How to be a better Christian (than everyone else)

Being a good Christian is hard.  You're supposed to read your Bible, and pray, and probably some other stuff, too.  And all those things take time away from the most important part of being a Christian . . . impressing other people with how good a Christian you are.

Fortunately, like all Americans, God loves a shortcut.  That's why there's a super-easy way to look like a great man or woman of God:  Make everyone else look really bad.

Read more »

My brilliant new marketing strategy...

First off, let me say that I had an amazing Mother's Day weekend.  My son's awesome preschool teacher had a ton of goodies the kids helped make for us, including a framed poem with my baby's handprints and a photo of him.  (Though they did have to rearrange the layout on my son's poem/handprints/photo collage, since his hands are so much bigger than any of the other kids'.  The trials of having a giant baby never cease.)

And my husband made me breakfast in bed Sunday morning whilst presenting me with a vase of gorgeous flowers.  I'm not much of a botanist, but they look like something that would grow wild in a field while Julie Andrews twirls around and sings.  I showed a blurry cell phone photo of them to my friend who knows flowers, and she thinks they're marigolds and shasta daisies.  Either way, they're really pretty, and beat the crap out of cliched roses.

For my mom and stepmom, I baked heart-shaped cookie cakes from scratch, and decorated them all pretty and fancy.  I don't usually cook anything that requires more than a toaster, so this was a real labor of love, coming from me.  (Also, I managed to procure two Mother's Day gifts, my friend's baby shower gifts, and my niece's birthday gifts, all for under $100.  Yay frugal me!)

On the subject of cookies, I'm sure you've seen the new DiGiorno Pizza & Cookies packages.  My husband and I love these, because we often eat pizza and cookies on Saturday nights when we stay up late without the baby and forget about eating healthy.  Buying those two things together is easier and cheaper.

But it got me to thinking, what other unexpected objects might be cleverly packaged together?  How about...

Read more »

I'm so proud of myself for actually reading Leviticus.

As I mentioned in a previous post, my Core Group (me and two awesome ladies a lot cooler than me) is currenty slogging through Leviticus.

Leviticus is not an easy read. There are rules for building the temple. And rules for sacrifice. And a few thousand (it seems) rules about what's clean and unclean, whether it's clean or unclean to eat, whether it's a clean or unclean affliction, or clean or unclean time to have sex (I don't know how they enforced that one, or rather, I don't want to think about it).

And this is why people sometimes feel like the Old Testament is a buzzkill, because of "Thou shalt not" books like Leviticus. But reading it now, as an adult, I'm starting to see how a lot of those laws made sense.

Read more »