What a Day We Had!

Yesterday, Sunday, started out pretty good.  Juniper was doing well enough that we were able to go to church; she did fine there and only cried at one song, the invitation, I Surrender All.  I still don’t understand why some songs make her cry; Cedar thinks it may just be an emotional reaction (and I agree), but why just the last year or so?

Anyway, Juniper wasn’t feeling good and was cranky after we got home.  I had fixed plates of cold food for lunch (slices of sharp cheddar cheese, some lunch meat, and baby carrots — easy, and great for a hot day when I didn’t have a lot of energy).  She didn’t want to eat; I put her plate in the frig, and later when she said she was hungry got it out for her.  Her plate was on the kitchen island, but she was walking around eating.  She came to me obviously choking on something and her lips were turning blue; I tried the Heimlich maneuver but she was wanting to drop onto the floor and I couldn’t get a good hold on her.  She wasn’t totally blocked up — she was whistling as she tried to breathe — but was blocked up enough to be very blue and panicked.  I tried calling 911 on my flip phone (I still have an Oregon number, even though we’ve moved to Kentucky); wasn’t sure it went through, dropped the phone and was trying to get Juniper to sit up so I could try the Heimlich maneuver again.  911 called back, twice, the second time I picked it up but by then she’d gotten the chunk loose and swallowed it and was breathing again.  I thought she was dying, laying there on the floor, blue from lack of oxygen.  I don’t remember ever being so scared in my entire life.  And I admit I was more than a little panicked myself.  If she hadn’t gotten her airway cleared by herself, I don’t know if the EMT’s could have gotten here in time.

Maranatha (Juniper’s next-older sister, who has taught school her entire adult life and has had to be CPR certified) told me that there is a way to do the Heimlich maneuver even on someone who is unconscious and lying on the floor.  I need to learn how to do that, although I did talk to Juniper afterwards about chewing her food thoroughly and not trying to swallow big chunks, and hopefully this won’t ever happen again.  She has almost choked on things before (her dad had to do the Heimlich maneuver on her three times — she turned blue that time, too — when she swallowed a toasted marshmallow at a backyard picnic one time); this is one reason why I normally cut her food into bite-sized pieces.

Juniper was scared silly for a long time afterwards, and is still shaken this morning.  I don’t blame her — so am I.

In other news, the goats were getting out again, and I hadn’t been able to figure out how.  Bob next door saw them out and came down when I was getting them into the small barn (not where I want them to be); he helped me get a new latch on the door to that barn, and then walked the fence line and found where they were getting out and fixed it (it was a low spot where they were crawling under the fence).  Thank you, Lord, for good neighbors!  I hope they don’t find any more exit holes, at least not this week while temperatures are in the nineties.  I like goats, but they are much too clever about getting out of fences.

I’m starting to re-train the chickens back into getting their food inside the chicken coop.  I want to catch all of them in there, and keep them there for a week or so (there are too many to leave them in there full-time) so they will start roosting inside again instead of out in the trees.  It will also give me a chance to sort the roosters, and cull the ones I don’t want to keep — we have way too many of them right now.

Juniper now has something to keep her toys and art supplies and books in (and on).  I think it was meant to be something like a baker’s rack for the kitchen, but it’s perfect for her.  There are four basket-drawers, a wide low shelf, a maple ‘counter’ (it will make a good shelf for her books), and two narrow shelves in the ‘hutch’ part of it.  I’m going to set up my Good News Club easel for her to do art (if she ever starts doing art again — I hope she does).  Got a big white board to put on the easel, too.  I think we still have a few dry-erase markers, though I’ll need to check and make sure they haven’t dried out.

Now I’m going to go put stuff on Juniper’s new ‘desk’ and see what she thinks of it; then maybe write a bit more this afternoon.

Oh, and Cedar has tried dictating part of a story and sending me the audible file to transcribe.  The first time I listened to it, it worked fine, but when I was ready to transcribe it, the audible file didn’t want to do anything.  So I need to try that again, and see if we can make it work.  It would be great if I could do that much to help Cedar out — she’s so busy right now it’s hard for her to find time to write.  She’s got several books she needs to finish.  She did make time to put up on Facebook the pictures of the house that I sent her from my flip-phone, though.

More Than I Thought!

