Sunday, December 7, 2014

Cookies, Nativities, and looking forward to our Health Care visitors

Hello, Friends.

Friday was a dreary December day! A great day to be baking cookies and addressing cards and preparing for the holidays. What are your plans? Are you going out of town? Don't forget to stop your mail! If you are leaving town, don't turn off your furnace. You can turn it down to a lower temperature, but if you turn it off, and the weather should turn, your pipes can freeze and burst causing your house to flood while your are gone. What a mess!

Since we are rolling into flu season, we will be having medical professional guests at our meetings and classes December 9 and 11. Bring your questions for advice for talking to you healthcare professionals and learn more about how to communicate about your health needs no matter what the country!

Carolyn

Tuesday's International Bible Study read John 5:16-30. Jesus is being persecuted (for healing on the Sabbath) by the Jewish leaders: this was mainly for his teaching and popularity among the people, but the Jewish leaders were afraid of Him. He made them look foolish and uneducated with His teaching. This is a wonderful lesson: Jesus teaches that God, His Father is always at work and ... [Jesus] too is working on our behalf (John 5:17). This is a comfort to us. Jesus goes on to explain how He knows what to do and what His work is. He tells the Jewish religious leaders to honor Him, just as they honor the Father...and warns that God has given Jesus the responsibility to judge us (a good reason to respect someone!) and that that judgment can lead to a death penalty, but Jesus assures us (and them) that if we believe what He says about God (that He is always at work on our behalf  because He loves us as as His children) and about Himself (that He is God's Son who has come to save us and give us life), then we have a good relationship with Jesus and with God. He is reliable!

We made traditional cookies at International Friends. We made gingerbread, sugar and shortbread and decorated them. We practiced having a cookie walk (not really!). I ended up with a lot of gingerbread...this is a good thing: I love it! I was told that they weren't to Asian taste. I also brought persimmon pudding to taste to our meeting. I misquoted the review for this: it was the same recipe that was in one reviewer's family for 130 years (not 300!). This is a very traditional Indiana style recipe. I hope that you have a chance to try it with your family.

Conversation on Wednesday, I brought the game of Jacks and we all tried this old fashioned game. The style that I have is difficult to find in the United States, because the jacks are small and metal and may be a dangerous hazard to very small children. We also made some traditional Indian cookies:
Nankhatai. We decided that these cookies are the same as the Japanese cookies Snowballs! I wonder where these cookies originated?

After classes on Thursday we painted our Nativities. Our pictures are posted as a private group on Facebook. To see this page, you need to be my "friend". Please "friend" me and let me know you want to be added to this group.

dreary: drab, uninteresting, boring
dreary December day: multiple words in a row in a sentence that begin with the same sound are called an alliteration. Alliterations call attention to what is being said and creates a musical effect, they make information easier to remember. When people choose a name or marketing people
weather should turn: the weather changes
[Jesus}: when reading and there are brackets [] around a word; it means that the writer is inserting a word to better explain what is being said when repeating a quote
persecuted: to annoy, trouble or harass someone
behalf: in the interest of someone, to speak for and support someone else
death penalty: put to death by law because of a behavior
taste: in this case the word taste is used to mean whether someone likes the way something tastes or
misquoted: repeated a fact or something that someone had said incorrectly
originated: started; where something began

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