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What’s in a Name

I know there’s not much here on Distractifying! yet, but what there is of it has been on the lighter side. You’re beginning to get a slight glimpse at how my mind works (or doesn’t as the case may be). While this post also has it’s lighter side, it also gets down to the seriousness that is my life as a follower of Jesus.

I tend not to call myself Christian as that has come to have a negative connotation in today’s crazy, mixed up world. To follow Jesus is to emulate Him, to strive to live, love, and even lead like Him. I say this in order to state flat out, I do not want this to turn into a religious debate. I’m not a religious person. Religion tends to cause trouble. I simply follow Jesus’ example and do the best I can in life.

If you’re okay with that, read on. And if you have a problem with that, well, it’s okay to skip the posts you don’t want to read about. Scripture will make it’s way in here now and then. But since this is Distractifying, it will not be the entire blog. Nothing will. I’ll be bouncing all over the place, so please, don’t let a little bit of Scripture scare you away. So let me get to it….

“The LORD called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name.” (Isaiah 49:1b, ESV)

What’s in a name? Some think it nonsense, but some see great significance in names and their meaning. In ancient times, names were given that represented (or ended up representing) personality traits. Names tended to call out the good, or the bad in people. For instance, Jacob in the Old Testament was a deceiver, lying and cheating his brother out of his birthright as the eldest son. It was a fitting name for him. After many years of striving and struggling with others to gain both wealth and prominence, he has an ultimate showdown with God and finally realizes that it’s more important to be blessed by God. And that blessing is achieved by surrendering to God, not fighting Him. It took one final, all night wrestling match for Jacob to finally figure this out and accept the God of his father, Isaac, as his own God as well. At the end of this struggle, Jacob is given a new name, Israel, which means “he strives with God.”

In the New Testament, Simon became known as Peter, “the rock.” There are many examples throughout the Bible, of names being changed to reflect new demeanors as people came to know God.

Growing up, I hated my name. If you had any idea how many times I had to endure people singing, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean,” … And any of you who know me, DON’T YOU DARE! I will hit you!! Anyway, like I said, I never liked my name at all. When I began following Jesus and reading about all the people in the Bible getting their name changed, I got very excited. I figured it was finally time to get rid of the name I’d disliked for decades.

I waited and waited for my new name from the LORD. It didn’t come. I had someone tell me once, (and only once!), that I made them think of Hephzibah, which means “my delight is in her.” It’s from Isaiah 62:4, “You shall no more be termed Forsaken [Azubah], and your land shall no more be termed Desolate [Shemamah], but you shall be called My Delight is in Her [Hephzibah], and your land Married [Beulah]; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.” [The names in brackets I put in to show what the names were that were being described. It was easier to do it this way than to figure out how to do footnotes. People don’t want to read things with footnotes anyway.] Anyway, as beautiful as the thought is for the name Hephzibah, I think I’ll go ahead and stick with Bonnie, thank you very much!

And when you consider my Dad’s choices for names, Bonnie is really not all that bad. His picks were Bertha or Brunhilda. So I’d pretty much given up on name changes. But with God, you never know.

One Sunday I was standing in the atrium before church, and a friend came up to me and shoulder bumped me as she said, “Hey Beautiful [Bonnie], how ya doin’?”

A voice reverberated through my head, “You are aptly named. I gave it to you from the beginning.” I burst into tears.

God named me Beautiful from the very beginning, as I was being formed in my mother’s womb. There is no name change required. He just needed me to come to that realization.

So from that point on, I have absolutely loved my name. But NO! You still can’t sing that song to me!

You Never Know What You’ll Run Into

Walking down the sidewalk at the strip mall, heading to lunch, and along comes the guy pictured above. I am, of course, making gender assumptions, which can be very dangerous in this day and age. Too bad. I’m calling him a him, and if he doesn’t like it, he can come tell me himself.

I have no idea where he came from, or where he was going. He’s not the normal type of encounter one has on a sidewalk in a strip mall in middle America. But there he was, “just a walkin’ down the street.” I don’t know if he was singin’ “doo wah ditti ditti dum ditti doo” (song by Jeff Barry and Ellen Greenwich in 1963, but made popular by the British band, Manfred Mann), or not. Middle America strip malls are not the normal places where crawdads sing. (Book by Delia Owens published in 2018, and soon to be a movie with Reese Witherspoon. As of January 2021, the book has spent a total of 124 weeks on the best seller list, with 32of those weeks at the top of the list. I’ve never read the book, but now that I’ve made mention, and done this little bit of research, I think perhaps I should. Any book that has done that well is a book I should investigate, especially as a hope-to-be published author of novels).