I got more done yesterday than I realized at first!  Between plunging the kitchen sink again (mostly unsuccessfully) and plunging the toilet (thankfully, that one was successful!), I cleared out around 800 e-books from my Amazon Kindle account.  I’ve started to do this project a couple of times before, but never managed to get more than a few books deleted.  (And there are a few that HAVE been deleted, and still show up on my Fire, though I can’t open them.  I do not know what is up with that!)  This might not seem like a huge big whoopty-do, but those books had been bothering me for quite a while — not, perhaps, as much as the physical clutter in the house, but every time I looked through my e-books, I cringed.

You have to understand, I am a voracious reader.  I am addicted to reading.  I learned to read — and read well; Mom and I used to argue over who got to read the Reader’s Digest magazine first when it came — when I was five: I can’t really remember ever NOT being able to read), and ever since then, if I’m not doing something else, I’m reading.  When I was younger, I would race through as many as seven books in one night (and suffer for it at school the next day).  I’m not talking about children’s picture books, either.  I don’t stay up until three am to finish a stack of books very often anymore (alright, maybe once or twice a year, if a really good book comes my way), but I do still read a lot.  So Kindle Unlimited has been like crack cocaine for me.  And the free books Amazon offers daily?  Wow!

KU isn’t so bad, because you can only check out ten books at a time (they had to have lost a lot of money on me, though).  But the free books?  Those I accumulated like a miser accumulates money.  Some of them were good — I’ve got quite a few of my favorite old classics, for example, and some really good books on theology and the Bible.

But some were pure trash, or so badly written, or so obviously message fiction, or so historically inaccurate, that I couldn’t get more than a few pages in (sometimes only a few WORDS in) without wanting to throw the book against the wall.  It was only fairly recently that I figured out how to delete books I didn’t want to keep, so there was this huge stash of books on my account that bugged me every time I looked through them.  It’s a real relief to have things cleaned up.  And now when I find a book that’s not worth keeping, I will delete it right away.  Same principle as with the house — get rid of the clutter, and enjoy peace of mind!

Sunday:  No, didn’t go to church this morning again.  Juniper is still not a happy camper, though she is better than she was yesterday.  (And this appears to be turning into a multi-day post.)  Also, while I did give her some ibuprofen yesterday, I forgot to take any myself (and have to limit what I take, because it starts to make my stomach hurt after a while), and my back isn’t great this morning.

Juniper still had two big boxes of toys upstairs (since the original plan was for the upstairs to be her bedroom, with space for visiting girls when they were here).  I went through those this morning before I even got dressed, and most of the contents are going to Goodwill.  I kept her art supplies and a few other things, but most of it she just doesn’t play with.  If she ever wants a baby doll again, I’m sure we can find one for her.

Monday:  Bright and early we went to Columbia and picked up a kitchen island! It’s two feet by three feet, with a drop-leaf on either end so it can be as big as five feet long.  There’s one shallow drawer; a door with two shelves behind it (it has a door on the back, too, so it’s easy to access); and two more open shelves.  It’s just the right size for the middle of our kitchen.  I’m going to need to find places for all of the stuff that we put on the plastic storage shelves, and find another place for the shelves (probably in the small barn, to hold boxes of canning jars).  Eventually I may put some other shelves there that will be easier to clean.  Or possibly cover the plastic shelves with something easier to clean (the shelves are molded and have cavities in them, which are going to collect dirt, and will be hard to clean).

I have said several times, and still believe, that my GPS was one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.  However….LOL!  I think you all know what I’m going to say here!  I decided to try an alternate route this morning, going down to Columbia, and it took us down a little narrow road that turned into gravel and then dirt, and then it had a stream crossing it, LOL!  I could probably have gone through the water at this time of the year, with my 4-W-D pickup, but decided it probably wasn’t such a good idea without knowing whether the road was going to improve on the other side.  And even with the detour, we were only a couple of minutes late.

Juniper has regressed somewhat, almost back to where she was a few weeks ago.  I’m blaming the excess of sun that she got the other day.  It’s sad, but the sun is poison for her.  If she starts wanting to go out again when the sun is out, I’m going to have to lock the house up again.

Doing Dishes…in the Bathtub

Well, at least most of the dirty dishes are IN the bathtub!  I did wash some of them, but my back doesn’t like doing that for very long at a time.  The kitchen looks a lot better, though, without dirty dishes all over the place!

