Isn’t he just darling?

Anyone who has to drink milk is still a baby, without experience in applying the Word about righteousness. But solid food is for the mature, for those whose faculties have been trained by continuous exercise to distinguish good from evil. {Hebrews 5:13-14}

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I’ve tried many methods for skin care and some have worked well, some a little, and some none at all. I like to switch to different methods every so often so my body doesn’t get used to a certain treatment and become none-affective. Some ladies don’t have to do as much as others depending on skin types. My skin is generally fair – not too oily, not too dry – so really what I’m concerned about it keeping it clear.

Honey and Cinnamon – I mix about 2-3tablespoons of honey with about 2-3 teaspoons of cinnamon. Cinnamon is a spice and can cause intense burning or irritation if you have sensitive skin or if you just use too much. You may want to test this on a smaller area before applying it all over. You can use this mixture as a mask or face scrub. This may be a little runny, especially if the weather is hot, so just apply a thin layer.

Oatmeal and Yogurt – I’m just trying this. It has worked well thus far. You take about a small handful of raw oatmeal, finely ground, and mix it with about 1/4 cup of yogurt. We buy plain yogurt and add in raw honey for flavour. If you do it this way you will have the extra benefits of the honey as well. Unlike the honey and cinnamon, this will be like a paste and will get stiff when it dries (like store-bought masks), which I like.

Baking Soda – You can make a paste out of this by just adding a little bit of water. I actually use it dry sometimes and apply it with a blush brush, especially over the spots where my skin tends to hold oil and cause several zits all in a bunch.

Apple Cinder Vinegar – This can be used as a toner. Just take a cotton ball and apply over the face. If you have any open blemishes it may cause a sting. A lot of people don’t like the smell, but for me I like to use this on my salad dressings or sometimes just drink a little bit plain (awesome health benefits here too!) so it doesn’t bother me. I would not recommend using the baking soda and then the vinegar, unless you want to have a science lesson on your face! haha!

Impatiens or Jewelweed Soap – This is used to treat poison ivy and we had some left over from last year. I washed my face with it was surprised at the wonderful affect it had on my skin. My face looked so much clearer within days. Apparently jewelweed has been used in North America for centuries, and is a folk remedy for bruises, burns, cuts, eczema, insect bites, sores, sprains, warts, and other skin irritations. If used too much or too long it can dry your skin out so use with care.

Essential Oils – There are a lot of uses and benefits for essential oils. I used organic orange oil for awhile and it made my skin look and feel (and smell!) great. Some of the ones you might want to look into are mint, any citrus, lavender, geranium, and tea tree oil. I read that rose oil is supposed to clear up acne almost instantly, but it is so expensive.

Citruses – Lemons, limes, grapefruits, and oranges are all wonderful for the skin and can be used as a wash, scrub, or toner. I read the peels are also good to use in poultices.

Goat Milk Soap – It is said that if you apply warm milk to your face daily it will greatly decrease breaks out and acne. I think in the same way organic goats’ milk soap works on your skin. We have bars and bars of this around and I love using it on my skin. You can find this all over online.

Epsom Salt – You can use this as a scrub by wetting your face and just dipping your fingers in the bag, and then scrubbing, gently. Epsom salt is great for a few different health benefits, and is wonderful to add in a bathe – if you do it this way you won’t really have to worry about using it directly on your face.

Eggs - I use eggs for so many things… hair wash, face mask, face wash, conditioner, gel and mousse, and am finding new uses for it all the time! You can use egg white on your face as a mask either by itself or adding in one of any of the above. The yoke is good to just use as a wash.

There are a lot more natural remedies I’ve found for toners, scrubs, masks, and whatnot, but I haven’t tried them all yet. These are the ones I have tried and have been proven affective on me. For all of these you can wash them off with warm water or exfoliate your face before doing so. They all smell pretty yummy too and leaving you smelling equally yummy. All of these work well, but if used too frequently they may loose their potency on your skin.

For moisturizers I have used EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) or coconut oil, but there is also Aloe Vera, organic coco butter, and the essential oils that work good for this as well. From what I’ve read its best not to moisturizer at all because your face’s natural oils will take care of that.

Tips

Don’t wash your face more than twice a day (morning and night), instead rinse your face off throughout the day with just water. It will refresh and remove unwanted dirt, bacteria, and oils without over cleansing.

