HARMLESS THOUGHTS

I'm sitting here in a quaint little French Restaurant finishing my sermon. I'm currently expositing my way through the Gospel according to Luke. This coming Sunday (tomorrow) we will be discussing Luke 3:15-18, which is right in the middle of Luke's coverage of John the Baptist's ministry. I mention these two details in the same paragraph, because I am feeling a sharp contrast between the clientele of this little restaurant versus the John the Baptist persona. My reason for being in this quaint little restaurant is the occasion of my wife's birthday. One of her absolute favorite things to do is to get away . She loves a little bed and breakfast or a tiny inn. The particular inn, in which we are staying, has a French restaurant on the main floor... with a legit French chef at the helm of its kitchen. I haven't eaten here in the evening, but because the breakfast is included, I've had it a couple of times now. And I have to say, the biscuits and gravy is the b...

Skin on the Pudding When I was a child, my mother used to make homemade pudding. It wasn't a pudding that came from a package, it was a legitimate homemade pudding. I've tried to do this a few times myself, but it is more work than the Cook and Serve pudding mix and it is a whole lot more work than pudding cups. Plus, when I've tried doing this myself, I usually ended up with lumpy pudding... and it wasn't the tapioca sort of lumps.  One aspect of the childhood pudding making that I remember the most is being drafted by my mother to stir the pudding. I learned that this was an absolute necessity during the cooking process. Because of the ingredients in the pudding recipe, allowing it to simmer would inevitably lead to a burnt layer sticking to the bottom of the pan. A good homemade pudding can be ruined by a few seconds of unattended simmering. I also remember that stirring that same pot of pudding after it was cooked, would still be necessary to keep the skin from de...

Preamble A couple of qualifiers, before I begin this post:  First: This is not a post about the Corona Virus. I am not going to debate the virus. I am not saying that it isn't a real virus and I am not saying that it isn't deadly. What I am saying is that this virus isn't as deadly (to certain strands of the population) as they told us it was going to be. We are not at Threat Level Midnight here... I have yet to drive past the hospital and see body bags lined up outside because the coroner can't keep up. There haven't been, at least in my area, bulldozers piling disease ridden corpses into mass graves. I am not aware of any CDC workers or military personnel showing up in large yellow hazmat suits, looking like giant thumbs, setting up tents and sorting the sick and the healthy into camps for the purpose of transporting them in those large, tarp-covered military trucks to unknown locations, never to be seen again.  But, like I said, this isn't really a post abo...