Friday's Favorites...

Birthday dinners for family (auntie J celebrating a 40-something birthday)
Having great long-time friends over for a great visit and dinner--and kids who let us have meaningful conversation.
A visit with my hair chick...long overdue!
Camelot park! With friends! Kids who love to run and play...and get real sweaty...
A new baby safely delivered into the world...welcome Zachary Savage Wilson!
Baby Samuel Harrison Arnold...who is no longer a baby and today we celebrate your five years of life...sharing with us a different perspective on hope, living, and joy. May we continue to learn so much more from your presence in our lives than we could ever hope to teach you.
So many opportunities to meet and spend time with our new pastor and his family...worn out from all the activities, but an awesome glimpse of God's glory...and timing...and grace...and mercy...
Bible studies...and being real with some neat ladies!

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Lesson 599

Nothing really prepares you for this level of change. There are days it feels as if a part of my heart has been ripped from my chest. I am walking around wounded, unwhole, and incomplete. There are moments that my breath is taken and the sobbing begins before the second hand has time to move. In the post office mailing care packages, standing in the checkout line buying Halloween candy, when a song comes on Pandora that she would have belted out singing, when I spot the dusty piano, when I realize this is the first sports season, ever, that she wasn’t there to see her brother score a goal, when I walk by her bedroom and see all the bits and pieces of the life she left behind, as I plan our first ever big family trip without her, as I think about navigating the holidays and know they will be different from now on. There are days I just want to go back to the moment she was born and do every single second over again, but I’m quickly reminded that’s not the way this works. There ...

A Lesson in Lunch Meat

Today, I stood at the deli counter at our local Walmart. When the lady finally came over, I was sure I’d misheard the lady behind the counter. It was mid-afternoon and she told me she was closed, couldn’t cut me any meat because she was cleaning up before she left and they are short staffed. I was too tired to be at The Walmart. I felt like someone had just stole my balloon. I stood there in literal shock, I just wanted Nate’s 2 pounds of deli meat. My mind started spinning and I wasn’t thinking very clearly. I just needed for Nate to be able to make 59 Dagwood sandwiches next week. He doesn’t eat at school. He runs and has soccer practice. He needs to be able to think and do pages of Pre-calculus homework and study for Chemistry . I just wanted meat and to go home. Where is this all going to end? The whole world is short staffed. I thought of my coworkers and I, we worked short staffed and overbooked this week as did many. I was tired. It was a...

My Ebenezers

I love the hymn "Come thou Fount", it's one of my very favorites. Every time we sing this song as a church family or our own family worship, I am overcome with emotion as I ponder the words of the hymn. I often have to stop singing. However, I'm disappointed when some editors of hymnals have changed the words: "Here I raise my Ebenezer, hither by thy help I'm come and I hope by thy good pleasure safely to arrive at home". Ebenezer is a big word and can leave some puzzled in it's meaning, we don't often use it in conversation. It's worth recovering. The line from the third verse "Let that grace now, like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee" is often changed as well. Fetter is a “chain/shackle usually around the ankle to hold a prisoner”. To be shackled to Him by His grace, what a beautiful picture... Ebenezer is a Hebrew word for "stone of help". In 1 Samuel 7:12, after being saved from an attack by the LORD...

Potluck Ponderings

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