Don’t pop whiteheads. You break the skin, open it up for bacteria, push the pus just under the top layer of skin, break veins and tiny muscles in your face, spread the infection, and cause the zit to stick around longer. No matter how tempting, just let it be. Ewww just reading up on this makes me cringe. Really groddy. You can wash it, apply any of the above mentioned remedies to help dry it out, and even sit in the sun for a while to allow your skin to soak up vitamins and dry it out that way.

Don’t push out blackheads (MORE home remedies). You can steam them and exfoliate them. I found that you should only push them out when they are coming out themselves, but don’t apply pressure and make them.

Try not to touch your face and wash your hands throughout the day as well.

Change your pillowcase every 3-4 days.

If your hair is greasy or oily or dirty pull it away from your face. It can help spread oils all over our face. A head veil is a great solution for this!

Get rid of commercial products you own. Seriously, throw them away. Cosmetics, especially, only clog pores, and waste all the time and resources you just put into your skin with home remedies.

Create a routine (food, health care, sleep, etc). Kate wrote a great post on how to do this here.

I would really like to go raw (food) for a week or two and see what kind of difference it makes in my skin. I’ve read that most, if not all, origins of acne and skin irritations come from what you eat, and after my last post on this subject I so believe it. Paul Nison’s wife, Andrea, has a blog called Our Raw Life, and offers a lot of raw-food recipes.

If you like to spend your time studying different things, like me, the ingredients I listed in this post are just fascinating and have different, wonderful benefits! There are so many wonderful things that the Father created for us that there is absolutely no need to go to the store and buy commercial products (especially since they are so dangerous to your health in the long run!). Let’s use  and share them!

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Seek Peace and Chase After It

For “Whoever wants to love life and see good days must keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit, turn from evil and do good, seek peace and chase after it. For YAH keeps his eyes on the righteous, and his ears are open to their prayers; but the face of YAH is against those who do evil things.” For who will hurt you if you become zealots for what is good? But even if you do suffer for being righteous, you are blessed! Moreover, don’t fear what they fear or be disturbed, but treat the Messiah as holy, as Lord in your hearts while remaining always ready to give a reasoned answer to anyone who asks you to explain the hope you have in you – yet with humility and fear, keeping your conscience clear, so that when you are spoken against, those who abuse the good behavior flowing from your union with the Messiah may be put to shame.
{1 Peter 3: 10-16}

Seeking after peace can be more than easy, especially if you have a right to press forward with your woes, but do not forget that the Father’s eyes are watching over you and no wrong doing will be left undone. That is why you have to make sure you do what is right, that you seek the peace that the Messiah brought – The peace not between father and son or mother and daughter, but the peace that comes from being righteous, from following his ways, from loving him wholeheartedly, and turning from what is evil.

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I agreed to review this book, Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus, upon request from one of the authors, but I hadn’t really thought about the contents or if I would really be interested in reading it. It seems, though, that it was of all His making that I was given this wonderful opportunity. I really loved how this book is written in a genuinely easy-to-read, non-confrontational way with info and resources throughout the entire book of contextual tidbits, definitions and explanations. It’s co-authored by Ann Spangler (Women of the Bible) and Lois Tverberg (Our Rabbi Jesus) and done so eloquently, ensuring to captivate you and truly “transform your faith” through the Jewishness of the Messiah.

The book has 14 chapters and can be used for a personal study or with a Haverim (Hebrew for study-buddy, but so much more too – you have to read the book!), whether it’s with family or with other believers. The reading is so interesting and easy understand to that children can learn right along with you, especially with the discussion questions and project/activity ideas for further study/interaction at the end of each chapter.

Introduction

1. Joining Mary at the Feet of Jesus
2. Why a Jewish Rabbi?
3. Stringing Pearls
4. Following the Rabbi
5. Get Yourself Some Haverim
6. Rabbi, Teach Us to Pray
7. For Everything a Blessing
8. A Passover Discovery
9. Discovering Jesus in the Jewish Feasts
10. At Table with the Rabbi
11. Touching the Rabbi’s Fringe
12. Jesus and the Torah
13. The Mysterious Kingdom of God
14. Becoming True Disciples of Our Jewish Lord

Appendices A Prayers Jesus Prayed 211 B The Feasts 218 C Recommended Resources 222 D Glossary 226 Notes 234 Scripture Index 253 General Index 257

I received the book but procrastinated a few days before actually picking it up. Many times I will pick up a book, read a few pages, get bored, and never pick it up again. There are very few books that interest me, but once I began to read Sitting at the Feet I couldn’t put it down. Over the next month I spent long nights up with mom reading through and discussing things we had never thought of or knew before. I re-read several chapters trying to gain a better understand of certain terms or situations that had just been words before – words that had no depth, no meaning to me.

