ShaLOm in 2017

Well, here it is the end of 2016 and I am posting my (planned... ya never know how that will go, ask Robbie Burns' mousie) one-word focus for 2017.

I am going with shalom. I like the way Cornelius Plantinga Jr presents that word in  Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. At one point he writes:  

In the Bible, shalom means universal flourishing, wholeness, and delight--a rich state of affairs in which natural needs are satisfied and natural gifts fruitfully employed, a state of affairs that inspires joyful wonder as its Creator and Savior opens doors and welcomes the creatures in whom he delights. Shalom, in other words, is the way things ought to be.

I want to focus on things becoming the way they are supposed to be, with wholeness and healing and all the deliciously dripping sweet fruits of the Spirit. 

And because I do not ever really get the whole one-word thing, I am mentally writing the word this way: shaLOm. I am using the L to remind me to Listen, a skill where I am very weak, and the O is not really the letter /O/ but a kind of sphere to remind me to Mind My Own Sphere of Dominion (and not everyone else's).

What about you? Have you got a one-word focus for the new year?  

 

Poor Hello Kitty

My lovely mouthless but still apple-pie-loving friend has hit the news. Devastatingly Handsome woke me up with the news that it has been reported that Hello Kitty is not a cat at all. 

Talk about shocking news. A real crisis to test your worldview. I turned to the computer to see if it could be true and found that like most news, there are several sides to the story. The latest information according to Sanrio says that she is actually "a personification of a cat." Not sure what that means, it sounds a bit like she is a dream, as if she appears in the thought bubble above a cat's head. Or maybe a little girl's. I think I can live with that. 

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By the way, the smartest Hello Kitty in the world lives in our schoolroom: