Talking to My Son About Boston | reblogged post from Christian Piatt

Bill O’Reilly is angry about the Boston bombing and thinks everyone else should be, too. Last night after listening to him, David asked if I was angry. I’m not angry. I’m just sad – sad that my 9-year-old grandson has to try to make sense of something so senseless – sad that children can’t take home made treats to school any more.

Read about Christian’s conversation with Mattias over breakfast this morning:

Talking to My Son About Boston.

Blessings,

Linda

The Fairy Tale of Gun Control | by Linda Brendle

At the risk of giving my readers whiplash, I’m following up my romantic short story from last week  with a brief commentary on the Newtown tragedy. Let me begin by saying there are no words to describe the horror and grief that go along with a massacre of this magnitude, and my prayers are with all those who suffered such great losses and all of us who are affected by the repercussions. It will take many lifetimes to study all the aspects of this event, and even then there is no way to understand or explain it. For today, I want to focus on what I call the fairy tale of gun control.

What Happens When One Person Cares | by Linda Brendle

Last month, spurred by a post written by my brother Jim, I posted an article called “Does Government Assistance Discourage Private Charity.”  The post was also published by Red Letter Christians where it elicited quite a bit of discussion. The discussion was interesting, but after reading it, I realized I should have used the word “personal” in the title instead of “private.” Most of the comments centered on the relative merits of government charity versus religious charity. It made me wonder if the discussion participants had read my post since I included stories about person-to-person acts of kindness rather than institutional generosity. But as luck or fate would have it, Jim gave me another chance to get it right.

Does Government Assistance Discourage Private Charity? | by Linda Brendle

Jim Robinson

A couple of months ago my brother, the Reverend Doctor Jim Robinson, posted a blog titled “Hard Work vs. Government Assistance.” It was well-written and thought-provoking, but I thought it was incomplete.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you that my brother and I love each other, but we fall on opposite sides of the political fence. He is as liberal as I am conservative; however, we’re both reasonable adults, and we’ve learned to discuss our differences in a civilized manner. In fact, he has a passion for civility, and his blog is “dedicated to hearing ‘both side’ of any issue.” But in this particular post, I think he failed to take into consideration that some issues have more than two sides. I think this is particularly relevant in issues involving caring for those I call “the least of these.”

Providing for the Least of These | by Linda Brendle

A sure way to start a riot on Facebook is to post a political comment. Nobody agrees on anything political with the exception of the national debt: that it has reached critical mass and that we have to stop spending money we don’t have. Ideas vary widely as to where cuts should be made: the military budget, tax advantages, entitlement programs. Some of the cuts will come after the elections, but some of them are happening right now, and some of them are happening right here in Emory, Texas. The media pundits throw around lots of impersonal words when addressing this issue, but it’s harder to talk about when there’s a face attached to the cut.

And Now For Something Completely Different | by Linda Brendle

On Tuesday I published a post called Enlarging My Territory.  In it I mentioned that I have submitted several articles to Red Letter Christians, “a blog by Tony Campolo & friends.”

Stop the Bureaucracy, I Want to Get Off | by Linda Brendle

Getting the proper documentation to operate a vehicle can be a delicate dance through the red tape. When we moved back to Texas from Florida last year, we debated about what to do about our driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. We signed up with Good Sam’s after we got our RV and took several extended trips. Good Sam’s is a travel club that offers special services for frequent travelers including mail forwarding. They assign you a personal mailbox, and when you’re on the road, you have your mail forwarded to them. When you stop somewhere for a few days, you let them know where you are, and they send the mail on to you. Full time RVers use their mailbox as a permanent address. When we left Florida, our plan was to spend a lot of time on the road, so we left our registrations in Florida.

Your Tax Dollars At Work

David and I went to the Senior Center for lunch today. Several people waved at us as we signed in. I headed toward the take-one-leave-one bookshelf with the paperback David finished last night. It took me a little while to get there.