MY WISH FOR YOU IN 2009

Just wanted to share this cute e-mail I got this morning--even though the monkey's bat has the wrong year on it. Guess it must have been a recycled forward, but it made me smile. Hope it gives you a chuckle too.

My Wish for You in 2009

May peace break into your house and may thieves come to steal your debts. May the pockets of your jeans become a magnet for $100 bills. May love stick to your face like Vaseline and may laughter assault your lips! May your clothes smell of success like smoking tires and may happiness slap you across the face and may your tears be that of joy. May the problems you had forget your home address! In simple words . . .

May 2009 be the best year of your life!!!

RANDOM THOUGHTS ON NEW YEAR'S DAY

This morning I went blog hopping with no plans to post anything myself. Just thought I'd spend some quiet moments perusing what others had to say about the New Year. The more I read though, the more inspired I felt to put down some thoughts of my own.

I awaited the start of this new year with great anticipation, eager to start writing the story of my life on a brand new page of a brand new chapter. Kind of the same feeling I get when I buy a new notebook and open it up and see all those crisp blank pages just waiting for me to fill them up. I love the feel of new beginnings and fresh starts.

That said, I did not come into this year with a set list of resolutions. I do want to lose some weight, and be a little more disciplined and less prone to procrastination, but not in any rigid way that would invite failure. So Marie's post on A Year at Oak Cottage, spoke right to my heart, especially her comment about this not being a time for resolutions that only get broken one by one, but rather a time for aspirations and hope.

Yes, I am starting out with lots of hope and eager anticipation of what the Lord is about to do next in my life. But also with a measure of flexibility and open-mindedness, knowing that only He sees the entire picture and knows what is really in my best interests. This has been confirmed to me over and over as I look back on my life and see the places where His way was not my way but always turned out to be the best way.

Life being so full of the unexpected, I can truly appreciate Karen's preface to her 2009 To Do List on For Such a Time as Now: "Do not boast about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day may bring forth." (Proverbs 27:1). That is a wise exhortation, and I now add "Lord willing" to anything I take for granted, even if I don't always speak the words aloud.

Finally, I would like to direct you over to Shasta's blog, Eccentric Ramblingz, where she has posted a most beautiful prayer. Though I was not the one who wrote it, it is my New Year's wish for you all too.

LOVING THE UNLOVELY

"If you love those who love you, what
credit is that to you? Even 'sinners' love
those who love them. And if you do good
to those who are good to you, what credit
is that to you? Even 'sinners' do that."
(Luke 6:32-33)

These verses kept popping into my mind as I read some of the posts of a fellow blogger who I know loves the Lord with all her heart, and this morning I woke up feeling strongly convicted that I needed to send her an e-mail of exhortation. An e-mail written in love, acknowledging that the words I was writing were intended just as much--if not more so--for me than for her. But instead of sitting down at my computer and impulsively dashing it off, as would be my normal way, I decided to let the thought percolate on the back burner of my mind for a while.

As I went about some other tasks, I prayed for guidance as to what exactly I should say, when suddenly the thought came to me that since this is an issue that I myself grapple with BIG TIME, maybe it's something I should be blogging about rather than bringing to someone else's attention, no matter how lovingly. So here I am writing this post, and suddenly drawing a total blank as to what to say next.

I know that God loves each and every one of us unconditionally, and that He sent Jesus to die for all of us so that there would be hope even for the most seemingly hopeless. I know that no one is beyond redemption, and that there is no sin so great, no life so base, that it cannot be forgiven. So then who am I to pick and choose, to look down on, to criticize, to judge?

Every one of us is a Divine Original, created for a special purpose that no one else can fulfill. If we find ourselves living a blessed life rather than a wretched one, it may be good to remember that it is not the result of our efforts, though it may seem so in the eyes of the world. It is only by the grace of God.

Instead of being so quick to condemn, I need to give thanks as I remind myself that there but for the grace of God go I. I need to open myself up to be His instrument so that He can extend that same grace, through me, to the hurting and unlovable folks He has put in my path. That is so contrary to how my natural eyes see things, or what my intellect would tell me, but then that's what faith is all about. We need to have the faith of a little child to be able to enter the kingdom of Heaven (Matthew 18:3).

One of my favorite passages of Scripture is found in 1 Corinthians 1:27-29, about how God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and to bring to naught the things that are, so that no one can boast. There is a wonderful paraphrase of this in The Message translation that says it all.

