Gravel Road Musings

Yup, I'm pretty sure this is a controversial topic and I am also pretty sure I would like some feedback from you on it. This is something that I have thought about off and on over the last couple years maybe, but it has really been driven home to me over the last six months.  First off, this is not a plea for money--we are abundantly blessed, as I plan to point out.  Second, it is not a diatribe against health insurance.  Third, it is meant to hold me accountable for putting my money where my mouth is about to be. Let me share our story:  We have Samaritan Ministries--we send our money to a family in need every month. If there are more needs than money, the need is prorated, which means you will not get enough money to pay off your whole hospital bill.  So when Nicole was born, we turned in our need.  It was prorated to 85%, meaning we had close to $1000 that was not going to be covered by the ministry.  To my money-bothered brain, this looked big.  You add to that a total comb

This book was given to me by Bethany House for the purpose of writing a review about it.  This was a great chick flick that I read in about 2 days or so.  A couple of months ago I had posted a review about "A Sensible Arrangement" by Tracie Peterson.  This was the sequel to that and focused a little more on Alice who had been hired to be Marty's personal maid in Colorado.  The economy took a serious downturn causing Jake and Marty to lose everything and they returned to Texas, very much against the will of Marty who blamed Texas for the bad things that had happened to her.   Alice falls in love with Marty's nephew, Robert, and he with her and they lived happily ever after.  There was, of course, the normal fiasco, where Alice ran off because she thought Robert was engaged to another woman and didn't want to come between them.   There's one paragraph I want to put on here that stuck out to me tonight as I was reading.  Robert was talking to his dad a

This book was given to me by Bethany House Publishers for the purpose of writing a review. I like Dee Henderson.  She is a good author, but in my opinion her best works were the O'Malley series and everything else is just a little beneath that level.  However, she did do a very good job with this one and I did really like it. The plot is the normal man and woman falling in love, etc., but the surrounding story was almost over my head.  It was a Navy story with the leading man being a submarine commander and the leading lady being a civilian with a brain I can't even dream about.  In college at the age of 14, she had made some amazing discoveries by the age of 29.  Cross-sonor, sending pings without being heard, discovering other subs by the quiet they create, etc. etc.  It blows my mind how a mind could even pull all this out.  I have to remember it is fiction, but there must be some element of truth to the ideas or Dee wouldn't use them?  Or is it all just fiction?  I