen I have used up during the day.
When I lay in bed just about ready to drop off to sleep I have to stop and "count my blessings". It sounds like a hokey thing to do but it seems to give me just enough strength (emotionally and mentally and physically ) to face another day.

THINGS THAT I KNOW:
1. God loves me
2. God will never abandon me
3. This life will end at some point
4. The Lord is all  powerful and all knowing.
5. Nothing can happen to me unless He gives permission first.
6. Everything I experience and endure is for my best.
... this is usually about the point where I fall asleep. So I will say good bye to you now and hopefully I have earned my oxygen for this day by letting you know that you are not alone. Others feel pain too but it doesn't have to be an end to things only a part of the path of our journey on the way to our real Home. The one that Jesus himself is preparing for us. (John 14)
P.S. Laura-Lee Was Here

44 and Still a Spinster

I am about to turn 44 years old on May 7th. I've never been married and that seems to freak out a lot of people and I'm not really sure why. I mean, if I'm content to be single I think every one else should loosen up a bit.
I think the tension comes from the fact that people think I'm not married or have never been married because I CAN'T GET A MAN! I have made sacrifices to be single and sometime I've just said , "No". When it comes down to it,  the only thing worse than being single is being married to the wrong person. That's a hell and loneliness I will never know. I've seen domestic violence and I can count on my one hand the amount of couples who had a marriage that truly lasted. So if my friends have had a marriage and divorce or several marriages and divorces ... how does that make them "ahead of me".

I made a decision a LONG time ago that I was going to do things Jesus' way or "no way". I am happy to not be married but I'm sure I'd be happy married too , if it's what Jesus has planned for me. That's the true key to happiness. It doesn't matter who you're with or where you are, just that you are faithfully following Jesus wherever he goes. I know what it means to have him in my life and I never want to be without him again. So, relax everyone. I don't mind being single. I may just become the "grooviest", "coolest" Spinster that ever lived.

I've earned my wrinkles and grey hair. I'm proud of them, because each day I get older, I also resemble my Heavenly Father more and that attracts all sorts of people. I don't need botox and I don't need to be nipped or tucked. I've got Jesus inside and I've been told I'm more beautiful now than I've ever been. I'll hand the credit over to the Lord, because he is the author of my life and the author and perfector of my faith.

So "happy birthday to me"...

LARGE PRINT BIBLE

Yes. It has finally happened. I bought my first Large Print Bible. I suppose that means I am getting old (not just older). However, when I did open up my new Bible, it was wonderful to not have to squint. I didn't realise that I had been avoiding my Bible because it was giving me a bit of a headache to read it. I know you think I should just go get a pair of glasses, but I've already got a pair because I can't see things far away. So it would mean bi-focals. And if a large print Bible makes me feel old, then I don't think bi-focals are going to make me feel young. But having to have glasses sitting on my nose for a long period of time also gives me a headache. So, for now, I have solved the problem the best (and least painful) way that I can. I'm glad I put my pride away, admitted my age and found the answer to the problem. It's good to be able to see God's words of encouragement, love and even discipline up close and personal again. Just like my relationship with Jesus: up close and personal.
 "Charm and beauty are fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord will be praised." Proverbs 31.  Let the wrinkles and grey hair come, I'll stick with Jesus through whatever it takes. And if taking a few hits to my vanity is the beginning... then so be it. (translation: "Amen")

Saturday Suffering

As Easter approaches I've been thinking a lot about Easter Saturday. The Bible doesn't talk about the day after Jesus died. It must have been such a horrible day for all those who loved him and had put all their hopes in him. They thought HE was the ONE! The long awaited messiah. But he was dead. Over. Finished. They didn't know back then, what we know now. That Sunday was coming! And boy! what a day that was going to be. But to those suffering through Saturday, it must have seemed like it would never end.


I heard someone say once that a person can live without food for several weeks, without water for several days but without hope they will almost instantly perish. I met Jesus and became a Christian just before my 12th birthday but I can still remember what it was like without him. I had decided to kill myself the day before. I had figured out that life was too painful and I was too small to get through on my own. Little did I know what would happen the very next day. A day that would forever change me in ways that I still don't comprehend and never fully will until I see him "face to face".

