"Jesus You Stink!" - Okay, I've Heard It All

Scottius and I read this for our devotions for the appointed day, Saturday, September 16th and immediately thought that this was a strange devotion. Yes, Jesus is the one who handles the "stink" of our sin, but this was just written in a very weird way. This woman's expression was weird too. I wanted to share it with all of you to see what you think!"


"Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you did for Me. " Matthew 25:40


"Early in the twentieth century, Dorothy Day was active in spurring the Roman Catholic Church to respond to the needs of the poor in New York City. She was not a distant executive director of relief work, but was involved personally in the lives of the people her organizations helped.

A movie about Dorothy Day pictures her at a point of frustration. Praying at the altar in an empty church, she has a heart-to-heart talk with God. She believed that Jesus was present in the poor people calling her to serve, yet that meant that she had to see Him in the filthy faces and awful conditions in which these people came to her. She finally cried out in her prayer, "Jesus, You Stink." As the words of her own strange prayer registered within her, she went back to minister to the poor, remembering Christ's promise that He was there for her as well as in the smelly conditions.

This story is another picture of what Jesus did on the cross. There, He took all of the stink of our sin and willingly bore it for us in order to make us clean. As we serve others in His name, He again remains the One who handles the stink."

Lucy's World

My dear sweet husband, Scottius, will probably roll his eyes when he takes a look at the title of this post because he knows all too well what goes on in Lucy's world! :) Oh well, we have a lot of fun!!

Anyway, I haven't been able to make too many posts these days as I am very busy with home-schooling and trying to give school all I got this year. Our dear son is growing up and approaching college age so quickly so college prep is one of my top priorities (besides God and dear Scottius of course).

Also, we are starting to fill out applications for adoption grants which can be quite time-consuming! I never realized how many organizations actually provide adoption grants until we started our adoption a couple of years ago. Therefore, for people who think that money is an issue for adoption, I am here to say that God does provide many ways to help a family with the funding of adoptions. The $10,000 tax credit is very much a blessing as well; however, the adoption has to be final before the tax credit can obviously take effect.

As far as the actual adoption goes, most likely we will be adopting a little boy. Only little girls with special needs are available for international adoptions because the baby girls are being adopted domestically. In essence it seems that little boys are not wanted in South Korea, totally opposite of China. After the 1st of the year, newborn Korean babies will be put on a roster list for 6 months in order to give South Koreans opportunities to adopt these babies. Any babies not adopted will then be placed on a list for families like us who want to adopt these sweeties. This will mean that most likely our little boy will be closer to 10 - 12 months old before we get him. Prior to this upcoming change, families could get their babies anywhere from 5 - 12 months old. Although we would love to get our baby at a much younger age, we are thankful that at least he will receive foster care for his time in Korea and not be placed in an orphanage.

Now for the names, our son and dear Scottius think that Angus would be a great name for our little one! Me? I like the name Daniel! I would imagine that most people would think of a cow whenever they hear the name Angus. Of course,there is the possibility that they may also think of Angus Young from ACDC. I do think he is talented, and I do like a few of their songs. However, I would rather not put our son through the questioning of why he was named Angus!:) All kidding aside, they just like to get me frazzled and tease me. At least, I think they are teasing!!! :)

Does anyone remember this hilarious episode?! And, does anyone remember the name of this horse?

Lucy's NFL Picks - Week 3

Tampa Bay
Chicago
Pittsburgh
Detroit
Jacksonville
N.Y. Jets
Tennessee
Houston
Baltimore
Seattle
Philadelphia
Arizona
Denver
Atlanta

NFL Picks: Week 2

Miami
Minnesota
Cincinnati
Chicago
Indianapolis
Green Bay
Philadelphia
Baltimore
Atlanta
Arizona
St.Louis
Denver
New England
San Diego
Washington

Pittsburgh

May Christ Touch Our Hearts

May Christ be with the families and victims of September 11th as well as with all of our soldiers whether they are active, reservists, veterans, etc. And may Christ have mercy on our country and may we repent of our sins and lean on Him as our Savior. We will never be a Christian nation, but we must always pray for the salvation of each soul.

A Man of Courage and Truth

I know that this man and our president, George W. Bush, may not have the best "approval" ratings according to the media; however, I am proud that he is the President of the United States. Is he perfect? Of course not. He has made mistakes and sins like the rest of us; however, he has had the courage to stand for truth and liberty when others would not. He has made TOUGH decisions, knowing that it may cost him popularity in the polls or with some people. He has been a witness to the truth of Christ and a compassionate president who has hurt for every loss of life from September 11th and the War on Terror.

