Whistling Badger Blog

I have been learning a lot of new skills lately:  Nixtamalizing corn from the garden, sewing, leatherworking, and this one:  Building arrows from scratch.  This is a store-bought sitka spruce shaft with store-bought feathers, but it has something I've never tried before:  A self-nock.  That means the little notch that goes on the string is carved into the wood itself, rather than a little piece of plastic glued on the end. I carved it out perpendicular to the grain with 4 mini-hacksaw blades taped together; finished with a 1/8" file and 140 grit sand paper.  Wrapped with silk thread coated in Duco. I am having a devil of a time getting the cuts dead center on the shaft.  I've been practicing on some old, broken POC shafts.  This is the first one I've tried that might actually shoot.  I plan on giving it a try tomorrow once the glue is all cured up.  I hope I've done it right.  I'm guessing an exploding arrow coming out of a 60...

I often hear people say that God answers prayers one of four ways:  Yes; No; Wait; and I've got something better. That sounds nice, and contains some truth, but scripture doesn't really articulate it that way. A while back, while struggling with the fact that so many sincere prayers seem to go unanswered, I did some very deep study on what the New Testament actually promises about prayer.  I did a lot of digging i nto the Greek, and found some very important nuances I had not noticed before. I did not find what I wanted to find, but I did come to a much more difficult yet more satisfying understanding that I believe might just be worth sharing. This is just a quick survey, not a full-blown study; I am just going to share some conclusions without really going into how I reached those conclusions, because I know how busy you are. To greatly oversimplify, the New Testament teaches that God answers prayer one of three ways: 1.  Yes.  I'll give this to yo...