I think I’m going to call the plumber again on Monday, if the drain is still clogged by then (and it probably will be, sigh).  I tried plunging the kitchen sink again this morning, to no avail, though I do think that it’s draining at a slightly faster drip than it was pre-plunging.

I had to snake as well as plunge the toilet this morning because *someone* (not me) decided it was a good place to dispose of partially-eaten apples.  Once I got that running again, I noticed that the bathroom sink was draining slowly (it’s been fine), so I dumped some of the enzymes down it.

The hamburger in the frig had finally thawed enough to do something with it today, so I made that meatloaf I’ve been kind of craving.  The microwave works just fine for making meatloaf!  It needed to cook longer than I expected (at least half an hour, total), even though I made the center much shallower than the edges.  But it turned out just fine.

I did get the beds made this morning (Juniper only slept in one bed — the double bed downstairs, so that’s a good thing!).  She got a bath this morning, and I combed her hair out afterwards and gave her a ponytail — it hasn’t been long enough to do that for a long time!  I really do need to cut it, though.  It’s easier to take care of when it’s short, and I think it looks better.

Did my Bible study, of course (that’s become almost automatic, thank you, Lord!).

Did one load of laundry — then found several washcloths in the bathtub that I’d missed.  (This may seem like to-much-information, but right now I’m using washcloths in lieu of toilet paper BECAUSE *someone* — yes, the same *someone* who was putting partially eaten apples in the toilet — has been putting ALL of the toilet paper down the toilet just as soon as I get a new roll out of the plastic tub where they are stored.  I figure she’ll get over it eventually, but in the meantime, TP is too expensive to waste like that, and I’m tired of having to plunge the toilet.)  Oh, well, the washcloths are seed for the next load of laundry, I guess.  But I got all of the first load folded and put away!  Yay!  We now officially have no laundry piles anywhere in the house!

About the only other thing I’ve accomplished today was a major de-cluttering of my e-books.  I got rid of around two-thirds of them.  It’s much easier to find what I want to read now, and all the books I started to read and figuratively threw against the wall are no longer there staring defiantly in my face.  Yes, I’m a picky reader, LOL!  Much pickier than I used to be.  I did read one book, A Bride for Donnigan by Janette Oke.  I like her stuff better than I used to, and there was a lot of wisdom in this one, a story about a mail-order bride, and her husband’s search for peace with God.

Tomorrow is another day.  Thank you, Lord, for this one!

Looks like Rain!

The skies are gloomy this morning and Accuweather says rain is coming!  I’m not used to having so much precipitation during the summer anymore, but it sure does keep things green around here (and I like that!).  It’s a good thing that my wonderful neighbor Bob chose yesterday to come down with his big tractor-drawn mower and cut the grass in the front part of the yard (outside the fenced area).

I just noticed that the house was quiet (Juniper had been hovering, trying to get me to ‘come cover me up’ again), and had to do a quick walk-around to find my girl.  She’s sitting outside by the gate; the two girl kittens are trying to get her to pet them.  They are sweet little things.  I didn’t see Bubbles, the boy kitten, but he’s probably out there, too.  And, when I looked out the back door, there were three chickens standing on top of the BBQ grill, and two more sitting comfortably on the small patio-table next to the grill.  LOL!

So, today’s checklist so far:

Made two of the three beds (Juniper slept in two beds again last night; when I was making beds, she was still in the downstairs double bed, so I’ll go make it in a few minutes).  Making beds got so much easier when I moved the two twin beds so I could walk around them and get to both sides.

Wiped down the bathroom.

Bible study.

We have each had a cup of Sweet and Spicy tea — my favorite!  And it doesn’t require any added sweetener.  I’m back on Intermittent Fasting, trying to lose weight.  Juniper doesn’t need to lose weight, after losing probably around fifty pounds in the last year or so due to being ill (lupus flare).  She was wearing size 16 jeans a year ago last May; she’s now wearing size four and six, with a couple pairs of eights and tens still in her drawer but they are very loose.  She’s only 5’2″, so her 115 lbs. is about right for her small-boned frame, but I don’t want to see her lose any more weight.  Me, on the other hand, sigh.  Since last fall I’ve actually lost almost twenty pounds, but weight loss stopped when we moved, and I regained about five pounds.  Now that the house is getting back in order, and we are back on the AIP diet, I feel enough in control of things to start working on my own weight again.