I don't believe in all of his theology or his policies, but I believe that he is trying to do the very best job as a president could do for our country. I am proud to be an American, and I am proud of President Bush!

This comes from Rush Limbaugh's website, Friday, Sept. 8, 2006.




"The reaction to this movie illustrates that the Democrats fear, deathly fear, the issue of national security becoming forefront in this campaign. They deadly are afraid of it, because they cannot compete against it."

Here's more of what Rush said

Monday Night Football Picks

Minnesota
San Diego

Dick Van Dyke

Here's the great Dick Van Dyke performing from the show of his name. This was the last episode filmed during their first season. Here Mr. Van Dyke shows that he is truly gifted with slapstick comedy.

Enjoy TK!

BTW.............. Our son posted this himself at the request of his dear mother and has so far kept him on a tight, tight leash as to what he can type...... about certain people... who make posts on this blog.

Okay Here Goes Week 1 for Football Picks

Tampa Bay
Carolina
Denver
Buffalo
Philadelphia
Cleveland
Seattle
NY Jets
Cincinnati
Chicago
Dallas
San Francisco
Indianapolis

I picked Cleveland just for Barb!! :)

Oops! The Wrong Team Won!

Oops! My team didn't win! Oh well, hopefully my Sunday picks will be more successful! :)

Not Such a Bad Show After All

When I was a little girl, I hated Star Trek. I guess that it was too far out for me and too much into the future. Anyway, here it is the 40th anniversary of the show, and I can appreciate it much better now. It is a good show that our family can watch together and enjoy the humor, especially when it comes to Spock. So ... I think we will be watching quite a few episodes this weekend and taping as many as we can as well!!

Isn't it amazing how things we don't like at first can grow on us?

LutheranLucy: The NFL Expert

Okay bloggers, Lutheran Lucy turns expert on NFL picks! Yeah right, you say!
Well, let's just say, I will give it my best shot! :) For tonight, I picked Miami!
We will see what happens!

The Dash Between the Dates

What a good reminder this is especially as many of us are reminded of how quickly God can take us from this world as He did Steve Irwin.
Devotional Reading for: 9/7/2006	Associated Scripture Readings: 1 Corinthians Psalm 39
The Dash between the Dates
Teach us to number our days aright. Psalm 90:12
You see it in obituaries and funeral bulletins. You probably don’t even notice it, because you really are looking at what comes before and after it. It’s the dash, the mark that connects the dates of birth and death. It looks so small, but it stands for all the days that mattered—the days of that person’s life. The Bible reminds us of the shortness of life. Psalm 39:5 calls its span a “mere handbreadth”—a fleeting breath. Whether long or short, that span of days is very important to God. That is the time He breaks into our lives with His love and labors to bring us His gift of faith through His Word, by the power of the Holy Spirit. That little dash is so important that God squeezed Himself into it. Jesus Christ, true God, became man, taking our created flesh into Himself. He stepped into time, taking on a birth date. On the day of His death on the cross, He broke the power of death. His resurrection proclaims that Christ has blown open the end of the dash. Death is no longer the end for those who trust in Him. We have been baptized into Christ. Life with Him has begun, and it will last forever. The dash no longer has power over us.
Merciful God and Father, renew me today in Jesus’ love, and show me eternal life, that I may live all my days in You. Amen.

What a man of adventure Steve Irwin was, and how he entertained us with his daring acts with those dangerous crocodiles, snakes, and other animals! We used to watch him on television all the time when our son was younger. Even though we no longer watched his shows (too many reruns), he will still be GREATLY missed! I pray that he was a Christian though I never heard him talk about Christ. May his wife Terry, their children, Steve's dad, and others so close to him be comforted by God's truth. I would imagine that most of us around the world knew that this day would come although not through a freakish accident with a stingray; a crocodile yes, but not a stingray!!

"Hummingbird Lane"

The household of Scottius Maximus and LutheranLucy are blessed to live on "Hummingbird Lane"! No, that isn't the name of our street, but it is for our hummingbirds! We have a feeder somewhat like the one pictured here and usually have a couple of hummingbirds feed off of it throughout the day. Just yesterday we started receiving a third visitor. They are so much fun to watch and are actually quite fearless as they buzz above our heads back and forth to the feeder and then to the trees or wires. They are not very good about sharing either and are constantly chasing each other off from the feeder! Pretty soon they will be migrating South for the winter so we will miss them a lot! We were watching a show about them not too long ago, and it was said that about only 20% of the hummingbirds who fly across the Gulf of Mexico (with their fattened up bodies for the journey) make it across the Gulf! It is a wonder that any of them survive at all across that vast amount of water! That is just another proof of God's provision and care for all of life!