These types of encounters happen to me all the time. They probably happen to everyone, but go un-noticed because people tend to walk around in their own world and ignore the rest of the world around them.I spoke to several co-workers who walked that same sidewalk at about the same time I did, and not a single one of them saw this little guy. They miss so very much. And it makes me wonder how much I miss, even though I tend to pay more attention than most.

This guy, (yes, I’m going with my gender assumptions again. Deal with it), is from an encounter on the way home from work one day. I was just driving along, minding my own business, less than two miles away from home, when I noticed a bunch of really big birds. I pulled over to have a look. This guy was rather curious and didn’t mind posing for me. It took a bit of research before I discovered that they are Sandhill Cranes. I seen and heard them flying high overhead during their migration season, but this was my first up close encounter.

It’s hard to tell from the photo, but he’s at least four feet tall. He looked friendly enough, but I kept my car between us, just in case he considered me to be a threat. (PLEASE! Respect wildlife. Don’t get too close, even if it seems like they are friendly and will let you. It is NEVER good idea. And yes, not only did I use the zoom on my camera, but I cropped the picture as well. I was NOT as close as it looks).

As with the crawdad, I didn’t think that this was normal territory for Sandhill Cranes, but it turns out I was wrong. Northern Illinois is the lower edge of their summer grounds, and some of my friends have seen them around for a couple years. I’m excited to know that they are willing to live with us, enjoying the suburban life.

What’s the upshot of all this? Keep your eyes open. Put the phone down and get outside once in a while. And even when you’re out there, take the earbuds out. There’s as much to hear as there is to see.

Elephant Plop

In 2009 I had the honor of going to Tanzania on a mission trip. So many things happened on that trip I’ll have writing fodder for a lifetime. There will be stories here from that trip, telling of wonderful and amazing things, and things of which no one should have to experience. But this story is neither of those. This story is a great big pile of elephant plop.

We had a total of three and a half weeks in Tanzania, and had two separate opportunities to see the wild life of Africa. The first was Gombe Stream wildlife park, where Jane Goodall did all of her research with chimpanzees. It was a lot of fun, but it was extremely taxing and there was only on within our group who had the wherewithal to keep up with the spotting guides. He got lots of photos which were shared with all in the group, but most of us did not see and chimps in person.

The second opportunity was at Mikumi Wildlife Refuge where we went on a photo safari and got to ride in Land Rovers to go out and see the animals, This was so much more that lions and tigers and bears, OH MY! And actually, we never did see a lion. But there were plenty of elephants, zebras, giraffes, and all sorts of other animals.

One of the sightings I made had the guide very excited. There was a very far off bird that looked different than every other bird we had seen. I pointed it out and asked the guide what it was. He got very animated as he told us it was a secretary bird and that it had been at least two years since one had been spotted in the park. I was pleased that it was me who spotted it. The picture here is not my photo. Mine had a little dot showing in the landscape. It was really far away.

The Secretary bird can be quite Distractifying! in and of itself. They average about four feet in height yet only weigh about seven and a half pounds. They hunt for small rodents, snakes, and reptiles by jumping upon and kicking them. Tests have shown that their kick can deliver up to 195 newtons of power. That’s nearly 44 pounds. Coming from a seven and a half pound bird, that’s an awful lot. African farmers used to keep the birds as pets since they kept small pests and vermin from inundating their land. When Europeans first spotted the birds in the 1800’s they gave the name of Secretary bird because they resembled the secretaries of the day. During that period, secretaries were man wearing dark, knee-length pants and long tailed gray coats. They also tended to carry their quill pens behind their ears. The resemblance is quite striking.

But none of this is what I was going to tell you about. Sorry. I was Distractifying! myself. This is supposed to be about the biggest pile of S*** I’ve ever seen, where I saw it, and how it came about (aside from the obvious).

