Oh my! The last two days I’ve been waking up at the crack of dawn or maybe even before that…that is very NOT ME. I have always been a night owl preferring going to bed past mid-night and sleeping for as late as I could in the morning. Becoming a mom changed that “a bit” but due to my husband’s graciousness, he’s allowed me to sleep a bit longer and he’ll get up with the kids. What can I say, I got a good man. Nevertheless, what is happening to me! I’m not sure if its my son’s grinding of teeth that bothers me, the fact that I can’t turn my brain off and it has loads of stuff stored in there or if I am just getting to the age where sleep becomes illusive. I love sleep! Oh my.

This could be serious if it continues. Lack of sleep doesn’t just make you tired and cranky. It could hurt your job satisfaction, make you fat, cause high blood pressure and a host of other problems.

of the health insurance world. If you have health insurance through your employer, you are basically out of luck if some dumb clerk somewhere makes a medical call over your doc and something bad happens. Be afraid, because they are above the law. Read this.

NOTE: I’m going to be talking about S-e-x in this post.

That’s the name I am thinking of giving a CEFL event in 2007 for married women. I think alot about how sex is one thing most Christians don’t talk about. In the sisterhood we hear alot about "the fire going out", "he had / she had an affair", "I love my wife/husband but I just don’t get turned on anymore". This is a reality. One thing I think happens is that as Christians some folks think that they are immune to the temptations of the world. In addition, I think many think that you can’t have fun in the bedroom. As partarkers of something GOD created, we should be having some awesome sex.

I’ve had talks with my sister friends about how important sex is in marriage - or even if it’s important. It seems some in the church have downplayed the importance of sex in marriage. Does the Bible address this? Yes! The idea that sex is not important to marriage is the very thing that the Apostle Paul is strongly arguing against in the first part of 1 Corinthians 7. You have to read it again, get out those commentaries and exam the scripture again!

In the Greek, Paul is saying that we are each owed sex by our spouse. Yeap, that is right. I think cognitively we understand that to be the case, but with most christians something happens and they seriously become so spiritually minded that they are no earthly good in bed! A man who does not meet his wife’s need for emotional intimacy is making it impossible to fulfill his obligation to her sexually.  In the same way, a woman who thinks she can just lay on the bed with no visual stimulation for her husband is looking for some serious trouble battling her husband’s fantasy life.

Why am I even talking about this, well for starters because I am 1) REAL ; 2) frustrated with the topics many women ministries talk about and 3) want to do something about it. I am NOT advocating for pre-marital sex (although I am very well aware that is happens in the church in a big way!!!) but I am advocating for absolutely mind-blowing sex if you ARE married.This is the way God wants it. He wants us to enjoy what He created without having to resort to a secret life of porn and side affairs and a host of other deviant behaviors that eventually do come out.

I am thinking of hosting slumber parties for women only. I did think of how does that look for a pastor to be hosting such events. I figure it this way…I am helping couples and I am acknowledging that santified sisters have an intimate side. Why is it that we have to talk to our non-christian friends about such things when it was the God that we serve who created it in the first place. And shouldn’t the discussion be held in light of God’s word as opposed to the wild stuff going on in the world? Thus I think it is very appropriate for me to host such a party. This lady did and she is devout Christian.This lady started a ministry doing it. He wrote a book about it. He preached about it. Anthony Bradley blogged about it. Christianity Today wrote a 53 page report about it (see highlights below):

A few highlights from this 53-page report

• Nearly 9 in 10 pastors are counseling a parishioner on sexual issues once a year or more.

• 71% of pastors and 49% of laity are "very satisfied" with their marriage.

• 55% of pastors and 64% of laity would like their sexual intimacy to be more frequent.

• 5% of pastors and 14% of laity have committed adultery. The primary reason was marital dissatisfaction.

• Laity respondents are more likely than pastors to confess adultery to their spouses (45% to 20%).

• Very few churches have established policies to protect pastors from sexual temptation. The most frequent policy is to have a window in the pastor’s office door (27%).

So, with all this said, I am not one bit embarrassed about posting this here. Although my husband or family members might be. Heck, this is one topic we SHOULD be talking about because again…there are santified sisters with an intimate side just waiting to be heard and educated on the wonderful sex she could be having with her husband. Here’s to more passion in our CHRISTIAN homes.

Make sure your speaker volume is up. I am the only non-musical one in the familia.

