The Bible In Fifty Words And Other Words

God made - Adam bit - Noah arked - Abraham split - Jacob fooled - Joseph ruled - Bush talked - Moses balked - Pharaoh plagued - People walked - Sea divided - Tablets guided - Promise landed - Saul freaked - David peeked - Prophets warned - Jesus born - God walked - Love talked - Anger crucified - Hope died - Love rose - Spirit flamed - Word spread - God remained

I'm not sure it's a joke, but The World's Greatest Collection of Church Jokes compiled and edited by Paul M. Miller (ISBN 9781624167010) contains nearly five hundred of them, and it's a lot of fun. And I recognize quite a few of them from our monthly church newsletters, like the pastor who played hookey from church Sunday and got a hole-in-one, then Saint Peter looks at God asking why He let that happen – then God replies, “Who's he gonna tell?” Or maybe that's another book ...

Today's lesson learned: when you let one of your kids use your keys to open the door, MAKE SURE TO GET THEM BACK! This morning I was getting ready to head to work and couldn't find my keys … not so unusual, but then I remembered that I gave them to Sarah last night to open the door and never got them back. So I'm looking in all the usual places and getting desperate, even calling the school to talk to Sarah, even calling to ask Sharon my mother-in-law for a lift, even calling Martha to see if she remembers seeing them!

But then I think – where would a seven-year-old who usually throws stuff down (she's getting teenage early, I think)instead of sets it neatly put them? And three minutes after I got off the phone with Sharon, I found them … beneath the pile in front of our computer desk! We've let this accumulate because we made the boo-boo of deleting Internet Explorer from our desktop computer last year and not replacing it yet.

And I was thinking I probably deserved it, for I tore into Sarah last night after Jeffrey went to the closed bathroom door and said he couldn't open it. I got up, I tried to open it but I couldn't even turn the knob! I thought and accused Sarah of locking it, and I was angry about it. Even after I got the screwdriver and turned the groove in the doorknob to open the door – yes, you can lock it from the outside – we were both still upset. She said the bedtime prayer and went to bed by herself.

Is it because I didn't have a brother or sister close in age to me (lived with my sister Jeanni for some years, and she's seven years older than me) that I'm not as understanding of sibling rivalry? I don't place much stock in Kevin Leman's birth order ideas either; otherwise, why bother having more children because the first one seems to get the best in material goods and personality traits of everything? But I will concede Jeffrey's quite capable of giving as good as he gets.

One thing we want to get out of them, this tendency to strike back – for that matter, out of me. Over the weekend the three of us each read numbers and short descriptives out of Rosemary Wells' Emily's First 100 Days Of School (ISBN 0786824433) and had a fantastic time. At school Sarah and Jeffrey (and their cousins) don't hit 100 days until the beginning of December, if I'm counting right; also this morning, Sarah got to do her A to Z list of people, places, things to pray for.

I only had to help her with four, as I recall (she and Jeffrey wrote their lists in my journal): an entry for C and I chose Canberra the capital of Australia, for Q I chose the Middle Eastern country Qatar, on T I had to jog her memory of her youngest nephew Trevor, and zero the placeholder. Interesting thing about their lists for the pro-lifers out there: both Sarah and Jeffrey picked out something to do with an egg without any prompting; Sarah chose the yolk of an egg to pray for, and Jeffrey the egg itself.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us some e-mail. Amen.