You see, we actually got to spend the night in Mikumi. It was glamping in the most awesome tents I’ve ever seen. They were on stilts, had running water and flush toilets. There was even semi-warm water for showers if you got to it before it cooled off as it was heated by the sun.

Each tent was assigned a Maasai warrior as a guard for the night to prevent disturbances by animals, but if the animals were disturbing anything, they were free to roam. And roam they did. The warriors did a great job. We never heard a thing. We animals were completely undisturbed by the elephant residents that walked past our tent and deposited the above gem just beneath our balcony.

I feel like I missed the view of a lifetime to have been that close to such incredibly wild creatures, and yet had no clue.

I missed it!

Oronoco Flow

Alright folks, here it is, Distractifying! at it’s best. (By the way, this is not the Oronoco River. This is just a random public domain photo of a river that looked like it had a pretty cool flow goin’ on. )

I was finishing up a short post about Camp NaNoWriMo and my writing goal for the month of July. (Not going to hit that goal, by the way, but I’m still pluggin’ away). I ended it with the words, “…do whatever it takes to stay in the flow.”

WELL! That reminded me of a song I used to enjoy called “Oronoco Flow,” by Enya. So I pulled it up and listened to it on YouTube. Wow! Nostalgia, right?

Anyway, as I listened to it, I realized that I had never really understood the lyrics, except for “Sail away, sail away, sail away,” and “Oronoco flow”. (Squirrel moment – How many songs are out there like that, where you have no idea what the singers are actually singing, but you love the song anyway?) I went back to Google to pull up the lyrics, and I still don’t understand them. It’s really a whole lot of nonsense that has nothing to do with the Oronoco River.

The river, mostly in Venezuela, though it shares a portion of the border with Columbia, eventually empties into the Atlantic Ocean. Based on the amount of water that flows through it, the Oronoco is the 4th largest river in the world, but at anywhere from 1306 to 1398 miles in length, (depending on how you calculate the length (there’s a whole discussion about that on Wikipedia)), it doesn’t even crack the top fifty.

Then there’s the reference to Rob Dickins. Never, in the hundreds of times I listened to this song, had I ever heard the name Rob Dickins in the lyrics. It turns out, he was the head of the studio at the time of the recording. Hmmmmm. Seems Enya has a sense of humor. And, that humor continues in the next portion of lyric, where “Ross and his dependencies” is mentioned.

Yes, Ross Cullum was a producer on the project, though it is said that he was out sick on the day that “Oronoco Flow” was recorded. But! The Ross Dependency is also a geographic reference. It denotes a portion of Antarctica claimed by New Zealand. So, apparently, Enya also liked to play word games in her songs. Or, at least she did in this one.

While my life has moved on from New Age music, there will always be a soft spot in my heart for the music of Enya, and especially the “Oronoco Flow.”

Distractifying.com

Sooooo, what do you do when you’re out of work, low on money, and forget to cancel the automatic payment for webhosting that you haven’t used for three years?

You start WRITING, of course … Again. You pretend you are Dory, (in “Finding Nemo”), and you — “Just keep writing, just keep writing, just keep writing!” What else can you do?

This blog is called Distractifying! because that’s what I am. I bounce from one thing to another. I may bounce back again, or I may bounce yet again in a completely different direction. One never knows. It can be tedious. It can be an adventure. I pray for more adventure than tedium, for my sake as well as yours. I know this sounds a lot like the About section, but I’m just learning how to make this site work, and the learning curve is so very steep! Bear with me. I’m finally on the right track.

I hope you’ll follow me down this rabbit trail that is my mind as it comes through my pen. Yes, everything I write begins on paper with pen. Even that is Distractifying! as I write with all sorts of pens, including fountain pens, and in all sorts of colors, too! (You should see my journals!) But it’s the only way I can get the words out of my head. They get stuck in some sort of portal of doom that just circulates inside my brain and never find the exit ramp when I try to type.

I’ve been playing at being a writer for several years, now, even publishing a few short stories. People tell me that publishing, even a flash fiction piece, makes me a writer, even when I’m not producing. I tend to think — NOT!! A writer must write, to be a writer, Content must be produced, (even if it’s not terrific), no matter how Distractifying! it may be.

So, once again, I hope you will follow me on this journey. Together we will see just how far it will go. And just how Distractifying! it will get!