Better late than never . . .

Wednesday evening, my husband and I finally saw “The Passion of the Christ.”  Wow.  I have to confess that I had mixed emotions about seeing it.  Not because of all the controversy surrounding it, but because in a way I was afraid I wouldn’t have the “appropriate” emotional response.  I accepted Jesus as my savior as a child, but in the many years since I’ve gone through valleys in my relationship with Him (like most Christians, I’m sure).  I’ve been in a shallow valley for a while now, and at times I just feel hollow, although I know that my salvation and my relationship with Jesus is real.  So I worried that I would sit there and be hollow in the midst of this vivid depiction of His sacrifice.

Silly me.  I did start out feeling that way, but as the movie progressed, the most unexpected scenes touched my heart and I cried.  The scene where Jesus is lashed to the whipping post and the psychopaths are laughing as they flog Him blew me away.  Here are these vile men, who in our day and time would make the criminals in “America’s Most Wanted” look like Sunday School teachers, laughing and whooping it up as they turn God’s Son into a bloody pulp.  And the fact is, He suffered it all for THEM.  As they tore His flesh with their instruments of torture, His love for them held Him there.  Amazing.  And subsequently, His love for ALL OF US held Him there.  “For ALL have sinned and come short of the glory of God . . . “

The other things that affected me were the scenes between Jesus and his mother, Mary.  I loved the way He interacted with Mary when he was working on the table and she called him to eat.  She told Him to wash His hands and He playfully splashed the water at her.  It showed Jesus as a loving, joyful person — not some somber, stern person.  I just loved that.  I think that’s what it will be like in Heaven. 

The scene where He falls and Mary runs to Him, thinking back to when He was a tiny child and fell . . . that really got my mommy’s heart.  I know how much I love my daughter, and I can’t begin to imagine what that must have been like for Mary.  And if Mary’s pain was so great, imagine what God the Father’s must be?  For His Son, and for each and every one of us on this earth that turns away from Him?

I am so glad that I went to see it.  It was well worth it.

Thank you, Mr. Gibson, for having the courage to follow the call of the Holy Spirit to make this movie.  And most of all, thank you, Lord, for sending your Holy Son for all mankind. 

This from The Federalist digest:

       There is some mystery around the nature of Nick Berg’s business in Iraq. He was not there in any official capacity as a contractor.

       His father Michael Berg, in his anguish, has been quick to toe the party line: “My son died for the sins of George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. This administration did this. I am sure that he only saw the good in his captors until the last second of his life. They did not know what they were doing. They killed their best friend.”

       In fact, Nicholas Berg was repeatedly warned by his parents that he could be targeted by Islamists because he was Jewish, as was the case with Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded by Islamists in Pakistan a year before Operation Iraqi Freedom. Nick Berg spoke with his parents on 24 March. Soon thereafter, he was detained by Iraqi police at a checkpoint in Mosul. On 31 March, U.S. officials then took him into custody while the FBI contacted his parents to confirm his identity.

       However, this was not the first time the FBI investigated Nick Berg. It turns out that he was interviewed by the Bureau after 9/11 in an effort to determine the nature of his relationship with Zacarias Moussaoui, the al-Qaida adherent now in federal custody and awaiting trial on conspiracy charges for his role in planning the hijackings on 9/11. While Moussaoui was in flight school training for 9/11, one of his roommates (a student at the University of Oklahoma where Nick Berg was in attendance) used an e-mail address traced to Berg’s computer. Berg acknowledged knowing the suspect and did let him use his computer, but Berg was cleared as a suspect.

       On 05 April, Michael Berg initiated a lawsuit to have his son released from U.S. custody in Iraq, and on 06 April, Nick Berg was released. He was offered safe passage to Jordan but refused. The last his parents heard from him was 09 April, when he called to let them know he was coming home.

While I think it is very sad that this man was brutally killed, I also think some responsibility rests on his own shoulders, as it does with every American that chooses OF THEIR OWN FREE WILL to travel in that part of the world.  The Middle East is a dangerous place, and someone visiting Israel on holiday could be blown up by a terrorist while innocently having coffee in a cafe.

If Mr. Berg didn’t think about the dangers of traveling in that part of world, especially considering his ethnic heritage, then he just didn’t think, did he?

I think I would like to scream.  If any of you are in a “service” type industry, where you provide quotes in hopes of securing sales . . . I’d like your honest opinion.  Wouldn’t you rather hear from someone telling you that they’ve decided to purchase from someone else, than to be left hanging . . . not knowing whether they’ve decided to purchase from someone else, have been busy, or maybe just need to wait a while?

I recently attempted to contact a potential client.  Left a pleasant message on their answering machine.  “Did you get the quote?  Do you have any questions?  Please feel free to call me.”  Didn’t hear anything for a while.  Left a second message after about a week.  Waited a couple more weeks and then left the following, “Hi.  Just checking in.  If you’ve decided to do something different, I would appreciate a return call so that I can close out your file.  Thanks.”