"The Message that points to Christ on the Cross seems like sheer silliness to those hellbent on destruction. . . . This is the way God works, and most powerfully as it turns out. It is written, 'I'll turn conventional wisdom on its head.' . . . Since the world in all its fancy wisdom never had a clue when it came to knowing God, God in his wisdom took delight in using what the world considered dumb--preaching, of all things!--to bring those who trust him into the way of salvation.

. . . Human wisdom is so tinny, so impotent, next to the seeming absurdity of God. . . . Take a good look, friends, at who you were when you got called into this life. I don't see many of the 'brightest and the best' among you, not many influential, not many from high-society families. Isn't it obvious that God deliberately chose men and women that the culture overlooks and exploits and abuses, chose these 'nobodies' to expose the hollow pretensions of the 'somebodies'? That makes it quite clear that none of you can get by with blowing your own horn before God. Everything that we have--right thinking and right living, a clean slate, and a fresh start--comes from God by way of Jesus Christ. That's why we have the saying, 'If you're going to blow a horn, blow a trumpet for God.'" (1 Corinthians 1:18-21 - The Message)

What else can I say, but Amen!

WORDLESS THURSDAY

Just wanted to share what I got from my NJ grands. Are they precious or what?

IT MUST RUN IN THE FAMILY

A week ago I made a delicious pumpkin cake to take to a book club breakfast. Even more delicious was the Duncan Hines Creamy Home-Style Cream Cheese frosting that tasted just like fudge. Well the recipe makes two cakes, so I froze one to use for company tomorrow evening. I'm not sure what my reasoning was, but I decided not to frost it until I took it out of the freezer to thaw. What a mistake! Well, almost.

Every day I dipped into the leftover container of frosting in the refrigerator and helped myself to a large spoonful, until this morning it suddenly dawned on me there might not be enough left to cover the entire cake. So I immediately took it out of the freezer to thaw, and was ever so relieved to find there was still enough for a thin layer over the top. Phew!

Visions of Christmas past when I had wrapped up several candy bars to give a friend for Christmas, but she didn't come when she was supposed to. After a couple of days, unable to contain myself, I unwrapped the gift and ate one of the bars, then rewrapped it, which would not have been so bad except that I continued this pattern until there were none left.

That, in turn, led me to thinking of the story about a favorite uncle who when he was a young boy (almost a century ago), lived in a small village in Hungary. He loved to eat. One day he discovered a large piece of salted meat his mother had hanging in the cellar for a special occasion. Every day he went down to the cellar with his little knife and cut off a slice or two, thinking his mother would never be the wiser. When the day of the celebration arrived and his mother went down to the cellar to retrieve the meat, she was quite shocked to see nothing but a very small piece remaining.

It must run in the family. LOL

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

Here's something for you to enjoy.



Click on the picture and create your own snowflake(s).

THANKSGIVING '08

"And I will restore to you the years that
the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm,
and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm..."
(Joel 2:25)

This Thanksgiving marks a year since my move, and the above verse totally captures the essence of how it feels. Even though it has not been a year without challenges, the Lord has awesomely intervened to work them all out for my good and for His glory.

As I get ready to celebrate, I think of each child, grandchild, and great-grandchild, and feel so blessed to see how our family has grown and, most of all, blessed that the Lord has allowed me to be a part of it. There was a time when I never even dreamed of the possibility.

I think of the previous 12 years after I left New York and settled in Virginia, and the bittersweetness of it all. The feeling of isolation, the difficulty making friends, perceiving myself as being on the outside looking in at a church where the teaching was good but I never felt truly included.

It was a lonely time, a time of struggle, a humbling time, a time of feeling that the Lord had put me on the shelf, a time where I learned much about patience and trusting Him even when I could not understand the whys or wherefores, and then finally, a time of resignation and acceptance.

I think of how it was when I reached that point of acceptance that the wheels of change were set in motion, and suddenly, between the events that took place one evening and the decisions made the next morning, the Lord unexpectedly took me off the shelf and landed me in this small town that I have grown to love.

Here I became part of a new church family that has embraced me with open arms and enabled me to make use of the gifts God has given me. Since day one, I have felt loved and valued. I have wonderful neighbors too, and once again, the walls of my apartment ring with the echos of joy and laughter as friends and family come to call.

I don't know what the next year has in store, but I intend to gratefully seize the moment and savor every blessing the Lord has provided for me to enjoy right now.