We try to communicate the Scriptures from one world to another over centuries and religious customs we don’t understand, and as Ann tells us of how she translated her room-mate’s (foreign student) question of “Can I have a pen” into “I have a pain”, so we also misinterpret the meaning of the Scriptures, thus the course of action.

“The Jesus we meet in the Gospels is not always easiest to understand. Partially, this is because we perceive his words and the distance of many centuries, from an entirely different cultures, and in a different language. Instead of making our hearts burn, sometimes Scriptures makes us scratch our heads in confusion.”

The book starts off walking the dusty roads to Bethany, the little village where Yeshua frequently visited with his friends, Martha, Mary, and Lazarus. The authors literally to that place in history and Scripture, and explain what being a disciple really meant to a Torah-observant Jew, which Yeshua as well as all who followed him were. The study of Scriptures (Mainly Torah) were greatly prized in Yeshua’s day, and Rabbis were roaming all over the country teaching, asking for nothing in return. It was people like those of Bethany that would open their homes to offer a room and food for the Rabbis. This is how Paul lived after he began serving Yeshua. He was not a paid preacher as we have today. He relied on the Father to provide through the people and said he was in need of nothing.

“Besides being an eye-witness, you would have had the advantage of being a first-century Jew…. Like Yeshua you would have observed the laws and traditions of Judaism, and would have been familiar with the issues of the day. You would have caught the humour and the nuanced remarks that made his words even more captivating, more life-changing”.

In my recent post on the Scriptural application of saying a blessing at meal-time a commenter remarked how the authors of the Good News didn’t need to make mention of certain practices because it was absolutely understood, by the people of the day, that Yeshua was following the Torah and the customs of the time. Today we look at the Scriptures, without that culture, and try to apply our society and reasoning to it. There are things so obvious there was no need to mention them. The Scriptures can be so much richer when you know about them in Yeshua’s first-century context.

Though it never said in the text the religious group Yeshua comes closet to is the Pharisees. His teachings, his style of ministry, and the customs he observed all reflected that of the Pharisees. The authors explain this very well and share the origins of teaching in parables – a Pharisaical method, drawing parallels from the Scriptures. “Sitting at the feet” is a Rabbinical idiom for learning from a rabbi, and as a first-century visitor you would have understood that when the text reads “Miryam who also sat at the Lord’s feet” it was describing Mary as a disciple of Yeshua. This is said of Paul in Acts 22 when it speaks of him sitting at Rabbi Gamaliel’s feet.

Female Students in the First Century Women were encouraged to sit in on the advanced discussions at the synagogue if they were able. A few even acquired the high level education required to contribute to rabbinic debates, and their words are still on record. Some restrictions on women, like separating men and women during worship, actually arose several centuries later.

We, today, stand on the beach and gaze in wonderment of the ocean’s beauty. There are many great things about it and we can form our own opinions and beliefs about, but what if we went underwater to see a whole other world of majesty? Both above and below are reflections of the Maker’s hand, but by diving deep we can see so much more insight. This is what it like in comparison reading the Scriptures and diving into its rich foundation as the authors have so clearly done in this book.

We are surrounded by images of ‘Jesus’ with long hair, deep blue eyes, and fair skin… a stereotype that completely ignores Yeshua’s Semitic heritage, writes Lois, upon returning from Israel having the children of the land call out to a Californian friend as “Jesus”. We’ve been presented with this image of Yeshua that is nothing like him and so we have an unrealistic view of him and confuse his teachings. Yeshua would have been immersed in Torah at the age of 5-6 and then afterward the Oral Torah. He, nor anyone in the day, viewed the Torah (the Law as we know it) as an onerous rule book, but instead a gift from the Father on how to live a life pleasing to him. To English ears we read and see “law, bondage, burden”, but to Jewish ears they hear “teaching, instruction, life”. The book shares how at any possible time Torah was studied… even at ‘parties’…but once you realize how rich and life-giving the Scriptures are you will have a deep yearning to be in constant study of them. It is said that study, not prayer, is the highest form of worship.

When Lois first heard about this Jewish fascination for study, she found it utterly incomprehensible. Just imagine – standing up in the middle of a party and saying to your friends, “Hey, everybody, let’s go talk about a bunch of old documents! But over time she realized there really are few thrills greater then digging deep in Scriptures and discovering fresh insight from the Word of God.”

