Straight From The Hart

  Joan Hart    ·  Shared with Your friends and Ruby's friends You all know how upset I have been with FB for not showing comments. The only way around it is to repost a comment as a status. This is one I wrote to Ruby Greene and I wanted to be sure she saw it plus there are others on this group who like to read my Bible-related posts. I didn't mean to ignore your question, I was just trying to think how to answer it without typing a book. And I don't want to start a Biblical argument because there is so much controversy about the book of Revelation. I can only say that many people get hung up on taking much of the language literally when it is meant to be a visual representation of something we can’t grasp in our mind (until we get there) by putting it in the language of something we CAN understand. It is the “typology” part that I wrote about earlier. A “type” of something in Biblical language means it is an example or an illustration. Gold is the most costly sub...

  Do you like gemstones? They are my favorite form of “bling”, and I have several because my husband loves to give me gifts for every occasion, and gemstones, especially the colorful ones, are his gift of choice, and my gift of “receiving”. God loves them, too because He decorated heaven with them. John the Revelator was so mesmerized by them when he was given a vision of heaven that he wrote about them extensively. John describes the foundations of the walls of heaven as if they appear in layers, one stacked on top of the other. If so, the beauty would be too awesome for words. I have a few rings where different gemstones are mounted in a cluster and they are mind-boggling in their extravagance. John says the first foundation is made of jasper, a beautiful reddish brown stone usually set as a cabachon. The next layer is sapphire. Sapphire comes from the mines in a variation of colors. Chalcedony is a form of quartz, a translucent stone in colors of white and gray and bl...

  THE TANGLED WEB OF BENGHAZI It was poet Walter Scott who said “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” I thought about this so many times Thursday as I watched the Benghazi hearings featuring Hillary Clinton. I also thought about William Safire’s description of Hillary in a column for the New York Times on January 8, 1996. Safire, a long time syndicated political columnist for the Times, and a talented wordsmith, said she was a “congenital liar” and then wrote “Drip by drip, like Whitewater torture, the case is being made that she is compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.” As I watched the lengthy hearings on media news Thursday, I was amazed to think that she could have saved herself so much trouble and time and attorney fees had she just told the truth to begin with. . But she could not. The web had become too tangled. I have studied and researched and thought a lot about the incident since it first happ...

  October Fills Up My Senses Written by Joan Rowden Hart on  a cool October morning, 2017 Listen!  Can you hear it?  There’s autumn in the air. And though the door’s still  open, you can  sense  a chill out there. Although the winds are still warm, You can hear a special sound As the leaves begin to rustle, and fall softly to the ground. Eyes open!  Can you see it?  New season coming on The summer palette fades away, Hazy days are almost gone The trees become transparent as their glory disappears Missouri embraces October- it happens every year. Breathe deeply! Can you smell it?  That smoke that’s in the air? Arising from the piles of leaves now that the trees are bare. That musty smell of dying soil now covered by summer’s waste Our memory of the harvest foods, the fragrance and the taste. Enjoy these days!  Another month and they will all be gone The sun sets much too early now, cold nights are hast’ning on Missouri has its fresh ...

  IT'S AUTUMN TIME AGAIN The dying leaves come tumbling down; Their colors mingling with the brown; Transforming lawns throughout the town; It's autumn time again. The mornings come so crisp and cool; A foretaste of the winter's cruel; And all the children are in school; It's autumn time again. The hickory nuts from the trees so tall Roll across my roof like a bowling ball; I sit in my study and hear them fall; It's autumn time again. The harvest food’s piled on tables high; The apples await the cinnamon pie; And old Jack Frost is standing by; It's autumn time again. So you and I have our seasons, too. Those summer days, we were young and new; But now our days are numbering few; We're in our autumn time. So harvest comes, and come it must; Our fruitful lives will return to dust; But new life will come, that is our trust In Christ, as our autumn comes. Written by Joan Rowden Hart, 9-14-02

Throwback Thursday. My column from several years ago. Why Do We Say That? If you are a regular reader of this column, you know I often mention my love for words and phrases. I don’t know if this predilection is part of my DNA or not, but I do know it began showing up by the time I was in junior high and I was inspired by a favorite teacher, Vada Esther Smith. I remember the illustration she used “hoisted by his own petard”. A petard was used by the military forces of all the major European fighting nations by the 16th century. It was a crude bomb filled with gun powder and used to blow breaches in gates or walls. The phrase was used by Shakespeare in “Hamlet” and it means to be harmed by one’s own plan to harm someone else, or to fall into one’s own trap, implying that one could be blown upward by one’s own bomb. Bible students will recognize that Haman in the Bible story of Esther was hung on the gallows he had built intending to hang Mordecai, thus Haman was hoist...

  We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. News Flash to the President: You have only one job. This is it. It’s made up of six components and you have failed in all of them. We do not pay you to raise funds for the Democratic party. We do not pay you to play golf or take your family all over the world on sight-seeing tours. We pay you to get up every morning and focus on creating a political and economic environment that will unite us as a country; assure that every citizen is treated justly under the law; and conduct yourself in such a way that the people of this great nation can live in peaceful tranquility together, (and that includes the Congress with whom you must work as difficult as it...

  I first met Annie back in February 2004 after Milan told me to let him know what I wanted for for Valentine’s Day and he promised would get it for me no matter what it was. He has often joked that he should have have put some conditions on that. But he didn’t, and so I headed straight to the Humane Society animal shelter. It had been two long years since we had put our beloved Maine Coon cat to sleep, a big pile of what appeared to be nothing but fur, but had a huge heart hidden inside. We had named him Ollie in honor of Col. Oliver North who was our news hero at the time. I entered the cat compound at the Humane Society. There were only two cats inside, a brown tabby who ran to the other side of the pen away from me, and a little black and white girl who came running over to me and when I picked her up, she snuggled her head under my chin and began to purr. It was love at first sight. She was new there and they had not given her a name so I called her Annie. She was alway...

  George Mason (1725-1792) had several claims to fame during his lifetime and yet today very few Americans know anything about him, even though he was one of the men who shaped the concept and destiny of America to determine a workable frame of government that is now a model for citizen-guided rule throughout the world. For one thing, he was one of three Constitutional delegates who refused to sign the new Constitution after working on it all summer. Mason held what was then considered a radical opinion - that a republic had to begin with the formal legally binding commitment that individuals had inalienable rights that were superior to any government. He felt the Constitution created a federal government which might be too powerful because it did not contain a bill of rights. His second objection was that it did not end the slave trade. Mason is considered by some as one of the most outspoken founders in denouncing slavery as evil, but he also owned the second largest number o...