Ezra's concert! thank you for coming!

This is a morning that I feel missing you! It is Grandma Monica's birthday

My whole life, until marriage, I celebrated my birthday as being my grandma's birthday. I think she was born in 1912. She would have been 49 when I was born and she would be 104, this year. I cried for years, after she passed. She seemed the only one to have understood me, somehow. There were many reasons why.

When we moved down here to NC. I felt like she came to visit me with 10 or 12 other grandmothers. I felt like I found her and was looking for her, at the same time. I was very sick with a fever and I will always blame this on the envisioning of her. It wasn't a vision exactly, as much as it was a sense of her. I felt so very far from her, when she died and I never could reconcile that in my mind, in my questions to God, who I love above all others. She was as close to loving God as a person could have been in my heart, and I took that love for granted many days.

It is clear to me that there is a relationship formed with the spiritual life, when you seek God early in your life. There was a relationship between this party that I felt like Grandma had planned and the closing of my womanly way. I was ending an era in my life and I felt sick, perhaps related to it. It felt like the angels in heaven have some part in squeezing the last part of womanhood and tying it up in a bow. I do expect to see my motherhood bow in heaven when I get there. That is one of the early parts of your body that dies and goes to Heaven. We danced around my living room. We twirled and giggled and celebrated a victory for Jesus. Not perfect mothering, by any means, but a motherhood devoted to God and filled with prayerful dependence on His Grace. Many times the devil whispers that a good God can't understand my pains. Each labor pain, each morning sickness, each submission to His providence, for Christ's sake is seen by a faithful redeemer. Each stumbling and fall into anger and wrongdoing is also seen and recorded. God granted a great blessing on my mothering, even above the beauty and joy of the great children that I have on earth, this memory of the grandmothers coming for the celebration of the closing of my womb is a private encouragement that I pass on to you, as something to look forward to and be encouraged to reach for greater wonder in your relationship with God. If I am not in Heaven, when you go through "the change", I will plan a party to parallel my experience. If I am in Heaven, look out!

Arise my soul to meet the day...

I am praying for you and for me to rise to the challenge, today! Somedays this is easy. Somedays we are limping through, with little vigor and expectation. I pray that God will give great joy in His presence today. This is hard to find, if one is not in the presence of God on a regular basis.

We have seasons of life where this is the most important thing to us. Then, we have deceptions that whisper of its lack of importance. I needn't prioritize worship so highly, these deceptions whisper and if heeded, they yell. Help us Lord to shake off the guilty fears. Help us to see the importance of worship as our most important love interest.

If we put this in our pocket then when we pull out our priorities they will fall out in tact. If not it cuts the connector of our priorities and they fall out all over the place. Scattered priorities aren't pretty and sometimes we can't get them back together for a long while!

God grant us the presence of mind to know how important the worship of God is and give us the determination to keep it the highest of all in our hearts and mind. In Jesus' Name, Amen.

Home for Thanksgiving

More than half of your college life is over and coming home for Thanksgiving is a great part of what we look forward to. We took the drive on Tuesday and now we have eaten and laughed and giggled and fought and grown more fond and now we look forward to the drive back to school.

Smooches and hugs to know that we will see you in another 2 weeks for winter break.

Preparations for your effectiveness!

Education can be tedious and intricate sometimes. Our minds search the sky and the ground for the reason that this preparation is necessary. It is necessary. It is like trying to run or crawl through a dark tunnel. Although there may be some light in the tunnel, we long to reach the outside. Perhaps we run, when we should be stopping and looking at our surroundings. You are going to need these tools one day. Don't leave them in the tunnel. Take every tool. Find a place for them in your life. Put them in a strategic place and then run on.

Where did you get all those tools from, someone will ask you. I put them away for today. And you will be very glad that you did.

The effective woman doesn't minimize any of her experiences or acquaintances on the way to effectiveness. You are alive for "such a time as this"

I told you how hard it is to get a story from a crane...

So,

Only you can appreciate the difficulty of getting this story out of my recent best bird friend, the crane.{shhhhhhhh, don't tell the geese, you know how jealous they are}

I am not like you, with a wonderful pond that is just a stone's throw away from my door. I have to hoof it a ways to get to the crane sanctuary, if you can call it that.

When life gives you mandarin oranges...

Make jello!

I was so distracted by the huge can of mandarin oranges that has sat in our pantry for, at least a year. I love mandarin oranges and I could have eaten the entire can myself, but I didn't want to waste it. I have a great recipe for an ambrosia, but I couldn't afford to get all of the ingredients and I wasn't sure that anyone else would've wanted some of the ambrosia or if it could be frozen. This was a simple recipe of jello and craisins and the whole can fit into the 3 cup recipe. I am so pleased and I will let you know if it is a month or so before we are rid of this messy delish! Mommy