The book touches on the main parts of life in Yeshua’s day in a brief but intriguing manner so as to you cause you to ponder and search things out for yourself. As I did you will go and grab the Scriptures just so you can make sure that the passage they just opened up to you is really in there and then you will never view it in the same manner as you did before. Your heart will burn to know more. If you are one of those people who are passionate about knowing and honouring the Messiah this book will only further show you who he was and what he meant and expects from you from his teachings. There is an entire chapter devoted to the Kingdom of God and our many misconceptions about what that idiom means.

I have recommended this book to so many people and used it equally as a reference. This book will be a refresher and a renewer in your own pursuit of the greatest Rabbi of all time, our Messiah Yeshua. My review was prolonged for so long because there is just SO much good information in it I wasn’t sure where to start. Saying “just go read!!!!!!” doesn’t quite get across what insight and blessings this book gives. I tried taking notes but before I was even to the third chapter I had filled two pages, both sides, and the chapters aren’t even that long! This review even is very vague compared to all the information in the book.  I applaud Ann and Lois for such a commendable work and hope that the Father will use it in a great way.

Ann Spangler has also made a PDF of Chapter 1 from Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus available on her website, along with the book’s Table of Contents and the Introduction, all available for free download and reading by clicking here. Lois Tverberg is working on a new book as a continuation of this one, and you can check out her website, Our Rabbi Jesus, for more info.

Now that I’ve wet your appetite you can enter to win a signed copy of this book by simply leaving a comment, and for extra extries you do any of the following.

For additional entries:

1) Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/aponderinghear and tweet this to your followers: I entered to win a copy of Sitting at the Feet of Rabbi Jesus from @aponderingheart Enter here: http://tinyurl.com/yg9pjhm Ends 3/11 RT You can tweet this once EVERYDAY for additional entries, just leave me your status link!

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Make sure you leave a comment for each option you do so we have a call-number for your entries. This giveaway ends on March 11th, Thursday, at midnight PST.

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Me: Blessing Yah BEFORE meals is a Pharisaical tradition, praying AFTERWARD is Scriptural. Saying a blessing before meals doesn’t violate Scripture – Yeshua {Jesus} did it – but not doing so afterward does.

Friend #1: Very interesting! I had no idea. I know you told me this once, but I didn’t know praying before was a Pharisaical tradition.

Torah only specifies that we should bless YHWH for the prosperous land after we have eaten and are full (Deuteronomy 8:10). However, Talmud explains that we are to bless Yahweh for everything prior to use – including foods immediately prior to consumption. Yeshua gave us His example of offering a blessing prior to eating (Matthew 14:19), thus verifying the halacha (He did not “bless the food;” rather He said a blessing over the food). It was not necessary for the Apostolic writers to say that He offered a blessing after eating, since that is a Torah commandment.

Friend #2: I know – and remembering is SO very difficult – definitely something to work on! Thanks for the reminder!

Friend #3: Do you have the references for praying after meals to share?

For ADONAI your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams, springs and water welling up from the depths in valleys and on hillsides.
8 It is a land of wheat and barley, grapevines, fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey;
9 a land where you will eat food in abundance and lack nothing in it; a land where the stones contain iron and the hills can be mined for copper.
10 So you will eat and be satisfied, and you will bless ADONAI your God for the good land he has given you.
11 “Be careful not to forget ADONAI your God by not obeying his mitzvot, rulings and regulations that I am giving you today.
12 Otherwise, after you have eaten and are satisfied, built fine houses and lived in them,
13 and increased your herds, flocks, silver, gold and everything else you own,
14 you will become proud-hearted. Forgetting ADONAI your God – who brought you out of the land of Egypt, where you lived as slaves… [read entire chapter!]
Deuteronomy 8:10

Friend #4: I had heard something about how the Jews pray after eating, but I had no idea that praying before was Pharisaical or that praying afterward was scriptural. I can understand how Duet 8:10 makes praying after Scriptural, but where is the scripture to tell us that praying before is Pharisaical or that Yeshua prayed after eating instead of before?  Didn’t He give thanks before with the 5 loaves of bread and two fish? PLEASE understand my heart here is to learn and I’m in NO way trying to be argumentative. I know that you can not see my sincerity through a computer, so know my heart is after God’s. THANK YOU.

Me: The Scripture doesn’t tell us saying a blessing before a meal was Pharisaical – that is just a fact in history. Yeshua gave a blessing before a meal as was the custom of the Pharisees/Jewish culture, and since he was the blameless Lamb he would have also said a blessing afterward as not to sin (ie break Torah/the Scriptures). ;)

Friend #4: I see… THANK YOU!! I realize I totally misunderstood what you first said. :D THANK you again for your kind reply.

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