I got frustrated when my call wasn’t returned and decided to call the client’s cell phone.  Pleasantly inquired if the jury was out.  No, it wasn’t.  They decided to order from someone else. 

I can respect that.  Just give me a call, for crying out loud and tell me so your file doesn’t clutter up my desk.  Thank you.

Man — every columnist at http://www.townhall.com  is hitting the nail on the head today.  Brent Bozell had the following to say, which is similar to my previous post except that it points out that there are some 9/11 families that honestly do hate the president (and in my opinion, probably did before 9/11 ever happened):

The idea that the activists who forced the creation of this politicized “independent” commission were just a group of nonpartisan widows with no political axes to grind. How dishonest.

 For weeks now, the networks have celebrated a very selective set of widows to dish out their anti-Bush outrage and ignored the families who support President Bush. On the day of Rice’s testimony, NBC and then MSNBC championed four women known as the “Jersey Girls,” who uniformly hate Bush, especially Kristen Breitweiser, who has coldly and routinely declared that 3,000 Americans were “murdered on Bush’s watch.”

 Meanwhile, a Nexis search quickly shows that NBC has aired no news story with the words “widow” and the U.S.S. Cole, where terrorists killed 17 Americans in 2000. NBC aired no news story with the words “widow” and the embassy in Kenya, where terrorists killed 12 Americans in 1998. NBC aired no news story with the words “widow” and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, where terrorists killed 19 Americans in 1996. These grieving families have never been given a nationwide TV platform on NBC to express their opinions on how the Clinton administration handled investigations of those incidents.

How I long for 9/10 before any of this happened, and even for 9/12 . . . when for a brief moment our grief dissolved partisan labels and we were simply “Americans.” 

I just read this in Jonah Goldberg’s column, and had to add it here since it definitely relates to my previous post:

This blame game stuff is counterproductive and dangerous when Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq. But if that’s the game we’re stuck with, it’s an indisputable scandal that the Clinton Administration is getting off scot-free.

From the day George W. Bush was elected president, he reinstituted the policy of having daily meetings with the head of the CIA, a tradition Bill Clinton canceled. Indeed, Clinton never met privately at all with his first CIA Director James Woolsey after the initial job interview. When a plane crashed on the White House lawn in 1994, the joke in Washington was that it was Woolsey trying to get an appointment.

According to a New Yorker article, FBI Director Louis Freeh considered Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, to be a “public relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press.”

Meanwhile, Bill Clinton despised Freeh and could barely stomach talking to him. Whoever was to blame for the sour relationship is irrelevant. Clinton was to blame for letting a spat get in the way of national security.

As we’ve heard from so many witnesses, throughout the 1990s the CIA, FBI and Justice Department were actively – not passively – impaired in their work to a scandalous extent. The CIA was told that it couldn’t work with individuals with dubious “human rights” records. Unfortunately, people with ties to terrorists are not captains of their Mormon bowling leagues.

And, of course, there was Clinton’s string of underwhelming, ineffectual and largely counterproductive responses to a string of attacks on America, starting with the first World Trade Center bombing.

The one recurring theme in the 9/11 hearings is the unanimous agreement that the “wall” between intelligence gathering and criminal prosecutions was too high and too thick, and that this was the single most obvious explanation for our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks.

Well, as we learned from John Ashcroft’s testimony, the Clinton Administration took its trowel and cemented a new layer of bricks to that wall of separation. In 1995, the FBI was instructed that intelligence and criminal investigations had to be separated even further than “what is legally required” to avoid “the unwarranted appearance” that our intelligence operatives were – shriek! – sharing their information with prosecutors, and vice versa.

The author of this directive? Clinton’s Deputy Attorney General (and Al Gore confidant) Jamie Gorelick, who now sits in self-righteous judgment on the 9/11 commission – when she should be called before it to explain herself.

The Bush team may not have done everything it could have prior to 9/11. But, for the previous team, not doing everything they could was policy.

Thank you, Mr. Goldberg.

Could anyone possibly think it’s proper for Jamie Gorelick to be sitting on the interrogation squad regarding 9/11?  From Linda Chavez’s column:

 “During the course of those investigations,” wrote Gorelick in 1995, “significant counterintelligence information has been developed related to the activities and plans of agents of foreign powers operating in this country and overseas, including previously unknown connections between separate terrorist groups.” But Gorelick wanted to make sure that the left hand didn’t know what the right was doing. “(W)e believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”  (emphasis added)

These guys want to have their cake and eat it, too.  To prevent the risk of infringing on some crack dealer’s (or other such similar scum) “rights” to ruin and/or end lives — Ms. Gorelick felt it necessary to separate counterintelligence and criminal investigators.  This is the very “wall” between agencies that the Commission is criticizing, and lo and behold, a member of the Commission is one of its constructors!  Please keep in mind that Ms. Gorelick wrote this in 1995 — well before President Bush was elected to office.