As part of that, I need to start planning meals ahead, instead of waiting until the last minute and scrounging.  (Of course, getting the kitchen sink functional will help a lot, too!)

“Waiting is much more difficult than walking. Waiting requires patience, and patience is a rare virtue. It is fine to know that God builds hedges around His people–when the hedge is looked at from the viewpoint of protection. But when the hedge is kept around one until it grows so high that he cannot see over the top, and wonders whether he is ever to get out of the little sphere of influence and service in which he is pent up, it is hard for him sometimes to understand why he may not have a larger environment–hard for him to “brighten the corner” where he is. But God has a purpose in all HIS holdups.” “The steps of a good man are ordered of the Lord,” reads Psalm 37:23.

I don’t know who wrote the paragraph above, but it is a very encouraging reminder — maybe I can’t go out and teach Good News Clubs anymore, but I can take care of Juniper and our home, and try to be an encouragement to other people I know.

Just cleaned out a couple of tote bags, and tossed one in the Goodwill boxes AND found the missing boxes of checks!  Praise the Lord!

Later:  We’ve been to town and back — stopped at the bank; mailed a couple of bills at the P.O.; dropped off four or five boxes full of stuff, plus the two empty file cabinets at Goodwill; went to Tractor Supply and got some enzyme stuff for the drains, and animal feed; Walmart for a new set of fingernail clippers and tweezers (to replace the missing ones, which I *suspect* Juniper flushed down the toilet), and a few groceries.

I’m going to leave the enzyme stuff in the drain overnight before I try plunging it one more time.  I hope and pray that this time it works — I really want to get the kitchen in order!

Couldn’t find Juniper a few minutes ago, so I went to see if she was outside.  Didn’t see her outside, so, with a sigh, was about to hop in the truck and go looking for her (assuming she must have climbed over the gate), when I realized that she was lying down in the back of the truck!  She has NEVER done that before!  I had left the doors to the cap closed, because there are still bags of feed and dog food in there; she opened those up in order to get in.  She was in the shade and it’s not terribly hot today so I left her there.

This, by the way, is the blog I’ve been reading for encouragement:  https://www.aslobcomesclean.com/2011/05/and-then-doorbell-rang/  She’s funny, and she is (like me) one of these people who does not naturally ‘see’ clutter.  We have to deliberately look and that is made much easier by de-cluttering.  I am tired of having all my mental energy be drained by my house.  Some things I have a pretty good handle on; other things I don’t.  So I’m working on them.

 

 

One Box at a Time

We moved into this house on March 27th of this year (2018).  I am still unpacking boxes.  I am still shifting boxes to where the contents need to go.  I am still taking boxes of things out to the truck to go to Goodwill (I am so thankful to have a cap on the back of the truck to protect those boxes from the weather, so they don’t have to stay in the house until I’m ready to go!).

There are several reasons why it’s taking so long to get unpacked and settled in.  First is my health and my back.  I have a bad back, and you will probably get tired of hearing about it.  But it has a huge effect on how much I can get done in one day.  I can work for a few minutes, longer some days and less on other days, and then I have to stop and sit or lay down until it quits hurting.  Moving boxes around, and being bent over to unpack boxes, makes my back hurt.

Each day, I try to get at least one box of stuff unpacked and put away.  Yesterday, I did three!  This morning, I got one done before I even got dressed.  Right now there are about five boxes full of stuff to go to Goodwill sitting in the middle of the living room; I need to go out and shift the stuff that’s already in the truck to make room for these.  Most of the boxes waiting to go out are full of fabric that I should have gotten rid of before we left Oregon — polyester which, while pretty colors, is not something I like to wear; dull and coarse fabrics purchased to make costumes for the community theater in Sprague River (we needed shepherds and so on for Pilgrim’s Progress and for a Christmas pageant).  We ended up finding enough costumes in the church costume boxes that I didn’t have to use most of the fabric I’d bought (cheap at Goodwill, whence it is returning, though not, of course, to the same store!).

I do intend to do some sewing once the house is straightened out, so I did keep quite a bit of fabric — three plastic tubs worth.  And possibly another couple of small boxes that are sitting on the shelves in the storage closet, but I will go through those on another day.

