Moving to Arabia

Cindy, a servant of Christ Jesus, called to be a mother and set apart for the gospel of God - the gospel he promised beforehand through his prophets in the Holy Scriptures regarding his Son, who as to his human nature was a descendant of David, and who through the Spirit of holiness was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead: Jesus Christ our Lord. Through him and for his name's sake, we received grace and apostleship to call people from among all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith. And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ. To all in cyber land who are loved by God and called to be saints: Grace and peace to you from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ. First, I thank my God through Jesus Christ for all of you, because your faith is being reported all over the world. . .

I forgot to take my Bible to church this morning. As has already been established in an earlier post, venues with large groups of people are not my favorite places to be. So, at first I thought maybe the lack of a Bible was a sign from God that I should just turn around and go home. Unfortunately, when I told John of my predicament he thought that maybe my lack of a Bible was a clear sign that I should be in church. So I went to church.

I then had the dilemma of deciding where in church to go. I could go to first service or I could go to Sunday School.* I decided to go to Sunday School to be antagonized by John Miller (the formally nameless man at church who likes to ask the tough questions). Since I'm often dressed up like Cyndi Lauper on Sunday mornings, I feel like my presence in Sunday School would be a distraction so I don't get there on a regular basis. When I am there, John likes to comment on my presence. This morning was no different.

The discussion this morning was on Paul and the book of Romans, particularly the first verses, some of which were paraphrased and rewritten at the beginning of this post. We were asked to shout out descriptors of Paul and his writings. Someone commented that Paul's writings are "not fluffy and he cut to the chase" (I know because I wrote it down). Upon hearing these comments, John felt the compulsion to stare at me with a knowing look, implying that my writings could be similarly described. At this point several people noticed a nonverbal exchange going on between the two of us so the discussion shifted from Paul's writings to mine. Thanks, John.

In my discomfort I was still able to learn a lot about Paul and his book to the Romans. Thanks, Dennis. I probably learned all of this in Christian school many moons ago but forgot about it soon after the test. For example, I haven't really thought about Paul's run-on sentences until we were asked to perform a variation on sentence diagramming, using the first several verses in Romans. I would like to point out something that has been bothering me since this morning but which I felt would be pointless to point out while Dennis was trying to make a point and that is that it was proposed that "the gospel" was the object of this first sentence but since it is in a prepositional phrase it cannot be the object because the object of the prepositional phrase can never be the object of the sentence. I'm just sayin'. And I'm trying out my ability to write a Paul-style run-on sentence. But I know where you were going with this so I kept it to myself as long as I could. I do feel better now.

Anyway, I also learned that Paul went to Arabia for three years and we unfortunately know nothing about this time in Paul's life. How sad. I wonder what the book of "Arabians" would have been like if he had later written a letter to the people there. It may have been my favorite book of the Bible. Or yours. We could be studying that now instead of Romans.

Maybe I should consider moving to Arabia for 3 years. Maybe not Arabia. Maybe the beach. I could live there for an extended period of time. But don't worry. I wouldn't leave you hanging. I'd keep updating so they wouldn't be the three lost years in Cindy's life. Until then you can find me studying the run-on sentences in Romans. Maybe I'll assign Mariana to diagram a few of them this week. She loves diagramming sentences.

*Please don't feel the need to send me an message telling me that they are Bible Fellowship Groups and not Sunday School classes. I never did quite get the reason to change the name. And I have never seen a Bible fellowshipping with another Bible so it really makes no sense to me in that regard. And then, as if Bible Fellowship Group isn't hard enough to remember, each one of these groups has its own separate name. I can never remember the name of my class so when I sign my kids into their classes and I have to list my location, I have to give up and just list my location as John's location which is usually the sanctuary only it's not a sanctuary at McBIC it's a Family Life Center. Sometimes I can't remember that name either because it's not exactly intuitive. I usually don't go to the Family Life Center with my family since they are all in their own classes and it's not the center where my family got it's life so that doesn't work for me either. Pretty soon they won't call it church either and then I'll have to remember something like Mechanicsburg Brethren in Christ Family Bible Fellowshipping Life Center Building.