The fact is, in my opinion — the United States has enjoyed a position of comfortable security on a number of fronts.  Even when our military has been weak (during the Clinton years), it has still been one of the greatest in the world.  We rested in the knowledge of this.  To our north is Canada and to our south is Mexico, both of whom we’ve had peaceful relations with for decades.  We rested in the knowledge of this.

To our east is the Atlantic — to the west, the Pacific.  We rested in the “knowledge” that we’d have ample warning of any attack from across the water.  It was almost infathomable to think that we could be attacked from within our own borders.  And yet this is what happened . . .

It is possible that we could have seen it coming.  Utilizing better intelligence, listening to the “chatter” down the grapevine, better communication between the agencies.  But the fact is we didn’t see it coming.  Anymore than we saw the first Trade Center bombing, the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, and all the other attacks that have taken place on our nation.

What I would like to know is:  where was the public outcry when the Trade Centers were bombed the first time?  Where was the public outcry when the U.S. Cole was bombed?  Why did it take 3,000 people dying for this commission to suddenly become concerned?  Were the victims of those and other, smaller attacks not enough? 

This commission has no interest in justice or the families of 9/11.  This commission is using 9/11 to try to take out President Bush and his administration.  The families of 9/11 are being used to facilitate this mission — their grief is being exploited in a way so much more attrocious and vile than “exploitation” the President has been accused of.  The families want and need closure and it is not surprising that some of them want someone to blame.  Since those wielding the box cutters are no longer here, it is not surprising that the families would look elsewhere.  The commission and liberal contingency see the hunger for justice in their eyes and see it as a tool to accomplish their own ends.

It’s just shameless.

Hope everyone had a pleasant holiday weekend!  We had good friends come for dinner Saturday evening and the kids dyed eggs.  Then Sunday morning we attended church at Victory Fellowship in Brazoria (http://www.victorybrazoria.com  ).  It was wonderful.  Headed up to the cousins’ to have Easter dinner and visit with family and friends.  Ate way too much.  It’s a shame  there are so many good cooks in the family . . .

Saw John Kerry on the news this morning while I was waiting for Jami to finish getting ready for school.  He was speaking to a classroom full of college kids and he said, “If I were president TODAY, TODAY (emphasis added by me!) . . . this is what I would do . . . “

I laughed and told my husband in my best John Kerry . . . “BUT if I were president TOMORROW . . . . “

All his supporters should get little lapel pins shaped like flip-flops.  To quote Jimmy Buffett, hopefully the man will “blow out his flip-flop” before November.  Then he can “cruise on back home” — of course, it may take him a while to decide WHICH home to cruise to . . .

This tickled my funny bone — unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get the Odin-nesque, all-powerful image to display . . . but the results are, nevertheless:

You are a GRAMMAR GOD!

If your mission in life is not already to
preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I’m trying to add a little to my journal and my grey tabby cat is intent on preventing me from doing this.  He’s lying between me and the computer monitor, occasionally jacking with the mouse and then letting his head roll over onto the keyboard.  It makes typing somewhat difficult.

I had a pretty stressful day today and it’s my own fault.  I got caught up in a debate over on another blog and got my Irish up (nevermindthefact that I’m not Irish — my husband’s grandmother is.  Does that count?)  Anyway, the majority of people posting to the comments section are extremely liberal and I actually wasted time trying to debate the issues with them.  I thought I presented my arguments in a logical, well-thought out manner — in return I was called a “nit-wit,” “ignorant,” “full of patriotic crap,” well . . . you get the picture.  When I made the mistake of pointing out that resorting to name-calling indicates someone is intellectually challenged and not able to debate the issues on their merits, another poster told me I couldn’t complain about name-calling if I was going to resort to same.

Personally, I don’t feel I was name-calling.  I think I was pointing out the obvious! 

In addition to the politically-charged conversations of the day, I went to do a blind installation this afternoon only to discover that the blind manufacturer sent the wrong installation brackets.  I called them asap only to discover that the brackets must come from the plant in Mexico, and it is very unlikely that they will get them sent out before the Easter holiday.  My poor client has been waiting weeks for these blinds . . . and now another delay.  Sometimes being my own business owner is not all it’s cracked up to be . . .

And then when I’m able to schedule things around my daughter’s school activities, or take a day to do something I want to or need to do . . . it’s good to be “Boss.”

Yum . . . made the following recipe for dinner:

1 lb. ground venison; 1/2 cup chopped onions; 4 carrots (diced); 3 ribs celery (diced); 1 garlic clove (minced); 1 qt. tomato juice; 1 Tbsp. salt; 2 cups dry lentils (washed with stones removed); 1 qt. water; 1/2 tsp. dried marjoram; 1 Tbsp. brown sugar

Brown ground meat and onion in skillet and drain.  Combine all ingredients in slow cooker.  Cover.  Cook on Low 8 – 10 hours or High 4 – 6 hours.  Eight servings.