"I Love Lucy" : Series Summary

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I would imagine that most of you know the story behind "I Love Lucy", but I thought it would be fun to post it anyway. Maybe you will end up reading a fact or two that you didn't know! :)

Series Summary:

Lucille Ball had spent three seasons on CBS radio as the female lead in the situation comedy My Favorite Husband when she decided to give the new medium, television, a try. In her radio role as Liz Cooper, she perfected many of the mannerisms that she would use in I Love Lucy, including the scatterbrained quality and the loud crying fits when things weren't going her way. CBS was enthusiastic about the concept of the show, but the network nabobs had two major objections--they were positive nobody would believe Desi was her husband (despite the fact that they were married in real life), and they wanted the show done live from New York, like most of the other early television comedies. Lucy was determined to use Desi and had no desire to commute from Hollywood to New York for the show. In the summer of 1950 the two of them went on tour performing before live audiences to prove that Desi was believable as her husband, and early in 1951 they produced a film pilot for the series with $5,000 of their own money. The pilot convinced the CBS brass that they had something special and I Love Lucy was given a berth on the fall schedule.

The premise of I Love Lucy was not that much different from that of other family situation comedies on television and radio--a wacky wife making life difficult for a loving but perpetually irritated husband--but the people involved made it something very special. Lucy Ricardo was an American of Scottish ancestry (maiden name MacGillicuddy) married to a Cuban bandleader. Husband Ricky was employed at the Tropicana Club and since she was constantly trying to prove to him that she could be in show business too, he spent much of his time trying to keep Lucy off the nightclub's stage. Ricky just wanted her to be a simple housewife. Whenever he became particularly exasperated with one of her schemes, Ricky's already broken English would degenerate into a stream of Spanish epithets. The Tropicana Club was in Manhattan, and so was the Ricardo apartment, in a middle-class building in the East Sixties where their neighbors, best friends, and landlords were Fred and Ethel Mertz. Lucy's partner in mischief was Ethel, and both Ricky and Fred had to endure the foolishness perpetrated by their wives.

I Love Lucy was an immediate smash hit and during its six years in originals, never ranked lower than third in popularity among all television programs. The plots, by series creator and producer Jess Oppenheimer and writers Madelyn Pugh and Bob Carroll, Jr., were superb, the gags were inventive, and Lucy's clowning the piece de resistance that took I Love Lucy beyond the realm of other contemporary comedies. As wacky as she was, audiences could emphathize with and adore her. Watching I Love Lucy in the early 1950s became as much a part of life as watching Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater had been in the late 1940s. It was a national event when, on January 19, 1953, Lucy Ricard gave birth to Little Ricky on the air, the same night that Lucille Ball gave birth to her second child, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz IV.

Over the years, within the context of the show, Ricky became more successful. He got a movie offer that prompted a cross-country trip by car with the Mertzes, during the 1954-1955 season. During the 1955-1956 season they took a trip to Europe, also with the Mertzes, and at the start of the 1956-1957 season Ricky opened his own club, the Ricky Ricardo Babaloo Club. He had also gotten a TV show and, with his good fortune, bought a country home in Connecticut early in 1957. It was also during the 1956-1957 season that little Ricky was added to the regular cast. He had been played on an occasional basis in the previous seasons by a pair of infant twins, Joseph David Mayer and Michael Lee Mayer. Also seen on an irregular basis over the years were Ricky's agent Jerry, the Ricardos' elderly neighbor Mrs. Trumbull, Lucy's snooty friend Caroline Appleby, and Mrs. MacGillicuddy, Lucy's mother.

Everyone has certain favorite episodes of I Love Lucy, and there were so many memorable ones that trying to cite the "best" is particularly difficult. Even CBS executives had problems doing it. During the summer of 1958 there was a collection of reruns titled The Top Ten Lucy Shows--there were 13 different episodes in that "top 10." There was the show in which Lucy maneuvered her way onto Ricky's TV show to do a health-tonic commercial, and got drunk sampling the high-alcohol-content product. There was the time she tried to bake her own bread, and was pinned to the far wall of her kitchen when the loaf--into which she had thrown two entire packages of yeast--was released from the oven. While looking for souvenirs to take back to New York from their trip to Hollywood, Lucy and Ethel tried to pry loose the block of cement with John Wayne's footprints from in front of Grauman's Chinese Theatre. There was the time Lucy tried to get into Ricky's nightclub show by impersonating a clown. When they were going to be interviewed on the TV show Face to Face they almost got into a fight with the Mertzes because Ricky's new agent wanted them to move into a classier apartment. The messiest episode, however, had to be the one that was part of their trip to Europe. Lucy had been offered a minor role in a film by an Italian producer and, in an effort to absorb atmosphere, ended up in a vat of unpressed grapes fighting with a professional grape stomper.

