Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Company We Keep

Tony and his mustachioed friend Frank. But which is which?
Image by Tony Alter on Flickr.

They say that sometimes spouses eventually start to resemble one another.

Some husbands and wives may not find this idea terribly thrilling.

A more disturbing trend is when people are dead ringers for their dogs, with the same flowing locks as their Afghan hound, jowls of their English bulldog, or roly-poly wrinkles of their Shar-Pei.

(Let’s hope none of my readers resembles the Komondor dog, which looks like a walking mop head!)

I guess it’s true to say that we become more like the people we spend a lot of time with.

We tend to conform to our friends’ attitudes and emotions, to their likes and dislikes, and even to their speech patterns. This can affect us for good or ill.

The Bible has a few things to say about how important it is to carefully choose the company we keep…

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

The Moonbow Connection

Lunar Rainbow over Victoria Falls, Zambia
Photo courtesy Calvin Bradshaw (calvinbradshaw.com)
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

I’ll bet most of us have seen a rainbow at some time in our lives, but have you ever seen a moonbow?

Frankly, until recently I didn’t even know such a thing existed. Moonbows, also known as lunar rainbows, are rainbows which are produced by moonlight rather than by direct sunlight. As such, they’re usually fainter than regular rainbows, and may even appear white.

But moonbows are still evidence of the sun’s presence, because they’re created by reflected sunlight bouncing off the moon. They’re a very special reminder that the sun is still shining, even when we can’t see it.

Sometimes I think God puts believing friends in our lives to function as “moonbows” for us.

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Posted on by Lori Cartmell

Chocolate: Everybody’s Friend

Photo by Jean Beaufort, PublicDomainPictures.net

One of the wonderful things about chocolate (and there are many), is how well it pairs with other foods.

Chocolate seems to go well with just about everything. It marries happily with fruits like strawberries, raspberries, pears, cherries and bananas. It perfectly complements the flavours of nuts, such as peanuts, cashews, hazelnuts, almonds and macadamia nuts.

Chocolate cheerfully coexists with citrus, coconut, ginger, caramel, coffee, dairy or mint. It has even been known to blend with the flavours of chili and meat in some Mexican dishes.

Some adventurous people claim that chocolate goes well with broccoli (well, perhaps…if you held the broccoli).

You’ve got to hand it to a food that is uncompromising about its own flavour yet harmonizes with such a wide variety of other substances.

Did you know that the Bible implies that we should be a bit like chocolate? Not in so many words, of course, but the concept is still there.

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