Marsha's Blog

 Once in awhile, Tony and I treat ourselves to a real, traditional Japanese breakfast. You have to start with proper rice that has just enough “sticky” to it that you can pick it up with chopsticks. Any number of things can serve as the “main”, but for us it’s usually it’s a piece of smoked salmon. Miso soup comes next, and I admit that I cheat and use the kind that comes in pre-packed servings to which you add water, along with tofu, onion tops, seaweed, etc. Then comes all the fun stuff, including pickled radish, a mysterious mixture of salt, sesame seed, and other unknowns we just call furikake or “sprinkles”. If we can find it, the meal is topped off with “natto” or fermented soybean. All in all, it’s a real treat, but one we don’t have that often because it takes so long to assemble. But I can hardly toil over the process without thinking of a lady we knew back in Japan many years ago. She was the product of an arranged marriage, brought into the family of a local sa-ke (Japan...

Dear Readers.   Hope all is well on your side.  I'm encouraged to see that more people are subscribing to my blog and am always touched that your reach stretches so far.  I do hope you know that my thoughts and prayers are with you as well.  is something I wrote last year while we were on the road, but because of poor internet was never able to send successfully. If somehow a copy made its way to you, please forgive me and chalk it up to my feeble mind! At some point during this long one-year journey, it occurred to me that for almost the entire time of our marriage, Tony and I have always been "foreigners", in a sense. Ever since we packed our suitcases in 1973 and headed out for a two-year mission assignment in Africa, “home” has always been a rather tentative thing. This helps explain, I suppose, why we so often find ourselves in that “foreigner’s quandary” where we just don’t quite get it.  That understanding was affirmed in 1977 as we were packing for ...

Many of you that read this blog are in the throes of winter at the moment.  We  Down Under on the other hand, are experiencing heat waves so bad that the newscasters are urging the elderly to stay inside. So whether your inside because of the heat or the cold, I had an interesting experience this last week, that I think you can relate to. Have you ever experienced that blast of cold air that takes away your breath when someone opens the door on a winter day!? I grew up in Colorado and I remember it well.  I also remember running as fast as I could after shedding my coat and boots, to the lovely open grid on the floor downstairs where the hot air from the furnace blasted upwards. This week I got a letter from a childhood friend.  I'll tell you about this couple someday but suffice it to say that after they married and reconnected with God, the two of them became even more treasured friends.  Of course, we were worlds apart geographically and hardly ever got to se...

I stopped by the kids house the other day to pick something up. It was early morning, and I was greeted by three little boys in various stages of getting ready for school: half dressed, cereal spilled here and there, laughter as they fed the dog and emptied the dishwasher, all the while poking and punching each other to the cacophony of "Mom! He hit me!" and such.   In the middle of the chaos stood my lovely daughter-in-love, already dressed and ready for work, singing out in a loud voice while holding up a shirt, "Whose is this and why is it wet?" How could you help but love the whole scene?  And yet at our age, how could you help but want to escape and go home for a nap? Our lives have been like this since we recently returned from a year away.  Our days have been filled, mostly sitting on telephone trees chasing up neglected paperwork, renewing just about every card we own, either because it was stolen in Spain, or else simply expired.  Besides all that, old ...

 Good Morning World! That's how I felt coming out of the trance they put me in for the angiogram. I was coming out of a well, but I could still hear and understand that I had absolutely NO blockage, and (after 4 hours of observation) I was free  to go home.  Very big answer to prayer, thanks so much.  I know most of you have been through these things and worse, but as a first-timer, it was a bit daunting. And now, on to the future. This last week we have celebrated Australia Day, a national holiday, celebrated much like America’s Labor Day, marking the end of summer.  Then alongside of this, I heard on the news that January 27 was the 70th anniversary of the closing of the infamous Nazi death camp called Auschwitz . Australia Day has long been protested by the Aboriginals and has mistakenly been re-named by some "invasion day".  But this year, there’s a growing effort to correct some misconceptions. This is not the day, as some believe, that we credit the B...

 Hello Fellow Followers! I hope you're still with me and doing well after I went all "troppo" and left you for about two months. Sorry for the abrupt departure but the cruise ship we were on set us adrift! Well, not exactly, but all the WiFi they promised turned out to be pretty much non-existent. Truth be told, that’s an excuse; the fact of the matter is, Tony and I both were feeling the effects of long CoVid, complete with chronic fatigue and a four-month-old cough that kept us awake 24/7.  To add to all the ailments, we discovered that after being several weeks on a rocking boat, our bodies had decided this was the norm. When we stepped ashore in Durban, South Africa, I had trouble walking for a few days.  They call it 'sea legs' and it's real. I would turn to the left and have to take a big step to catch myself because I'd overcompensated for the non-moving floor. When we finally arrived home in Australia to Grandkids, Christmas and all the excitement ...

 We interrupt this program today to bring a word about that 16thcentury German monk who changed the church from the inside out, Martin Luther.  Some of your calendars may include mention about the 505th anniversary of the Protestant Revolution, but did you know that on or about this day 500 years ago, Martin Luther completed his translation of the New Testament into German? This was one of the first steps toward placing the Bible into the hands of the common man and into the hearts of a whole new wave of Christian believers who would demonstrate over the next several years a willingness to die while proclaiming their message, “Sola fide! Faith alone! It is only by faith in Jesus Christ that we can know peace with God.” The problem Luther had with the church was that as a monk, he was able to actually read the Bible in an authorized Latin version. In reading, he came to understand that the New Testament writers were talking about a different salvation than what the church was t...