Christian Women Online

I’ve been raising a family for a long time now.  The oldest of our seven children is 34 and my youngest is 10.  That makes for a lot of nappy (diaper) changes.
It also makes for bigger than average purchases at the supermarket, and lots of exercise lugging bags of fruit, vegetables and other sundry items to our car at the local markets.
Anyone who regularly does the weekly shopping knows that the job isn’t finished once you’ve popped the last of the bags into the car.  Once home, those bags need to be taken out of the car and their contents put on their allotted shelves.
That’s the part I used to complain about.  I was usually all right going out to do the shopping.  I was fresh and ready for the challenge.  But coming home after 2 - 4 hours of being on my feet and running round from place to place would leave me somewhat wilted.
And it was in that condition that I had to face ‘the putting away’.  It sounds simple enough, but the job could take 20 minutes, and on occasions takes nearly 30, especially if a few interruptions came along the way.
So ‘the putting away’ became the really distasteful part of the whole job, and every time I was faced with the task, I would do so, quietly bemoaning my hard lot.
I could have made things a little easier by putting my feet up and enjoying a hot drink before tackling the job, but that to my mind, was an unthinkable alternative.  I just wanted to get this unpleasant task out of the way.
One day, as I was pulling items out of a shopping bag to place into our pantry my mind was filled with the same self-pitying thoughts that I usually got caught up with while doing that job.
Suddenly, a new thought cut right across my normal thoughts.  It was different – and I knew it was God.
“How dare you complain about the inconveniences of your own prosperity!”
Ouch!  That stung.  I replayed the statement over in my mind several times.
It still stung.
It had hit the target like an arrow hitting the centre of the bullseye.
Here was I living in a comfortable home, with money to buy food, markets and supermarkets conveniently nearby, and shelves and refrigerators in which to store my purchases – and I’m whinging.
Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not wealthy by the standards of my own country.  I’m just pretty average.  However, if you’re reading this on your own personal computer, chances are you, like me, are privileged to enjoy a quality of life that the bigger percentage of the people in this world will never come near.
Perhaps, as an alternative to my prosperous lifestyle, I’d like to join the ranks of those without a home.  There’d be no shelves to stack, no toilets to clean, no beds to make, no messes to tidy.  There’d be no carpet to vacuum, no garden to weed, no curtains to wash, and best of all – no oven to scrub.  Wow!  Just think.  I could eliminate all those nasty jobs that I have inherited because of my prosperity!
There’d also be no washing machine, leaving me to wash everything by hand.   There’d be no blender in which to make those oh so delicious fruit smoothies  There’d be no oven in which to cook a roast for a cold winter’s dinner, or cakes for my children’s birthdays.  There’d be no juicer to extract those wonderfully satisfying drinks.  There’d no no food processor, or personal computer, or heater, or air conditioner……
I decided that this was a lesson I needed to learn very quickly.
I resolved never to complain about the inconveniences of my lifestyle again.  Philippians 2:14 rang a loud and clear instruction:  “Do everything without murmuring (grumbling/complaining) and disputing (arguing).”
I also resolved to be obedient to 1 Thessalonians 5:18: “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God …”.
It hasn’t been easy, and it didn’t happen overnight.  I asked God to catch me out when I begin complaining, or when I wasn’t thankful.  I also called on Him to change my heart, so that my automatic response in any situation would be one of thankfulness – even when I’m wilting.

When we went to live in Malaysia for six months in 2005, we knew that many of the Chinese spoke English.   We figured then, that communication shouldn’t be too much of a problem, especially as we would be relating with the Chinese more than anyone else.

However, it turned out to be a little more of a challenge than we had anticipated.

Malaysians love to abbreviate. (more…)

If we start with the Word of the One who knows all, the evidence of today’s world makes a great deal of sense.

When God created the world, he declared that all living things were to reproduce ‘after their kind’.  That means rats come from rats, horses from horses, roses from roses, and humans from humans.

Evolution has never been observed to have occurred and the fossil record shows no evidence of any in-between stages of anything.  Every so often claims are made that some in-between fossil has been found, but sooner or later in each case, the claims have been shown to be wrong.

God created within living things a wonderful genetic capacity for rapid change in response to environmental pressures.   This rapid change within kinds is most easily observed today in isolated island environments.  It has nothing to do with evolution - changing from one kind to another.  It’s all about ‘adaptation’ - changes that occur within kinds, but only according to genetic information that is already present.

Click here to read of rapid change that has been observed in mice, mosquitoes, daisies, lizards and guppies - sometimes up to 10 million times faster than the average rates determined when evolutionary bias is applied to the fossil record.

Oh dear!  The weight so many parents of young children carry - and I’m not talking of being fat!

Unfortunately, the kind of weight I am talking of is a self-inflicted burden.  No-one forced it on the parents.  They have simply chosen to shoulder that burden themselves.