Juniper got sunburned yesterday.  You may wonder what is so bad about that — everyone gets sunburned from time to time, unless they are blessed with very dark skin.  But Juniper has two issues which make it really bad for her to get too much sun.  Both are auto-immune diseases.  She has vitiligo, which is where patches of skin lose all their pigment and turn albino (supposedly Michael Jackson had this, which was why he always wore a glove on one hand).  These albino patches burn in just a few minutes — she has quite a bit of pink on her face.  Frequent burning leads to a much higher-than-normal risk of skin cancer eventually, so I try hard to keep her out of the sun — and then she needs high doses of Vitamin D3 to make up for it.

The other issue, and even more critical, is that she has lupus, and too much sun can trigger a lupus flare.  (Florescent lights can trigger a flare, too, among other things.)  We are just getting her healed up from the last flare she had, which was triggered by getting too much sun last summer while camping in the Black Hills in South Dakota with my sister Pam and her family for a few days.  We had a good time camping, but it is so hard to keep Juniper out of the sun if we are outdoors.  I’ve given up on the idea of getting a canoe for us, because going out on the water is even worse as far as sun exposure goes.  What may save us this time is that she doesn’t also have the stress of traveling in addition to the sun exposure.  And I think she’s getting over the stress of the big move to Kentucky now that the house is starting to look like a house instead of a storage container.  So hopefully we’ll be able to minimize the damage this time.

Juniper slept part of last night on the bathroom floor again.  I went downstairs a little past midnight to go to the bathroom, and got her up and into the bed in the downstairs bedroom.  An hour or two later, she was upstairs trying to make me get up and come down to ‘cover her up.’  This is a losing proposition, although a bedtime routine that she insists on; usually what happens is I get her into bed and covered up, and by the time I’m going out the bedroom door, she’s getting back out of bed and asking me to cover her up again.  I’ve quit doing repeats; she gets covered up and put to bed by me ONCE, not dozens of times!  So anyway, when I refused to get up at her bidding in the middle of the night, she screamed for a few minutes, then got quiet.  I thought I heard her talking outside, and got up to look and make sure she was still inside the fenced part of the yard (she hasn’t climbed over the gate yet, but theoretically she could, if she wanted to badly enough); when I turned around, there she was in the other twin bed in the attic!  When I went down to the bathroom again later, she was in the downstairs bed again (I guess I did get SOME sleep, because I didn’t hear her go down the stairs that time).  When I finally got up this morning she was in the bathroom.

So if anyone wonders why I’m tired during the day, see the above.  That was actually a fairly good night, all things considered.

Someone in the Kinder Goat group on Facebook posted a good idea for a hay feeder — they cut some holes in an IBC tote, and fastened it to a fence so the goats couldn’t push it away from the fence; the person can toss hay into it from outside of the fence.  I’ve got a perfect spot to do something like this, inside the middle bay of the big barn.  The hay will (hopefully) be going into the hay loft from that bay, and the far end of the bay opens into one of the goat paddocks.

On my daily checklist:

Made the beds.

Weighed myself.

Wiped down the bathroom sink and the toilet (did the tub yesterday before Juniper’s bath).  (The slightly bigger bathroom really makes a difference when it comes to ease of cleaning.  I can get to things to clean without contortions.  It also helps a bunch when Juniper and I both have to be in there, which is a really good thing lately, since that’s where she’s hanging out most of the time!)

Dirty clothes to the laundry hamper as soon as they are removed from body.

Daily Bible study.

Writing here on this blog.

Tossed some more stuff from the ‘office.’  (Old envelopes we will never ever use.)

Some things, like cleaning the kitchen sink, are waiting on getting the drain unclogged, sigh.

And…I got a heavy bag full of papers (three and a half file drawers worth) out to the garbage cans — but the bag split on the way and I had to pick it all up and put it in three bags in order to get it there.  That hurt my back, so I probably won’t get a whole lot more done today.  I intended, when I went out, to pick up the trash that Cameo got into and strewed around the yard several days ago.  Guess that will have to wait until tomorrow morning.

Made us a casserole for brunch (and supper, it turned out).  Used a can of spinach, a can of olives drained and crushed, a small can of mushrooms, four eggs, half a cup of cassava meal, some seasonings (salt, sage, garlic powder, onion powder, turmeric which I add to everything possible because of its anti-inflammatory properties), and a can of jack mackerel, with the liquid but without the backbones — they are edible, but crunchy and I don’t care much for them.  Cooked it in the microwave for 18 minutes, and it was quite good, I thought.  We got two meals for each of us out of it, too.

