Yom Teruah – AKA Feast of Trumpets

Leviticus 23 lists God’s feasts – not the Jews’ feasts, God’s feasts. (Lev 23:2) We just celebrated Yom Teruah. Scripture doesn’t tell us a lot about what to do on this day, but we are always excited to celebrate.

 The Spring feasts are remembrance of past events, but the Fall feasts have not yet been fulfilled. So, we can only make an educated guess as to the meaning. Some of the scriptures about Yom Teruah are:

Lev 23:23-25

²³ Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, ²⁴ “Speak to the children of Israel, saying: ‘In the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a sabbath-rest, a memorial of blowing (teruah) of trumpets, a holy convocation. ²⁵ You shall do no customary work on it; and you shall offer an offering made by fire to the Lord.’”

Num 29:1-6

‘And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, you shall have a holy convocation. You shall do no customary work. For you it is a day of blowing (teruah) the trumpets.² You shall offer a burnt offering as a sweet aroma to the Lord: one young bull, one ram, and seven lambs in their first year, without blemish. ³ Their grain offering shall be fine flour mixed with oil: three-tenths of an ephah for the bull, two-tenths for the ram, ⁴ and one-tenth for each of the seven lambs; ⁵ also one kid of the goats as a sin offering, to make atonement for you; ⁶ besides the burnt offering with its grain offering for the New Moon, the regular burnt offering with its grain offering, and their drink offerings, according to their ordinance, as a sweet aroma, an offering made by fire to the Lord.

There is a lot of detail about the offerings to be made, but since there is no temple at this time, we can’t do those. Other than that, we know we are to rest, and to make a teruah - alarm, signal, sound of tempest, shout, shout or blast of war or alarm or joy.

So, that's what we make sure to do. We rest - my hubby doesn't go to work, we don't do chores or housework. And, we make a teruah.

We make a teruah with trumpets and shouting and other noise makers.

We make a teruah for quite a while.

This year a friend was just arriving as we started our teruah in the back yard. She said she could hear us loud and clear down the street, so we must have been doing a good job.

Oh, and we dance.

So, if you're thinking about celebrating the Feasts, just do it. Don't worry about doing it wrong. Just take a step of faith and enjoy!

Built-in Billys - Part 1

This post is late in coming and I haven’t had the time to get all the information into one post, so we’ll have to go with installments.

We are blessed with an awesome great room in our home. Our kitchen, dining room and school room are all one big room. I had this huge amount of wall space in the school room. While, it is great for hanging maps and such, I knew it would look so much better and be more useful if we had built in bookshelves.

Quite honestly, it wasn't hard to make it look better. One of our “bookcases” was an old entertainment center with no sides. My husband made it in high school, so we’ve been carrying it around all these years (it’s partner is in my bedroom closet), but we finally gave it up for this project. We put it on the street with a “free” sign and it was gone in an hour. And, junk always ended up all over the hearth. Just being real, here.

I didn’t really have the expertise to start from scratch, but found that there are many blogs and tutorials for built-in Billy bookcases. A couple of the blogs I referred to most often were:

http://www.justagirlblog.com/billy-bookcases-diy/

http://www.ikeahackers.net/2012/01/billy-bookcases-to-built-ins.html

The IKEA hackers page actually has the exact layout that we used for our shelves. I like that the wide bookcases were interspersed with small bookcases to break up the monotony. And, the area for the TV in the blog worked perfectly for our schoolroom computer.

We host a home fellowship every other week, so squeezing in a home renovation in our meeting room was tricky. I purchased the shelves from IKEA, and, when, we had a 3 week break between meetings, I got started! Books went into boxes and the school table went onto the back patio. This is one of those times I’m thankful for beautiful Southern California weather in November.

The first task was to put together the IKEA bookcases. The kids loved helping with this.

Next, we removed the baseboard along the wall we planned to place the shelves.

After they were all put together, we set them against the wall to make sure they would fit. 

In the next post, I’ll get into the details of how we installed the shelves.

Another Jesus

I am a Bible believer. I believe we should follow the old and new testament, to the best of our ability. I believe the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is the one true God. I fellowship with people who others might label as “Messianic”, “Torah Observant”, “Hebrew Roots”, etc. (I don’t like to apply a label to myself. All those labels cover too large of a variety of beliefs and actions.)

I have heard many of these people say Christians with differing beliefs worship another God (or another Yeshua or Jesus or …). That type of comment has always bothered me. Clearly, my Biblical beliefs are different from many people in this world. But, I don’t see that as a reason to judge that their God or Jesus is not the same as mine. And, if there is only one true God and one Messiah, that’s a serious judgment.

People see different parts of other people, depending on their relationship. And, I feel the same thing applies to our relationship with God and Jesus.

The thought struck me one day when I was talking about one of my children with someone that only saw that child in a certain situation. I was saying that she is loud, boisterous, funny, crazy, etc, and, the person I was talking to was amazed. They saw her as calm and quiet. I realized that this is very common.

Using myself as an example, different people in my life know me in very different ways.  How and where I see them, how much we talk, how they see me interact with others, affects what our relationship is like and their perspective of me as a person. Examples of people that see me regularly that will have very different views of me: 

• ·         My husband obviously knows me best. He is my confidante, my friend, my lover, my boss and the head of our home. I’ve lived with him longer than I’ve lived with anyone in my life. We talk off and on throughout the day every day. He sees me interact with people in all different situations. He knows my strengths and weaknesses. He is the head of our home.
• ·         My kids spend even more time with me than my husband does, because we homeschool. We are together all day every day. They see me as their mom, their boss, their teacher, etc. They see me interact with others in all aspects of everyday life.
• ·         My bff has known me for years and she still loves me. We communicate regularly throughout the week and spend a lot of time together.
• ·         I have one friend who is my confidante in a very important area of my life. That one area is what our friendship is based on. We talk about other things, but I share my innermost thoughts with her in this one area.
• ·         Those I fellowship with regularly hear my opinions and thoughts on Biblical issues. They see me worship. They see me act as hostess, serve others and teach children.
• ·         People I chat with week after week as I wait for my kids at their lessons see me interact with my kids and others in the vicinity. We discuss how the kids are doing in their activity. We talk about parenting and homeschooling.
• ·         People that work at the stores I frequent (and have frequented for the past 15 years) talk to me regularly. They know I’m married and have a large family. They know I homeschool. But, beyond that, most of our conversation is small talk or a summary of the week’s activities.

·          

All of these people would see me very differently – even those I know well. My husband has a different relationship with me than my kids or my closest friends. And, the others, while they know me to varying degrees, would likely have a very different viewpoint of who I am. If one of the moms I chat with described my personality and our relationship, it would sound very different from my husband doing the same thing. If a friend I fellowship with regularly described my personality and our relationship, it would look very different from my kids or a store employee doing the same thing. You might not even know they were talking about the same person.

It’s not a matter of any of these people knowing someone who isn’t me. It’s simply a matter of them knowing different aspects of me. They don’t even all call me by the same name. I go by Missi, Miss, Gloria, Mom, Mommy, Mrs. Lara, even Mrs. Fernandez sometimes, because my grocery discount cards are all in my mother’s name. My point is, those who know God and Jesus (or Yahweh and Yeshua, or Yahuwah and Yahushuah or whatever other name folks want to use) will know different aspects of Them and Their character, based on the person’s own viewpoint and relationship. As a matter of fact, my God is big enough that we can all know a big part of Him and there’s still plenty left to learn.