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Mikey and I are habitually late bandwagon jumper-on-ers. We got into CSI about five years after it began, but it was great because it was in syndication so we could watch it every night.
National Geographic magazine has been around for, oh, 120 years, and we just started our 
subscription eighteen months ago.
We’re thinking of starting to watch Lost. I’m just not sure, though … might be too early.
On the side panel of my cereal box is a recipe for a kind of trail mix. It calls for, among other things, cereal, dried cranberries, and peanuts. It notes that the peanuts are optional. Thanks for that.
This has no relevance; it's just funny.
Unless you’re baking*, I think everything in a recipe is optional. If you hate mushrooms, don’t disqualify a recipe that calls for them. They’re optional. If you don’t like tomatoes, use an alfredo sauce or olive oil on your pizza. If raisins make you cringe, add nuts instead.
*The exception is that if you’re baking, you’re essentially performing a chemistry experiment and almost all the ingredients are necessary. Never omit flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, eggs (unless you use egg substitutes), or yeast in a recipe. You can use chocolate chips in place of nuts, though. Yum.
At the risk of sounding high on the horse, I was a pretty smart kid. I was in “enrichment” classes in elementary school and almost always took a higher-level math class than other kids in my grade. As you can imagine, I also got made fun of a lot.
In high school, Ms. Bachelor, my counselor, told me I had a lot of potential. I got that a lot. In college, I started to believe it. But after I graduated from college, I stopped hearing it. Now that I’m thirty, I can’t remember the last time I heard it.
That’s because it’s time I started fulfilling my potential. You have it when you’re eighteen. Not when you’re thirty. By the time you’re thirty, you’d better be living up to your potential. If you’re thirty and still think you have a lot of potential, you’re a has-been.
“An ounce of pretention is worth a pound of manure.”
– Julia Roberts as Shelby Eatenton quoting Drum Eatenton in Steel Magnolias
Knowing my propensity toward pride, I confess to keeping this quote close at hand. Pretention … Pride … Same thing. One is just more obvious than the other. 
“If God is silent, what’s that to you?
If he turns his face away, what can you do about it?”
Job 34:29 (MSG)
So, you’re waiting on God. You’ve been waiting. You keep waiting. Waiting, waiting, waiting. God’s not showing up. He’s … in a word … silent.
Job is kind of like Opposite Day in the Bible, where for about thirty chapters, everything you read from Job’s friends is wrong. God comes around at the end (sorry to spoil it for you) and says He’s fed up with the friends. They’re idiots.
But then, you can’t just go Screwtape Letters on it and take the reverse of everything they say, because some of it is true. 34:29, for example, is spoken by Job’s friend Elihu and really hits home for me. So God’s being silent. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to turn your back on Him, the One who can actually do something about it?
Or do you stick it out, knowing that if anybody knows the best thing and can do it, it’s Him?
It may be a cop-out for not writing a real blog entry today, but I just saw this video and am still laughing.
beth nelson 