My family and I went to see Dream Girls today. Wow! The movie was fantastic. There were many parts of the movie that you felt raw emotion and Ms. Hudson (American Idol loser) belted out "And I Am Telling You…" powerfully. This movie is bound to get some kind of award! Go check it out!

Meanings of Christmas . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fr. Andrew Greeley, Woman’s Day, 12-22-81

   "It might be easy to run away to a monastery, away from the commercialization, the hectic hustle, the demanding family responsibilities of Christmas-time. Then we would have a holy Christmas. But we would forget the lesson of the Incarnation, of the enfleshing of God—the lesson that we who are followers of Jesus do not run from the secular; rather we try to transform it. It is our mission to make holy the secular aspects of Christmas just as the early Christians baptized the Christmas tree. And we do this by being holy people—kind, patient, generous, loving, laughing people—no matter how maddening is the Christmas rush…"

My older son, Samuel hasn’t been doing too good in school. It’s not that he is a bad behaviorally (well not that bad), it’s not that he isn’t smart (he really is), its something else. I’ve read about how boys do in school versus girls and this is a crucial stage for him. At first, I didn’t want to get him anything for Christmas because I said to myself "Christmas is so commercialized my son thinks its about the gifts" and "since he doesn’t ‘deserve’ gifts because of his grades thus far, I won’t give him anything or something small."

Then a thought came to me which I shared with my husband. This Christmas is another teaching opportunity for Sam. The facts are that he didn’t do well in school at all and that he doesn’t deserve anything but that is the beauty of Christmas. We, human creations, did not deserve God’s love that was expressed in such a way that He sent his only son to live among us, to struggle like we all struggle on this earth to ultimately die a death we "deserved". Christmas is about the pathway to forgiveness, grace and mercy for those who don’t deserve it by way of Jesus.

What better way to model "forgiveness, grace and mercy" for Sam by showing him that although he really didn’t deserve a CHRISTmas, he got one anyway because of his parent’s love. And this,I hope will help him "get it" that that is why we celebrate gladly the birth of Jesus, because we all have received CHRISTmas without deserving one bit of it.

This Christmas, then…
Let us mend a quarrel.  Build peace.  Seek out a forgotten friend.  Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust.  Write a love letter.  Share some treasure.  Give a soft answer.  Encourage youth.  Manifest our loyalty in word and deed.  Keep a promise.  Find the time.  Forego a grudge.  Forgive an enemy.  Listen.  Apologize if we were wrong.  Try to understand.  Deny envy.  Examine our demands on others.  Think first of someone else.  Appreciate.  Be kind, be gentle.  Laugh a little.  Laugh a little more.  Deserve confidence.  Take up arms against malice.  Decry complacency.  Express our gratitude.  Welcome a stranger.  Gladden the heart of a child.  Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth.  Speak our love.  Speak it again and again.

I can hardly walk this morning. Evidence that my body is hardly what it used to be but thankfully the bed has allowed this slightly more used body some rest from a night of festivities at the Rios’ household.

Last night, we held our annual Christmas Agape, a time where church family and other friends and family gather to celebrate the birth of our Savior, where we eat some good Boricua style food and sing to our own renditions of popular Christmas and worship music and also do alot of Karaoke. Everyone who comes when we do our Agapes knows that Liz will be doing Gloria Gaynor’s "I Will Survive"! Hiram and I are pretty much extroverts and love having people around. So parties are fun to us, it’s the clean up afterwards. Lord have mercy. But for a little taste of what went on yesterday, I’ve uploaded an mp3 file of the Wounded Healer rendition of "Mary Did You Know"…We do this alot. Make up on own flavor to songs. Download WHFMarydiduknow.mp3 and yes, that’s me singing and Hiram on the drums.

Here are some pics:

Liz singing "I Will Survive"

My NY friends who now live in FL (Neredia, Rachel, Angela)

James Sheppard of 89.7 Spirit FM hung out with us -looking for a song to sing!

My son Samuel part of the entertainment for the evening, playing some traditional Christmas carols.

The WHF worship team..Hiram on drums, Woody on Piano and Derek on bass

The "observers"

The guys doing "YMCA"

As promised, I had Rena Pederson, author of the Lost Apostle: Searching for the Truth About Junia answer some questions for me. This is part I. Part II coming this week. Enjoy!

You mention that you never heard of Junia until someone in a book club mentioned her, why were you so intrigued with her aside from the fact that she was a women…were you a woman in leadership, had you noticed the treatment of women leaders in your past?