But the day before ... the day of pain, of grief, of suffering ... it seemed like it would never end. It stretched on forever in front of me, because I didn't know what was coming.

But once we know something we can't un-know it. Now we know that Jesus lives, that his home is inside of us, he has gone to Heaven to prepare us a place, that he will come back for us and (most importantly) he never breaks a promise!

So hang onto that one promise and the loving God who will never break it. Then every week, when Sunday rolls around, realize that God is reminding you once again that Sunday always comes. Once his grave became empty, it stayed empty! And that for thousands of years, billions of people have believed:

" I know that my Redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand upon the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God;"


(Job 19:25-26)

Remember: Sunday is always just a day away.
 
Easter Blessings to All
 

Firefly Jayne's Hat (pink-Chick version)

This is basically me making a fool of myself on camera. But I LOVE all things Firefly. What can I say? I'm a hard-core Browncoat.
(Click on the Green Link at the bottom of this post to go to my Firefly Group)

Hope you enjoy the video. Feel free to leave a comment.



My Firefly Serenity Browncoat group at MySpace

Jesus Gave Me My Computer

Here is the story of how I got my new laptop, when I prayed for it and Jesus answered me.

Why I Believe Again by A.N. Wilson

Why I believe again
A N Wilson

Published 02 April 2009

39 commentsPrint versionEmail a friendListenRSSA N Wilson writes on how his conversion to atheism may have been similar to a road to Damascus experience but his return to faith has been slow and doubting


Unlike his conversion to Atheism, Wilson's path back to faith has been a slow one
By nature a doubting Thomas, I should have distrusted the symptoms when I underwent a "conversion experience" 20 years ago. Something was happening which was out of character - the inner glow of complete certainty, the heady sense of being at one with the great tide of fellow non-believers. For my conversion experience was to atheism. There were several moments of epiphany, actually, but one of the most dramatic occurred in the pulpit of a church.

At St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London, there are two pulpits, and for some decades they have been used for lunchtime dialogues. I had just published a biography of C S Lewis, and the rector of St Mary-le-Bow, Victor Stock, asked me to participate in one such exchange of views.

Memory edits, and perhaps distorts, the highlights of the discussion. Memory says that while Father Stock was asking me about Lewis, I began to "testify", denouncing Lewis's muscular defence of religious belief. Much more to my taste, I said, had been the approach of the late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey, whose biography I had just read.

A young priest had been to see him in great distress, saying that he had lost his faith in God. Ramsey's reply was a long silence followed by a repetition of the mantra "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter". He told the priest to continue to worship Jesus in the Sacraments and that faith would return. "But!" exclaimed Father Stock. "That priest was me!"

Like many things said by this amusing man, it brought the house down. But something had taken a grip of me, and I was thinking (did I say it out loud?): "It bloody well does matter. Just struggling on like Lord Tennyson ('and faintly trust the larger hope') is no good at all . . ."

I can remember almost yelling that reading C S Lewis's Mere Christianity made me a non-believer - not just in Lewis's version of Christianity, but in Christianity itself. On that occasion, I realised that after a lifetime of churchgoing, the whole house of cards had collapsed for me - the sense of God's presence in life, and the notion that there was any kind of God, let alone a merciful God, in this brutal, nasty world. As for Jesus having been the founder of Christianity, this idea seemed perfectly preposterous. In so far as we can discern anything about Jesus from the existing documents, he believed that the world was about to end, as did all the first Christians. So, how could he possibly have intended to start a new religion for Gentiles, let alone established a Church or instituted the Sacraments? It was a nonsense, together with the idea of a personal God, or a loving God in a suffering universe. Nonsense, nonsense, nonsense.

It was such a relief to discard it all that, for months, I walked on air. At about this time, the Independent on Sunday sent me to interview Dr Billy Graham, who was conducting a mission in Syracuse, New York State, prior to making one of his journeys to England. The pattern of these meetings was always the same. The old matinee idol spoke. The gospel choir sang some suitably affecting ditty, and then the converted made their way down the aisles to commit themselves to the new faith. Part of the glow was, surely, the knowledge that they were now part of a great fellowship of believers.

