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A few days ago I was listening to an NPR radio station from Seattle. An artist named Bo Bartlett¹ was being interviewed about an exhibit of his works currently in Seattle. He was describing the feature painting named "Heartland". It is a painting of a boy pulling a wagon filled with sticks. As he spoke about the painting he said that part of the inspiration came from his own childhood. When his mother would discipline him, she would make him go and cut the stick, or the "switch" which she would then use to spank him. He said that he had wondered to himself..."what if I had kept all those sticks over the years?"

I've have the funniest set of Christmas candles in my office you'd ever want to see! They're supposed to be standing straight and tall--and somehow, the ceiling vent's been blowing warm air in their direction--until they're tilting sideways. One is extremely bent over, sometimes even falling out of its holder, poor thing.

Sounds like some of us after Christmas! Bent over from all the packages we've picked up, opened up, and now have to return; all the decorations for which we've stretched and strained, not to mention the hot stoves and baking ovens over which we've watched and worked...oh, our aching backs!

How many remember crossing the Rockies before the Roger's Pass highway? It was an adventure of swithbacks and steep drops if you missed a corner. Valerie and I drove a short portion of the famed Route 66 this spring. For the most part, it has been supplanted by Intersate 40, but in north and west Arizona a portion exists. The portion that heads west into the mountains between Arizona and California is also an adventure. It is narrow, twisty with many switchbacks and portions are subject to falling stones and in season, flash floods. Anyone wanting to make time safely through the desert and mountains takes the interstate.

I imagine that the Judean wilderness north and east into Iraq is similar geographically to the Mojave. Not only did travellers have to contend with natural hazards, out of the way roads were notorious haunts for brigands and bandits.

Luke 3:7-16

Just after 4:00 am, April 29, 1903, a mountain fell upon an unsuspecting town in the Alberta Rockies.¹ The town of Frank Alberta was buried under about 100 million tons of limestone that day. There were a few survivors and around seventy dead. Growing up not far from Frank, I have often driven the highway through the middle of the slide. Decades later in the 1960's it still looked like a moonscape. A piece 2100 feet by 3,000 feet by 500 feet thick had broken off Turtle mountain and tumbled into the valley below. The town was there because Turtle Mountain had rich seams of coal and was being actively mined at the time of the slide. The Blackfeet nation did not like to . . .