Tomorrow we must go to town — I need to sort out some bank account stuff (haven’t been able to find a new check book for one of the accounts I still have in Oregon — it’s where Juniper’s SSI checks are still being deposited), and pay a couple of bills; get some enzyme to put down the kitchen sink drain (and HOPE it works!); pick up a few groceries and some chicken feed.

 

 

Starting Over

I’m going to try to keep a blog regularly.  Maybe not every day, but often.  Topics will range widely, but I want to use this space to keep track of God’s blessings and answers to prayer; Bible study topics; how Juniper is doing; progress on the house and the property; my health; family visits; what I’ve been reading lately; projects of all kinds; and so on.  There’s going to be a learning curve — for one thing, I need to figure out how to add pictures!

Well!  That was easier than I expected!  LOL!  This is Juniper (in the red coat, and happy!) and me, about five years ago.  For anyone reading this who doesn’t know us very well, Juniper was born in 1980 — she’s 38 this year.  She is autistic, functions at about the level of a three-year-old; and has several auto-immune conditions:  celiac disease, vitiligo, probably Sjogren’s Syndrome, and — most serious — lupus.  She has two older sisters: Cedar Sanderson, chemist, and author of Pixie Noir and several other good reads; and Maranatha, who is ‘retired’ from teaching full-time at a Christian school in New Hampshire, and planning self-employment.  Cedar has four children; two will be in college this year (ouch!).

As you might expect, Juniper has been both a blessing and a source of a lot of stress her entire life.  For the last year and a few months, she’s been having an auto-immune flare.  She has obviously not been feeling good (her way of showing this is screaming and shrieking at the top of her lungs, not sleeping, and other behaviors that she doesn’t normally do anymore), and has lost a lot of weight.  I was reluctant to take her to the doctors she usually saw in Oregon because they didn’t seem to think that she or her health was very important.  So when we made the decision to move closer to her older sisters (Cedar lives about four hours from us now, in Ohio) and I found and bought this place in Kentucky, I started looking for a doctor to take her to who would actually care about her.  Found one who I think is pretty good down in Nashville (about two and a half hours drive from us); got some blood work done, and Juniper is on liquid Vitamin D3 and a special anti-inflammatory turmeric/curcumin concoction, and doing somewhat better.  At least she’s ‘there’ again — she was like a zombie — a shrieking screaming zombie — for a while.  We are continuing to work on diet and other factors which are adversely affecting both of our health; trying to stick to the auto-immune protocol diet more strictly, for one thing.

The move was challenging.  I’ve always had trouble with my back, but starting a couple of years ago have been in serious pain a lot of the time, more often than not.  Junior Mad Scientist granddaughter was living with us for a while prior to the move, and she ended up doing much of the packing.  I should have gotten more stuff sorted out before the move, but am working on it now as I unpack boxes.  We are actually nearly to the end of the boxes — I think there are only maybe a dozen or so left to deal with.  But of course those are going to take a lot of my time and mental energy to sort and deal with, because the hardest ones got left for last!  The biggest blessing is that right at the end of our little road, less than half a mile from the house, is a nice little Baptist church.  We haven’t been able to attend very much yet, mostly because of Juniper’s health issues (partly because of my back pain), but I look forward to getting to know the people there and to worshiping with them.  Ever since I was first saved, I’ve wished that we could live within walking distance of our church, and now we do!

There have been a lot of issues with the house — some I knew about, like no kitchen (just an empty room, no cabinets or anything) and no flooring, just the sub-floor.  Some I suspected could be a problem but was hoping wouldn’t be (all the plumbing needed to be re-done — there were leaks all over under the house; and the wiring is a mishmash of old and new).  And some things we weren’t expecting — well pump needing to be replaced; split water line between the well and the house.  Ah, well, I really bought it for the location — figured the house was at least solid and had a good roof!  And it’s paid for, which means a lot to me.

I’m working on reading through the New Testament this summer, plus Psalms.  It’s always interesting to read some of Matthew Henry’s take on the different passages.  Amazes me to see the insight that he had, and really points up how much our modern education is horribly lacking.  Though I suppose even back then only a few believers had the depth of understanding, knowledge, and wisdom that he had.  We do have a few even in our day….