As a hesitant, doubting, religious man I'd never known how they felt. But, as a born-again atheist, I now knew exactly what satisfactions were on offer. For the first time in my 38 years I was at one with my own generation. I had become like one of the Billy Grahamites, only in reverse. If I bumped into Richard Dawkins (an old colleague from Oxford days) or had dinner in Washington with Christopher Hitchens (as I did either on that trip to interview Billy Graham or another), I did not have to feel out on a limb. Hitchens was excited to greet a new convert to his non-creed and put me through a catechism before uncorking some stupendous claret. "So - absolutely no God?" "Nope," I was able to say with Moonie-zeal. "No future life, nothing 'out there'?" "No," I obediently replied. At last! I could join in the creed shared by so many (most?) of my intelligent contemporaries in the western world - that men and women are purely material beings (whatever that is supposed to mean), that "this is all there is" (ditto), that God, Jesus and religion are a load of baloney: and worse than that, the cause of much (no, come on, let yourself go), most (why stint yourself - go for it, man), all the trouble in the world, from Jerusalem to Belfast, from Washington to Islamabad.

My doubting temperament, however, made me a very unconvincing atheist. And unconvinced. My hilarious Camden Town neighbour Colin Haycraft, the boss of Duckworth and husband of Alice Thomas Ellis, used to say, "I do wish Freddie [Ayer] wouldn't go round calling himself an atheist. It implies he takes religion seriously."

This creed that religion can be despatched in a few brisk arguments (outlined in David Hume's masterly Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and then laughed off kept me going for some years. When I found myself wavering, I would return to Hume in order to pull myself together, rather as a Catholic having doubts might return to the shrine of a particular saint to sustain them while the springs of faith ran dry.

But religion, once the glow of conversion had worn off, was not a matter of argument alone. It involves the whole person. Therefore I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers. Reading Louis Fischer's Life of Mahatma Gandhi, and following it up with Gandhi's own autobiography, The Story of My Experiments With Truth, I found it impossible not to realise that all life, all being, derives from God, as Gandhi gave his life to demonstrate. Of course, there are arguments that might make you doubt the love of God. But a life like Gandhi's, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense. Attractive and amusing as David Hume was, did he confront the complexities of human existence as deeply as his contemporary Samuel Johnson, and did I really find him as interesting?

Watching a whole cluster of friends, and my own mother, die over quite a short space of time convinced me that purely materialist "explanations" for our mysterious human existence simply won't do - on an intellectual level. The phenomenon of language alone should give us pause. A materialist Darwinian was having dinner with me a few years ago and we laughingly alluded to how, as years go by, one forgets names. Eager, as committed Darwinians often are, to testify on any occasion, my friend asserted: "It is because when we were simply anthropoid apes, there was no need to distinguish between one another by giving names."

This credal confession struck me as just as superstitious as believing in the historicity of Noah's Ark. More so, really.

Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

For a few years, I resisted the admission that my atheist-conversion experience had been a bit of middle-aged madness. I do not find it easy to articulate thoughts about religion. I remain the sort of person who turns off Thought for the Day when it comes on the radio. I am shy to admit that I have followed the advice given all those years ago by a wise archbishop to a bewildered young man: that moments of unbelief "don't matter", that if you return to a practice of the faith, faith will return.

When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love. It is not that (as they believe) they have rumbled the tremendous fraud of religion - prophets do that in every generation. Rather, these unbelievers are simply missing out on something that is not difficult to grasp. Perhaps it is too obvious to understand; obvious, as lovers feel it was obvious that they should have come together, or obvious as the final resolution of a fugue.

I haven't mentioned morality, but one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler's neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer's book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer's serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to.

My departure from the Faith was like a conversion on the road to Damascus. My return was slow, hesitant, doubting. So it will always be; but I know I shall never make the same mistake again. Gilbert Ryle, with donnish absurdity, called God "a category mistake". Yet the real category mistake made by atheists is not about God, but about human beings. Turn to the Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - "Read the first chapter of Genesis without prejudice and you will be convinced at once . . . 'The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life'." And then Coleridge adds: "'And man became a living soul.' Materialism will never explain those last words."