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If anyone is interested in reading a great essay about how common sayings, phrases, and even certain logos can be misunderstood, go check out Knowledge Is Power. France Is Bacon.
I normally avoid discussing sensitive topics like religion online, but I must bring it up today due to the sort of childhood I had.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I was a preacher’s kid and was homeschooled for the first several years of elementary school. The combination of these two things meant that I knew very little about secular pop culture until I was about eleven or twelve and my parents began gradually relaxing their rules about music, tv shows, and films.
(They were less strict about books for some reason, but even there I mostly read the classics, Bible stories, the Inspirational genre, and fairy tales until I was old enough to go to the library with less adult supervision and, ahem, bend the rules just a little bit by borrowing children’s ghost stories and Choose Your Own Adventure books. 😉 )
Therefore, I suspect that my first two answers might not be familiar to some of you. I mixed it up as much as possible and included secular music, too, to increase the odds of someone knowing at least one of my answers!
Apple Red Happiness
Apple Red Happiness is a kids’ worship song about the Fruits of the Spirit, which are a list of virtues from the New Testament. They include love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.
What confused me about this song were all of the food references that had nothing at all to do with the topic at hand. What on Earth did food have to do with being kind or peaceful? I couldn’t figure it out, so I was always left feeling puzzled and a little hungry during this song.
I’m in the Lord’s Army
I’m in the Lord’s Army is a kids’ worship song about committing to being in service of God that uses a lot of militaristic imagery to get its point across.
There were motions we were supposed to act out at specific portions of the song. For example, we’d pretend to pull the string back on a bow and shoot an arrow every time we heard the world artillery or pretend to hold a bridle and gallop like a horse every time we heard cavalry.
Given the large number of pacifist German Mennonite relatives I had, this song also utterly confused me. When I learned what metaphors were, I concluded that this was a metaphor….well, at least until I learned about the Crusades and other holy wars when I grew older. Then it was back to permanent confusion.
As protective as my parents were, though, some secular music did seep through.
Kissed By a Rose
I believe I heard Seal’s Kissed By a Rose on a radio that was playing in a store somewhere when I was a kid.
It sounded a little medieval to me and was nothing like I’d heard before. I loved it!. For several years I assumed that this song was hundreds of years old and had only recently been rediscovered and recorded for a new generation.
Stop! In the Name of Love
One of my elementary school classmates would randomly sing Stop! In the Name of Love by The Supremes when we were at recess. (Or maybe some other artist did a cover of that song that I wasn’t aware of?)
I had never heard of this group before and had zero cultural context to understand what I was supposed to stop doing, what love had to do with it, or what other rules love might compel someone to follow in order to avoid breaking anyone’s heart. None of it made sense, and for many years I assumed that kid simply enjoyed making up silly things to sing that weren’t supposed to make any sense.
It also didn’t help that he only sang those five words over and over again and only occasionally included the next five (“before you break my heart”). Maybe he didn’t know the rest of the lyrics and was secretly just as confused as I was?
This is going to be one of those weeks when I give more than ten answers. It will help to make up for the weeks when I fall far short of that goal.
I am an introvert because my emotional battery is charged up by being alone.
As I’ve 
If I could relive one memory, it would be hanging out with my best friend Jill Scheiman.
“…I hear the sounds of melting snow outside my window every night and with the first faint scent of spring, I remember life exists…”
“Every year, I’m shocked at the abundance of growth, life, and wholeness that seem to happen in a matter of weeks. Half the year we live in Eden, the other half on Mars.”
“Come with me into the woods where spring is
I usually weed through my TBR list a few times a year because even though I am a mood reader my tastes do tend to shift over time. Just because I read 3 or 5 or 10 books on topic X last year doesn’t mean I’ll continue with that pattern this year. Sometimes I will, of course, but in other cases my interest in that subject has been satiated and I want to read about other things now.
Last year I used one of the spring themes to talk about 
Every time we came over to visit, they were to pour a little water in one end of the pipe and make sure it flowed out the other end into a nearby creek.
Thank you to