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246 Holiday Greetings 2022

12/21/2022

I keeping with my tradition, I include here a copy of the letter which we have enclosed with seasonal greeting cards to close family and friends. It’s been quite a year, better in many ways than some of the recent ones, but still not filled with the sense of world-wide peace and love which one might hope for. Still, the season does bring hope for better times to come. Let’s all remember that in these times.

I’ll be back in a couple of weeks (after things settle down a bit) with more of my usual blather. I hope there are people who find what I have to say of some interest, or at least get some amusement from it on occasion. In any event, I enjoy creating it, so I’ll probably keep it up.

In the meantime, you can catch up with what the extended Beam family has been doing this year (in brief). I hope you enjoy it and have a great Holiday season.

🖖🏼 LLAP,

Dr. B

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
                   — Nelson Mandela
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic; capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”                                                                       ― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

P.S.   I was going to just leave this as written above, but then I saw this Luann comic strip last Sunday and I couldn’t resist. If it were only this simple and easy to get this done. Well, we can still wish, I guess.   RSB

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245 Unexpected Church Signs

12/7/2022

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I’ve touched on this general idea a couple of times before in posts about “church” signs which I found interesting, or amusing. I’m sure everyone knows the signs to which I am referring. They are usually (but not always) on the lawn in front of a church and they commonly list the church’s name, the pastor’s, and, most often, the title of an upcoming sermon or some other noteworthy information. I have found, on occasion, that these notices can be of some amusement. You would have to know the actual people involved, I guess, to know if they were intentionally funny, but the amusement seems pretty obvious, at least to me. In any case, I’ve collected pictures of some of these signs and thought some might make an enjoyable post. So, here we go.

I found this, first, sign absolutely hysterical. It appears to be simple, logical and entirely reasonable, until you actually pay attention to what it says. Then, it’s a hoot!

This next sign is one of several which I have run across from what appears to be the same source, perhaps not actually a church. But every example from this source I’ve seen has this wonderful sort-of “religious” twist to it which I find highly amusing and I have thought was definitely worth the effort to retain. This one, for example, makes reference to the excessive rain in some parts of the country. (Not in Omaha, I should note, where we’ve been in “severe drought” all this year.) Apparently, Fairfax County, VA, has had quite a bit of rain. As that’s near where daughter, Kate, and family live, I know that they had NOT had the drought concerns we’ve had here in Omaha.

Thinking of drought, or the lack of one, reminded me of the sign below from the “Holy Family Parish” church. The name doesn’t really provide much in the way of specific location, or anything else (except that one can assume that it’s probably a Roman Catholic church from the fact that services are advertised as “Masses”), but the sign’s message certainly does provide something to consider. Especially when we humans get a little too big for our britches and assume that we are “so smart.”

I see that St. Mark’s Anglican (The Friendly) Church wants to remind us that we should be careful about getting as much specific information as possible before just accepting something, no matter how good it sounds or who’s making the offer. They seem to be suggesting that even God does expect one to live up to the agreement in fact, not just by saying so.

I have a strong belief that I have encountered a somewhat similar notion in a less religious setting. It was something like this expression of the “United Church,” but I remember the words as not being quite the same. Still seems like a good idea, though.

I don’t pretend to be a biblical expert but I don’t recall a passage phrased quite like this in the section of Exodus which discusses the Ten Commandments (Chapter 20), but the sign’s message does seem to be pretty close to the commandments in spirit, in any case….

That reminds me of another one of those Fairfax County, VA signs I have run across. I don’t think of this as a particularly “religious” notion, but the reference to God does have a sort-of “church-like” quality to it and, religious, or not, I think it’s worthy of some careful consideration.

Perhaps the most interesting (scary, thought-provoking, stimulating) sign I have encountered, at least recently, however, is the one below. I don’t care if you are a staunch, hard-core believer, or a bit more casual in your spiritual practices, this idea has got to make you think a bit about the state of the world, our country, and your own behavior.

I have no desire to scare anyone, but this sort of statement can take many of us back to memories of being “less than perfect” children and hearing a statement like this from our parents when we were small. It does seem likely that we (all of us) might profit from giving some thought to how the choices we make and the actions we take impact other creatures and the world and universe around us. Taking care of each other is a choice! We all need to try to make ones which improve things, not are just momentarily satisfying.

I’ll be back soon with my family’s usual holiday letter for anyone who may remember us and is interested.
🖖🏼 LLAP,
Dr. B

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.”
— Nelson Mandela
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic; capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.” ― Albus Dumbledore, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

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246 Holiday Greetings 2022

245 Unexpected Church Signs

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