Ok, explain this....

Some, many, (I don't know what percentage) of Christians have an aversion to the Quran in varying degrees, maybe ranging from dis-interest to outright feeling that it's sacrilegious to touch it. Some, many (again, I don't know the percentage) believe that Allah is "some other god" but not certainly "my" (a Christian's) God. I can write this with certainty because I have been there myself, and have talked to people who believe the same.

So why then do Muslims have no fear of touching and reading the Bible? Muslims are taught to believe all the scriptures that came from God. They understand that the Gospel was given by God to the "People of the Book".

Amazingly, the Torah, the Bible and the Quran are similar. I guess the most glaring difference is that the Jews rejected Jesus and the Muslims love Jesus. Let that digest in your head for awhile.

I will get to the subject of the "People of the Book" later.

Jesus in Islam

Most Christians don't know that Islam considers Jesus to be the promised Messiah, a word from God, born of the Virgin Mary to bring a new covenant to the people of Israel. The Arabic word for Jesus is Isa. The Arabic word for God is Allah. It is important to note that Arabic Christians also use the word Allah. Jesus spoke Aramaic, and used the word Alaha when he spoke about God.

The word "God" translated into other languages (thanks to Google Translate) - this is interesting. 
Affrikans - God
Albanian - Zot
Arabic - Allah
Aramaic - Alaha
Bosnian - bog
Croatian - bog
Dutch - God
English - God
Esperanto - Dio
Filipino - Diyos
French - Dieu
German - Gott
Greek - Theos
Haitian Creole - Bondye
Hungarian - Isten
Indonesian - Allah
Irish - Dia
Italian - Dio
Javanese - Gusti Allah
Khmer - preahcheamcheasa
Latin - Deus
Lithuanian - Dievas
Macedonian - Bog
Maylay - Allah
Maltese - Alla
Norwegian - Gud
Polish - Bog
Romanian - dumnezeu
Russian - bog
Serbian - bog
Slovak - Boh
Spanish - Dios
Swahili - Mungu
Swedish - Gud
Turkish - Tanri
Ukrainian - Boh
Vietnam - Thien Chua
Welsh - duw

Reading...

....the Quran through Christian eyes, discussing it with a Muslim who knows the Bible. Wow! Interesting to compare the scriptures.

Pretty much by late August...

....I'm just waiting for fall. Summer seems tired, dusty, buggy, full of spiders and other bugs, heat and humidity, air pollution, pollen, mold spores, you name it. After the first hard frost the air clears, it begins to look clean again. Yeah, I know it means winter is coming. My favorite month? October, then spring. I can't pick a month for spring because here it might be May one year, April the next, or even June. But most certainly summer is July. August is spider month. September, too, it it stays warm enough.

What is spider month you ask? Webs....at night. I'm afraid to walk outside at night unless I'm armed with a flashlight and a broom. I will not, I repeat, NOT walk into an orb web. The panic and fear attack I would experience would probably put me in the hospital. Yeah....it's that bad for me. My daughter just laughs and touches them while I stand at a distance, trembling and pale. Now a spider...without the web...I can take a tissue and grab it (and flush it). And those little black fuzzy jumping spiders? I don't mind them. They aren't web builders.

The only thing my mom could figure out is that when I was a baby the silk ribbon on my baby blanket frayed into hundreds of gossamer threads, and my mom found me tangled in them, screaming. Early imprinting? Whatever. The fear won't go away.

Happy Anniversary

To me & my hubby!

In case you were curious...

....the Albanian alphabet and how to pronounce it. I love listening to my hubby speak. Being from Kosovo he speaks the Gheg dialect, which is different than Tosk, the official Albanian dialect. Our 2nd anniversary is coming up and still I only know maybe a dozen words. Hubby speaks many languages, but he has trouble understanding some Americans when they speak. We tend to speak "sloppy", like saying "budder" instead of "butter". Also there are accents and dialects. Once someone told me their address and it sounded like "say-er". I couldn't verify it online. Finally, after she texted me her address I saw that it was "Fair". I have heard everything here, from southern drawls to Boston to something weird where people say "hay-yand" instead of "hand" and "hay-yed" instead of head. Talk about butchery.

warm, worms.....warm worms...?

Ahhh...so I have an accent...who knew. Hubby said he forgot to drink his Red Bull, so he was going to leave it in the car. I told him he should drink it, because it will get warm. He thought I said "worm". We agreed we often get lost on each other's accents. Albanian is phonetic. Each letter is pronounced ONE way, mostly. If you know how to pronounce the letters you can pretty much say the words. Of course there are some letters that make sounds that don't exist in English, so Americans tend to fall flat when trying to pronounce them. And many American ways of pronouncing things are very difficult for Albanians, and our mixed up ways of pronouncing the same letters all sorts of ways are confusing. It certainly makes for colorful conversations :)