Do you like limits? You’re like, “limits on what?” Fair. Do you like spending limits? Do you like hours-in-the-day limits? Do you like energy limits? Do you like preference limits?

If you hate budgets, if you wish for more than 24 hours, if you get frustrated by fatigue, if you feel constrained by considering what someone else wants, then, you are probably sinning. You are wanting to be God; that’s pride. You are criticizing God for how He made things; pride unthankfulness. You aren’t embracing image-bearing in relationships: that’s idolatry of self.

The fact that you can see beyond your limits is good, and helps you to give thanks and provides the opportunity for wise stewardship. The woman who gave her last two copper coins was praised per proportion/percentage (Mark 12:41-44). If you had infinite money and strength, and if things always went your way, big whoop.

Two hands and ten fingers are God’s idea. Even before sin there was some scarcity. You cannot be in more than one place at a time, you cannot be in more than one time at a time, your anxiety can’t lengthen your life even an hour of time. You were never supposed to live without sleep, you were never supposed to get to run the world according to your desires.

If you are having a hard time submitting to your finitude, do you even appreciate Christmas? You were born with constraints outside your control, can you imagine being in control and being born with constraints, like swaddling cloths?

- Sean Higgins -
source: https://tohuvabohu.org/2024/12/the-limits-of-swaddling-cloths/

excerpt from an article about Thanksgiving, at www.ligonier.org

So we have a holiday of thanksgiving born in and further nurtured during times of great adversity and struggle. We might think that times of adversity and challenge would spawn ingratitude, while times of prosperity would spawn gratitude. Sadly, the reverse is true. A chilling scene from the animated television show The Simpsons demonstrates this. Bart Simpson was called upon to pray for a meal, to which he promptly prayed, “Dear God, We paid for all of this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.”

Prosperity breeds ingratitude. The writers of the Heidelberg Catechism knew this. Question 28 asks what it benefits us to know that God creates and sustains all things. The answer is it gives patience in adversity and gratitude in prosperity. Moses also knew this. In Deuteronomy, he looks ahead to times of material prosperity for Israel, then sternly warns, inspired by the Holy Spirit, not to forget God. “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth’ ” (Deut. 8:17). We did this all ourselves. Thanks for nothing. Human nature trends toward ingratitude.

What does it benefit us to know that God creates and sustains all things? The answer is it gives patience in adversity and gratitude in prosperity.

Another culprit breeding ingratitude is our entitlement culture. Simply put, why should we be grateful for what we deserve and what we have a right to? I was owed this, goes the culture, therefore why would I say thank you?

- Stephen Nichols -
source: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/what-is-thanksgiving-day

Father,

You are the object of our thankfulness.

You have made reconciliation and approaching the throne of grace possible through the meritorious righteousness of Christ and absolutely none of our own. Without his substitutionary atonement we have no standing with you and must take our rightfully deserved eternal punishment.

You are good and, even when things don't, as we like to say, "go our way", you have commanded us to be thankful for all of it. Although today we formalize it, please make us thankful every day and where we are not thankful, grant us repentance and thankfulness.

That being said, in obedience to you...
Thank you for day and night
Thank you for sun and rain
Thank you for good times and hard times
Thank you for joys and sorrows
Thank you for victories and defeats
Thank you for comfort and pain
Thank you for life and death

You create life, you sustain life and you take life at the appointed time. Thank you, for it is all from you and under your authority and command.

Our Lord and our God, thank you for the many blessings you have bestowed on your people and thank you for the food you have provided...

In Jesus name, Amen

- crucifyd -

this is utter insane lunacy...

I kept looking at the URL to make sure I wasn't reading The Babylon Bee.

who new the Stooges were monetary experts? describes it perfectly...

some stuff I found in the bowels of my email:

1 march 2023:

Youth is wasted on the young.

- Unknown -

13 april 2023:

You cannot simultaneously claim there are no essential characteristics of womanhood and also that "trans women are women". If there are no essential characteristics of womanhood, then no one is a woman.

- Unknown -

6 june 2023

I've long wanted there to be a metal band named Indecipherable, with a logo to match.

- Unknown -

31 July 2024 from the book "Passion and Purity"

If we hold tightly to anything given to us unwilling to allow it to be used as the Giver means it to be used we stunt the growth of the soul. What God gives us is not necessarily "ours" but only ours to offer back to him, ours to relinquish, ours to lose, ours to let go of, if we want to be our true selves. Many deaths must go into reaching our maturity in Christ, many letting goes.

- Elisabeth Elliot -

July 2024:

People who choose a political side are divided...

- Unknown -

July 2024:

Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.

- George Carlin -

26 July 2024:

It is not oppressive of men to keep women off the battlefield.

We’re trying to keep women from becoming victims, not sending them to war because they currently are.

We do not honor weaker vessels (1 Peter 3:7) by putting them in harms way.

- Sean Higgins -
source: https://x.com/tohuvabohu/...

The greatest thing ever...

He's about two inches too short to keep it off the ground while carrying it.

They never met, but the boy LOVES Great Gramps's old Al's Auto Supply Motor Oil can. He carried it around for about 20 minutes...this time.

Love you boy...