I was intrigued from the very beginning about Junia’s story because I found it shocking that her story had been hidden for so long.  As a matter of justice as well as faith, I felt women today should know about Junia and the part she played in establishing the early church. Perhaps that interest was sharpened by the fact that I had often been in the position of being the “first” woman in roles preserved for men – first editorial page editor, first woman board member, first women president of the civic group, that sort of thing. I had seen how hard it was for women to obtain positions of influence and had seen how often in the corporate world, women’s contributions were often obscured, even today.  But my main motivation was to see Junia’s name restored, to see her included among the many women of faith who helped start the early church and sacrificed their lives to spreading the good news.

How long was this project to write?

It took me about three years to finish the book. I pretty much eliminated everything else I did during that time to focus solely on the researching and writing.  Worked on it nearly every night and weekend and used my vacation time and much of my savings to travel to Italy so I could walk where Junia and other members of the early church walked.  During that three years, I interviewed more than two dozen experts on the early church, New Testament scholars such as Elaine Pagels at Princeton,  Karen King at Harvard, Wayne Meeks at Yale, Peter Lampe at Heidelberg,   Bishop N.T. Wright in England,  Darrel Bock of Dallas Theological Seminary and many, many more.  My friends would call me on the weekend to go to a movie and complain, “Are you still working on that book?”   Had I known how much work it would take, I might have been hesitant to take it on, but now that I have been stretched and have grown as a result, I am glad I  forged on.

3. Where there any moments that you told yourself, who would want to hear about what I uncover? What kept you going?

I did occasionally ask myself if I were crazy to keep pressing on.  I wondered, would anyone really care? But when I would talk to women about the project, they were always intrigued and asked, “Tell me more about Junia.” I could tell there was a hunger there, a yearning to know more about the women who helped start the early church.  I felt as if I needed to do it for them.

4. Women in ministry struggle with not "fitting in", I myself was laid off from a job because of my advocacy for women in ministry and for just doing what I felt God called me to do. How would you encourage omen who are called to ministry or leadership roles who have been told "you don’t fit in".

I was particularly strengthened by the encouragement of women in the ministry, who struggle to find a place in the church establishment even today.  It is a travesty of faith and justice that women still are treated as second class citizens in many denominations.  We need to ask the church fearlessly: what does that say about God if you insist that women are not “holy enough” to fit in.  Would a loving God do so? Would a loving God say half of the human race made in the image of God is less worthy? Doesn’t such treatment contradict Jesus’ own efforts to reach out to women?

5. What aspects of Junia’s story is still a struggle for women today?

The NYTimes recently did a front page story about the “stained glass ceiling,” presenting a multiplicity of examples of how women who have become ministers are often shunted off to assistant pastor positions or to smaller churches where they subsist on poverty wages that male ministers won’t accept.  Mary Lambert, a woman who had taught Sunday School in upstate New York for 50 years, was fired last summer because she was a women.  Although there are more women in seminaries today and more women in pulpits today, they still struggle to be respected and to be truly heard.

6. Do you think women should defend themselves or let their gift make way for them?

I think more women should speak up about the discrimination against women in the church that is veiled as God’s will, when it is really a cultural distortion of scripture.  We need the Holy Spirit to speak to hearts and minds, but we need to add our voices and prayers, too.

7. So who exactly what Junia? How can you explain her briefly.

Junia is the only woman mentioned in scripture as an apostle (little a – not one of the Twelve Disciples, but clearly one of the leading missionary figures  in the early church) in Romans 16:7.   As Paul commends early leaders of the church in Rome and sends them greetings, he singles out  Junia and Andronicus  (presumably her husband) as being Christians before him, in prison with him and “outstanding among the apostles.”  The scholarly consensus in the early church was that Paul was referring to a woman, but her name was lost for centuries, because her name was changed to a man’s name (“Junias”) in the 13^th century by church leaders who did not think a woman could have been an apostle. Thanks to more accurate scholarship, most Bible translations today are going back to the woman’s name, although most believers don’t know about that change yet.

8. Do you think women today are at risk for having their identities lost? In what way?

I think Junia’s story strikes a chord with women because so often they feel invisible in our culture, their voices are not respected.

Ok so I changed my name for one day.  Actually I got this in an email and I liked it.

I certainly am not "diva" in the most understood form of the word. But I am determined inspired victorious always!