Fancy Meeting You Here!

There is a small number of blogs which I read faithfully, either for information or just plain old fun, and I hardly ever skip a day because, well, just because I like it that way. Something interesting happened yesterday with two of the blogs to which you can link from this one. They met.

Thepioneerwoman.com is one of my all-time favorite fun sites. The woman is just wild, but in a very good way. She's married to a guy she refers to as Marlboro Man, and they have two daughters and two sons. PW announced a few days ago that Marlboro Man and the two girls were going on a trip to the Dominican Republic with Compassion International with some other bloggers, to see what Compassion does down there. I have sponsored kids through Compassion since about 1985, and so I found this interesting, and it has been fun to read MM's reactions to what he sees. PW has apparently stayed at home to arrange the blog posts as he sends them in, and the considerate guy keeps sending photos of laundry to prove to his wife that it's a universal problem--not just hers. With six people on a cattle ranch, PW does a LOT of laundry, much of it stinky. I'm sure all those photos are making her feel better.

Another blog I visit daily is www.challies.com. Tim Challies is a man in Canada of Calvinistic persuasion (I don't hold that against him) and his posts and links are always worth reading. I even bought a copy of his book, although it's packed in a box in the garage because it lived in that room which just got the new floor, so it may be some time before I can get my hands on it to actually read it. But I will. Honest. Tim Challies also announced a few days ago that he was going to...the Dominican Republic. With Compassion. Talk about a small world! I laughed about the coincidence.

So yesterday I read Pioneerwoman, and then scootted over to challies.com. Mr. Challies had a slide show up of photos he had taken, and as the pictures slide-showed by I noticed something. I saw pictures of Marlboro Man and the girls. Wait! Wrong website! You don't belong here! It was a very strange reaction. I knew intellectually that they were in the same place, but it was a little surreal all the same, kind of like if Harry Potter were to walk in through my office door. I never thought that any of these people were fictional, but I never expected them to appear together either. It's not clear to me why this startles me so.

Marlboro Man's post today has made my heart a little sad. It's not the poverty or anything, even though that's obviously a bad thing too. It's that when he talked about faith (a subject with which he is clearly uncomfortable) he seemed to be attributing the faith of a woman he met there to the wrong cause. MM kept talking about the importance of sponsors connecting with their sponsored children, and I got the feeling he thought that was where this woman's amazing faith and hope came from. Wrong anchor, dude. Way wrong. It made me very sad, and so if you read this, help me pray for this guy. He's a sweetie, and I'd love to see him in the kingdom if he isn't in it already, but at the very least he needs a stronger grasp of the source of our faith and our hope. Yikes. But for the record, I do think he is absolutely correct. It is the combination of the gospel, education, food, clothing, and connection with someone who cares that makes the most difference. For biblical backing, see James, chapter 3.

But the REALLY extraordinary thing is that my spell-checker had no problem with the term "slide-showed".

Love, Spud.