Making a Few Necessary Changes

Okay, so I’m sure at least a few people have noticed that I’ve made some changes to my website. I’m not doing it to confuse anyone, but after all, it is an author website. After doing some needed research, I realized that some things were missing with this website – essential items that help people to contact me and buy my book. (No pressure to purchase, but it’s nice to have the information at your fingertips for immediate and/or future reference).

Yes, I’ll admit, I feel the pressure to make sales. (Too few reviews sound like bad news. I wouldn’t want to blow a fuse). But that’s not the reason I write. I write because I have a message to share and I can’t type it fast enough, and then I have to think about “Is anybody reading it?”

I know. What does that bird have to do with anything? I wish it would stop peering over my shoulder already.

ARRRGH! I’m a writer. I just want to write. I have another book to finish but marketing is a distraction. It’s like the carrots in the pot roast that refuse to cook all the way through, but the meat has been done for three hours. Even the potatoes are tired of waiting for them to cook. Anyhow, I think you get my drift. I’ve made some major renovations to this site over the last few months – renovations that in some ways correspond with renovations in my life. As some children prepare to move overseas (I will miss my grandson!) others come back home.

They’re here and then they’re there. They like to travel everywhere. My rhymes almost sound like a Doctor Seuss book. I used to wonder about his last name; sounds like the Hebrew word for horse.

Doctor Horse. Good name for him. I can see the toothy grin. Reminds me of Mr. Ed the talking horse. Remember him? If so, you’ve probably been around a while – long enough to go through numerous changes.

Like my website. I’ve been writing more articles for authors and for readers too. But my main message hasn’t changed a bit. To me it’s all about the miracles and healing Jesus still performs. He’s just the same today as He was two thousand years ago.  That’s what the Christian fiction stories I write are really about – children walking in the power of the Spirit, taking His inspired comic books at face value and using them to take incredible adventures.

These heroes are like people who read the Bible and do what it says without wavering.

They’ve had it with the Snore Bore. They won’t listen to his dead weights, and – well, I think you get the picture. They trust God to help them make those needed changes in their lives, even though some things can be so frustrating – like figuring out where all those widgets go and how and why and – Anyhow, change can be good. Now if I could only figure out where my villain ran off to…

 

 

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What Made Him Change His Mind?

There once was a pharaoh who hired a cook, even though his most reliable spy had told him she couldn’t be trusted. He suspected she had swiped his favorite pomegranate pudding recipe and prepared the dish for her cat, but Pharaoh hired her anyway.

One day she was busy kneading dough in the royal kitchen. Her daughter Suzie sat close by, building a model pyramid. Suddenly she saw a flash of green.

“Sproing-a, sproing-a, sproing-a!”

“What’s that hoppity thing jumping around the kitchen, Suzie?” said the cook that Pharaoh never should have hired.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just my pet frog,” Suzie said.

“Since when did you have a pet frog?” asked her mother.

“It just hopped in through the window.”

“We are not allowed to keep frogs in the palace, so you just –”

“Rrrr-rrrr-ribit!”

“Ack! Somebody save me!” the cook screamed. The frog had just landed on her head.

“Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll catch it!” Suzie yelled.

Her mom continued to scream. “It’s tangled in my hair. Get it out, get it out!”

“Hold still, Mom. I’ll get a broom.”

“No, don’t –”

“Whack!”

“Ow!”

“Splat!” The frog jumped off the cook’s head and landed in the kneading bowl. The cook continued to scream as two more amphibians joined the party. They hopped from the kneading bowl to the cupboard, back into the kneading bowl, off the table, and then to the box from which the cook had stolen Pharaoh’s favorite recipe. Suzie was having fun chasing frogs with her broom.

“Smash!” There went Pharaoh’s famous hand-painted pitcher.

“Crack!” His delicate mosaic lamp crashed to the floor.

“Shatter!” His favorite dessert recipe, inscribed on hand-crafted stained glass, broke into a thousand pieces.

At that moment, Pharaoh poked his head through the door. “Just checking on lunch,” he started to say, just as a frog jumped in his face.

“Whack!” Suzie swung her broom right at it. “Oops, sorry. It was an accident.”

Two days later Pharaoh, his nose swollen like a balloon, was tired of having frogs hop all over him. As soon as he rid himself of one, two more would hop in his face. He hadn’t had a decent meal to eat in three days, due to all the frogs hopping into his food, jumping onto his ear, and messing up his newly shampooed hair. So he called up Moses, yelled at him about the frogs, and asked him to pray for him. Moses said he’d pray, and the frogs died immediately.

The fact that they croaked so swiftly convinced Pharaoh that his cook had poisoned them with the intent of putting them into his food and making him sick. She was trying to kill him, he told himself. So much for Moses telling him God had sent the plague of frogs! In Pharaoh’s mind, it wasn’t God. It was this cook.

Pharaoh fired her, then told Moses he refused to let his people go. After all, he was no fool. If he couldn’t find good help from this sneaky Egyptian lady, then he must stock up on foreign slaves. It was the only way he knew to save his skin.