The success of I Love Lucy is unparalleled in the history of television. The decision to film it, rather than do it live, made it possible to have a high-quality print of each episode available for endless rebroadcasts, as opposed to the poor quality kinescopes of live shows. The reruns, sold to independent stations after I Love Lucy left the network, and translated into virtually every language for foreign distribution, made millions. This set the pattern for all of television. The appeal of reusable filmed programs, all started by I Love Lucy, eventually resulted in the shift of television production from New York, where it had all started, to Hollywood, where the film facilities were. I Love Lucy was practically unique in that it was filmed before a live audience, something that did not become widespread in the situation comedy world until the 1970s, and the technique of simultaneously using thee cameras during the filming to allow for editing of the finished product was also a Lucy first.

By the end of the 1956-1957 season, despite the fact it was still the number one program in all of television, I Love Lucy ceased production as weekly series. For the two years prior to the suspension of production, both Lucy and Desi had been seeking to cut down on their workload. They finally succeeded. After the fall of 1957 there was no I Love Lucy, but there was a number of Lucille Ball-Desi Arnaz Shows, full-hour specials about the continuing travels and tribulations of the Ricardos and the Mertzes. Reruns of I Love Lucy had aired during the summer of 1955 as The Sunday Lucy Show and during the 1955-1956 season on Saturdays as The Lucy Show. With the original show out of production, prime-time reruns of I Love Lucy were aired for another two years on CBS, showed up briefly in 1961, and ran in daytime on CBS until 1967. The syndicated reruns have been running continuously ever since, and there is no end in sight.

Series summary from The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946-Present

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Did You Know?

The "valentine" opening credits seen in syndication were *not* the original opening credits. When the series originally aired on CBS, the credits featured animated stick figures of Lucy and Desi along with the sponsor's product--Phillip Morris cigarettes, for instance. The "valentine" credits were added when CBS began rerunning the series in 1958.

References to the series' original sponsor, Phillip Morris, can still be seen in some episodes today. Most notable is the scene in "Lucy Does a TV Commercial" in which Lucy dresses up as Johnny the Bellhop, the Phillip Morris icon.

Bea Benederet and Gale Gordon were Lucy and Desi's first choice to play the Mertzes.

Desi Arnaz invented the rerun during the pregnancy episodes of this series by re-airing some episodes from the first season to give Lucy some rest.

When Lucy was pregnant with Little Ricky, network censors wouldn't permit her to say "pregnant." She had to say "expectant".

You won't hear the word "lucky" in "I Love Lucy." Phillip Morris, the sponsor, forbade it because they did not want their audience thinking of their main cigarrette rival, "Lucky Strikes."

I Love Lucy was one of the first TV shows to be filmed, in Hollywood, at a time when many shows were done live in New York. It pioneered the use of three cameras simultaneously, and the results were high-quality prints of a classic comedy series preserved for future TV audiences.

The full names of Fred and Ethel are Fredrick Hobart Mertz and Ethel Louise Roberta Mae Potter Mertz

Because of limited space on the sound stage, the Ricardo's bedroom and the Mertz's living room is the same set with different furniture.

Lucie and Desi Arnaz Jr. appear in the final first run episode of the series. Their parents wanted them on the show to help them celebrate the final episode of the series.

Gale Gordon was the first choice to play Fred Mertz, but he was unavailable. When they came across William Frawley, Desi Arnez wanted him, but he was told that Frawley would be a poor choice because he was a womanizer, a gambler, and a drunk. Arnez said, "He's perfect!"

The Ricardos' address was 623 East 68th Street. E. 68th Street in Manhattan only goes up to 600, which means that the Ricardos' building in the middle of the East River.

Three "flashback" episodes were shown during the period when Lucille Ball was recovering after giving birth to Desi Jr. These episodes were filmed in advance after Miss Ball found out she was pregnant.

Lucy's birthday is 6 August 1921. She was born in West Jamestown, NY. Her birth year was always kept secret as a running gag on the show, but it was revealed in the episode "The Passport".

Ethel was from Albequerque, New Mexico and her father ran the candy store. Also, one of her neighbors was Betty Ramsey, who would later become a neighbor of Ethel's and Lucy's when they moved to Connecticut in the final season.

Did You Know Facts from The Internet Movie Database