EEK, THERE'S A MOUSE IN THE HOUSE...

...or there WAS a mouse, in the pantry.

I'm not quite sure why I didn't think to blog about this at the time. Probably I was too traumatized and tried to shove the experience into the deep recesses of my mind. But this morning it all came back to me in vivid detail as I read a post that made me laugh and laugh while I pictured myself reacting the same way.

My mouse experience started a couple of weeks ago when I was looking for something in my pantry and noticed a hole in a bag of Oodles of Noodles. I figured it must have torn as a result of being carelessly bagged at the grocery store, or as I tried to shove it into an overcrowded pantry shelf. Then, a couple of days later as I was putting some groceries away, I felt something lightly skim my forearm and roll under the stove. I assumed it was something that fell off the shelf, so I looked under the stove with a flashlight to retrieve it, but couldn't see a thing.

That evening my daughter and grandkids came for dinner, and I asked my granddaughter to look under the stove with the flashlight and see if she could find what had rolled under there. She couldn't see anything either, and must have thought I was having another one of those senior moments.

Anyway, the next day I decided I really had to do something about the pantry and started taking everything out of it so I could reorganize the shelves. In the process, I noticed a hole in a bag of egg noodles...and then some mouse turds...and then it struck me. There had been a mouse in my pantry. There were mouse turds everywhere--even on the wall behind the shelves. Yuck, gross!!!!!

I practically fell to my knees thanking God for His grace in keeping me from actually seeing the mouse or even imagining that that was what had so lightly brushed my arm as it jumped out and went scurrying to safety under the stove. Knowing that I had no hubby to call who could come to my rescue, and I would have most likely run screaming into the street, not even closing my apartment door beind me, or perhaps fainted or died on the spot--not a pretty sight for my daughter and grandkids to be greeted by--He came to my rescue Himself. Now how cool is that?

So try to make a long story a bit shorter, I had the handyman in my complex come up and move the stove, and sure enough, there was a mouse hole behind it which he plugged up. And God was gracious to me once again by keeping the mouse from returning before we did this, because the thought of setting out mouse traps freaked me out even more than the thought of seeing a live mouse. That just seemed too, too cruel. And if we would have used the Have A Heart kind that just traps them in a little cage so you can dump them elsewhere, my mice phobia is so extreme and irrational, I think it would have scared me just as much to see the poor little thing sitting behind bars as to see it running free.

BATTLE OF THE BULGE

"...keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget
the things which thine eyes have seen, and
lest they depart from thy heart..."
(Deuteronomy 4:9)

Now there's a verse I never thought would apply to me, and yet another reminder to never say never.

The battle of the bulge is something I have struggled with for most of my adult life, and I have tried many weight loss programs, including a Bible study I posted about a while back, which is not so much a weight loss program, as it is a study that delves into what God has to say about the topic. So I have had many opportunities to see what works and what doesn't.

Well, for quite a while I was able to maintain an ideal weight for me--until I started taking it for granted and slowly let the things I knew "depart from my heart." It started with, "Oh, an extra bite or two won't make a difference," to "It's okay to eat as much as I want on special occasions," and I think you can get the picture of what happened after that.

In a few short months I gained back everything I had lost, plus some, and was pretty much eating whatever and whenever, upset that I could no longer fit into most of my clothes, but not really doing anything about it except make excuses. "I'm always hungry." "When I'm eating something I enjoy, I can't tell when I'm full." "If I exercise I'll lose the weight."

This weekend we went to visit my new grandbaby in NJ on the occasion of his Christening. It was also the first time I got to see him in person. We had a wonderful time, and many pictures were taken, and it was when I looked at those pictures that I went into shock. I knew I had gained weight, but never realized what I really looked like. What a jarring eye opener.

The next morning I decided to start Weight Watchers again (I am a lifetime member). I picked that so I would be able to compare what an appropriate amount of food for someone my size is to what I've actually been packing away. Needless to say, it confirmed that by "forgetting the things my eyes had seen and letting them depart from my heart," I have allowed myself to become a full blown glutton.

So once again, I have humbled myself and gone back to my Lord to ask for His forgiveness and grace as I renew the commitment I once had. And God has such a sense of humor. This morning he spoke to and encouraged me through a cartoon I saw on my friend Rachel's blog. It was just what I needed to see.

CHRISTMAS IS A COMING

Just love this clip I saw on Kat's blog. What a great concept.