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Showing posts from April, 2018

Family antics: Spring 2018

Well.  This has been a spring, hasn't it?  In less than two months we've gone from this: to this: via a LOT of rain. It feels like a long time since I wrote a general family update, so here are a few highlights for March and April. Easter Toby and Theo both needed Easter bonnets this year.  I was dreading the whole thing, but to my surprise, both boys were enthusiastic about making them, and it turned into an enjoyable experience.  They didn't win any prizes, but they were very proud of their hats. We also baked and decorated biscuits, and took them to my parents' for the Easter service at their church.   Car We parted with our aging and decrepit Rover and traded it in for a shiny new vehicle.  Graham did all the hard work finding the new car, but it was well worth it.  The gears work.  The windows roll down.  The doors open without falling off.  It even has a voice control system which tells the boys to "Please speak more quietly&qu

Super Samson Brings House Down

A book can't last several thousand years unless it contains some properly good stories, can it?  And the Bible has plenty of them, from the inspiring to the gory to the downright odd.  We meet people that we would like to be, people we wish we weren't, and people who we would like to ask a lot of questions. But when I was asked to write a tabloid version of any Bible story for my writing group, there was only one character who really stood out.  Larger than life, always getting into trouble (and then getting into more trouble to cover it up), and with a thunderous end: Samson is prime tabloid fodder. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons The original version of Samson's story is in Judges, chapters 14-16.  It is not the kind of nice improving story that you might hope to find in a sacred text.  Samson falls for a girl who is an enemy Philistine, and orders his parents to get her for him. (Nice and polite, then.)  They oblige, and on the way to meet her, he kills a