Do you COME INTO MY MIND!?? I have been saying this phrase over and over and over again recently.

whooa really? That's just a little messed up.

I was raised Catholic, and I used to swallow my gum as I stood up to get in line for communion... haha.

Also, when I was really young, in Catholic school, the nuns had eagle eyes, and they would catch everyone before church started and make you spit it out into their hand.

Amen! - Jesus doesn't take the shattered pieces of our old lives and glue them back together - he picks them up and makes a mosaic :)

I think there is something else important to drag from this story though - you mentioned how you thought the crab looked dead, just before it molted and became new. I think that's very applicable to being born again as a Christian - initially, it can be *very* painful. It can feel like you're dying at points. It's hard, and you might feel like you're just going to die there, without a new shell. But you won't. Eventually, your new shell will come out. :) Keep pushing past the pain, birth is coming! Praise God for the way he works, it's beautiful :D

Haha my childhood church has a live nativity too. For many year now, the wisemen have had to stand *next* to the camels, because the camels had to be kept in a large pen, far from people - they were just too mean to be handled! They would literally bite you if you got too close. Now *that's* reality (nevermind that Mary is 8 and Joseph is 9 and that Jesus is actually a Bitty-Baby doll wrapped in a towel....)

I picture it something like that. Except that Joseph is inside the house sipping on some wine, shooting the breeze with the boys. ;)

I've read that we've got the entirely wrong idea about Jesus being born in a manger anyway. First of all, no one in their right mind would just allow a pregnant woman to give birth in a barn. She probably gave birth indoors and then put jesus in the manger afterward as a make-shift "crib". Here's an article that i read about it -
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/2009/12/...

Which could have a follow up post about how every time you buy a new Bible you feel like you have to qualify it with "It's new!!"

Can you please do a post on "judging people's whose Bibles look unused"?

"I Cornelius, am really excited about picking up the leftover crumbs of goldfish off the floor of the room used for Sunday school in 2010."

I guess bread crumbs in the park are for those "heathen" doves.