I think that its weight would sometimes be unbearable.

When you try to tell them they don’t have to carry that burden, many of them look at you as if you’re from Mars.  To them, they can’t see any alternative……

What precipitated my little outburst? (more…)

Hey!  I was taught that fossils were remains of dead creatures.  How can a fossil be ‘living’?  Well, when a creature or a plant that lives today is identical to fossils that are believed to be ‘millions of years old’ it creates a problem for evolutionists.

To skirt around the problem, they came up with the phrase ‘living fossils’.  That basically means that evolutionists can’t explain why these creatures and plants have shown no change for the supposed ‘millions of years’ they have been on earth.

However, if you look at it from a creationist point of view it poses no problem at all.

Find out why.

It’s a rare parent that doesn’t want the best for their child.  Parents generally want their children to expand their interests, develop their talents, enjoy good friendships, be successful and have a good marriage and a happy family.

When it comes down to the specifics, we have differing views of what ‘the best’ is.  For some parents, ‘the best’ for their children means (more…)

Our first taste of Malaysia was the nine hour bus trip that took us from the Singapore border to Seremban, about an hour south of Kuala Lumpur.  The bus meandered its way north, frequently stopping along the way to pick up and put down locals.

We were eventually deposited at the Seremban bus station where a  young man from the church we would be attending at Port Dickson,.met us and took us the 25 minutes to our final destination.

Port Dickson is what the Malaysians kept calling a ‘small’ town.  It was however big enough to have several multi-storey resort complexes, a lot of restaurants, many suburbs, (more…)

For believers in the prevailing evolutionary view that dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago, the idea that they might be alive today is hard to accept.

But dinosaur like creatures are regularly being sited in many places all over the globe.  Read the account of a ‘dinosaur-like reptile’ that was seen on two occasions in the Lake Murray area, in Western Province of New Guinea in 1999.

One of my daughters-in-law has given her children jobs, or chores as some would call them, to do each afternoon after they come home from school.

It falls to her second child, a boy, to get the washing in.

One day, he must have been feeling particularly efficient.  Normally on arriving home from school, his first thought is ‘food’.  However several months ago, he walked through the front door, dropped his school bag, then walked straight out the back door to the clothesline and began taking the washing off the line.

He didn’t notice that the washing was still damp.   (more…)

The ferry pulled alongside the dock at Piraeus, near Athens.  We had taken the overnight trip from the Greek island of Kalymos after having spent a week there and on the neighbouring island of Kos.

We were scheduled to speak at a couple of churches in Thessaloniki on the weekend and chose to take the seven hour train journey from Piraeus in order to arrive in Thessaloniki that day.

Now we weren’t sure if that was going to work out. (more…)

It’s commonly believed that petrification takes millions of years.

Care to cook with some flour that was ground around 1903?

Find out why you’ll have a hard job doing that.

At a recent prayer meeting I attended, we waited on the Lord for some time just to meditate on Him and his Word and to enjoy His presence.

When we finished, one lady shared that she had a lovely sense that God was dancing with her.

Now I realise that may seem a strange thing.  Firstly, I know that some people believe that dancing is a sin.  I don’t take that view.  Though I certainly recognise that a lot of dancing is provocative, lewd, sensual - indeed, designed to appeal to our lusts - there are also many ways to dance (more…)

We’re going through a bit of a financial tight spot at the moment.  It’s happened before, and as on previous occasions, an end will come to it.   In the meantime, we have had to adjust our living - go without, mend things more often, think twice before we use the car, only buy essentials.

About 4 months ago, our 14 year old daughter told me she would be needing new runners soon.  I also noticed that some of her clothing was getting too small for her, some of her track pants had holes in the knees, and she had completely outgrown her good shoes.

Despite that, I asked her to eek out the last of the life left in the runners - a request with which she happily co-operated.

A few months after that, we received a cash gift with instructions (more…)

What has caused a bottle, a ceramic jar, basketware, iron corrosion products, pebbles and shell fragments to keep close company?

Find out how the sinking of the British troopship HMS Birkenhead in 1852 has lead to yet another proof that geological processes don’t need millions of years.

There was a time when I would write out a ‘to do’ list each morning, then lament each night when I didn’t complete everything on the list.   I lived with a sense of failure because of the things that were left undone, rather than with the joy of knowing I had accomplished many things on any given day.

We didn’t watch television, and computers and the internet were still a mystery to us, so I couldn’t be accused of wasting time on soapies and computer games.  It’s just that five young children take a lot of looking after.

Despite my high productivity, I always carried a sense that I was failing to meet ‘the standard’, and lived with that mindset for many years.

Fast forward to 2003.  (more…)

Life will inevitably bring along it’s little frustrations.  We have found though that when we live in a culture different to our own, it has a habit of presenting us with a few more frustrations that we would usually face.

Here’s a little exchange that occurred between my husband and (more…)