How do you do it? How do you make it right when you have hurt some one? What happens when an apology isn’t enough, doesn’t even make a dent in the mess? How can you re-open some one’s heart to you when you have disappointed them, so let them down? Are some things just irreparable?
On the cause and cure of a wounded spirit C.H. Spurgeon preached, “Take sin away and give me a spirit washed in the fountain filled with blood, and I can patiently go through anything and everything, the Lord being my Helper.”
Tristan went to Austria to play drums for a missions worship team recently.
Austria has chocolate and really good pastry (and tafelspitz, and germkenodel). and is where Arnold Schwarzenegger came from. Julie Andrews made their hills famous as she twirled and sang. Lots o’ composers were from this little nation (Mozart, Beethoven, Strauss, Brahms and more). It is mainly Catholic, but mostly in a traditional, religious way. And it is a great mission field.
Tris and the worship team take on the castle.
Got to see pictures and hear his experience last night. The missionaries throw country music into the worship set list because people are drawn to that. A little Keith Urban here, a little Brad Paisley there. But they did not “get” Brad’s song, “I’m Gonna Miss Her,” about a guy whose wife gives him an ultimatum. They thought they were misunderstanding the translation and asked, “Why would a man choose fishing over his wife?” Perplexed, they were.
And it turns out they are NOT fans of “The Sound of Music.” Tris said they find it campy and believe it paints them in a bad light, to which my husband speculated sarcastically, “You mean because they sided with the Germans?!” Never-mind him, Tris. You went. You played. You ministered!
And everytime one of Tristan’s photos did show some beautiful hills, it was hard for me not to break into song. They did get that right!
I doubt this Austrian street drummer knew he was no match for our Tristan. Ahem.
When my kids go, I stay and pray. My honor to do so, to share my kiddos with the nations! And Tristan is wonderful. He brought us Mozart’s Balls (chocolate truffles, people) from the land of “singing hills” and coffee, too. Yum!
Stormie got baking chocolate. Mmmm…what loveliness awaits us this holiday season, I wonder? NOTE: Careers with McDonalds are available there, it seems.
Wanna hear some awesome Holy-Spirit-anointed drumming by Tristan Kelley?Right HERE! Click on “Freedom” (also down-loadable) for 34 minutes of his playing with scriptures on the topic read by Pastor Lewis Brown and Lewis Brown Junior (Proxy). Very cool!
In other family-missionary travels news…
Mary Jean just returned from 6 weeks Scotland, England, Estonia, and Norway~
That woman travels and teaches! AND she brought me ART! A signed and numbered piece called Heart Garden in a series of paintings about the heart (from Proverbs 4.23)…isn’t it beautiful? There is actually so much to look at in all the details!
Overall, pretty lame, as Keanu {so very cute, but seemingly pretty empty-ish and not much good at dramatic parts), plus the melodramatic storyline will most usually end up (did you recall hoiw much hope I had for “A Walk in the Clouds”? *sigh…). Anyhow, rather unsatisfactory and weird story, but a few interesting quotes I am fond of and the title is nice! ;p
Nelson: Why a month? Sara: Because it’s long enough to be meaningful, but short enough to stay out of trouble.
Nelson: Try to be wrong once in awhile. It’d do my ego good.
Sara: You’re my immortality, Nelson.
Sara: Nelson, do you want to be my November? Nelson: Yes.
Nelson: November is all I know, and all I ever want to know.
Nelson: This is it. Life will never be better or sweeter than this.
If only the movie had been as lovely as these lines…FYI: A really really great movie to see each November is “Pieces of April” starring Katie Holmes. It is a sweet Thanksgiving movie (thank-you Rob and Carol Ann for introducing me to it!).
PICTURED: The K-kids – Gavin, Guinivere and Gemma; and Hunter-Magoo!
Yes. I do. I h a t e it. This is my nearly-2000-word {highly-opinionated} essay (w/no pictures) on WHY~
I don’t hate little kids, all cute and dressed up coming to my door with an open bag. That actually requires a lot of trust in this day and age and I look at it as a chance to bless the little children, a chance to be a nice neighbor. Trick-or-treating does not bother me, really, because the kids (young kids only, please – you kids that are old enough to work – go buy your own dang candy) are just excited to get to wear a costume and eat more candy than they should. I hate, literally loath, despise and abominate Halloween, but maybe for reasons different than you’d imagine…
The Horror of Retail {mwa, mwa, mwa….}
For 5 years I ran a retail party store. Halloween was the BIG ONE. It drove our sales for the year and I had to be number one (I just HAD TO!…andwas!!, ok – strike that last prideful statement), so can you imagine my deep loathing for both milking-Halloween-for-all-it-was-worth for the money we could rake in and just hating the symbols that have come to represent it all? I set everything and worked my head off (can you say 90+ hours a week during the evil-season??) to sell to people who would purchase useless styro-headstones, “bloody” goblets and giant fuzzy spiders. Fog machines were the biggest rip-off and anything witchy-skeletony-or-ghoulish you could add double-D batteries to so it would light up or make some horrific noise were big sellers.
And then there were the costumes. We sold all those crappy costumes plus face paint and fake blood, stitches, etc.
And people would FILL those carts and spend hundreds of dollars. I both loved racking up the sales AND I disrespected seeing people waste that much money on something like Halloween, a “holiday” that really celebrates nothing that means eternal anything to me.
The worst part though? The company “encouraged” (read: forced) us to “dress up” – the whole month of October! It is fun for like, three days. The other 28, not so much. I have been a nun, a gypsy, a bunch of grapes. There were platinum blond wigs, Cleopatra headdresses and hot pink beehives. I was never “evil,” just dressed, all the while managing a hopping Halloween staff, chasing shoplifters, receiving Christmas and trying to make that transition as fast as humanly possible and just gritting my green-hick-farmer teeth to get through.
Suffice it to say I had more Halloween than I ever wanted and enough to last 37 people a lifetime. Yuck.
The Great Halloween Debate
And to top it off, I have spent almost a lifetime in the middle of the great Halloween debate: Is it OK for Christians to Participate?? OR Is it an evil-pagan holiday dedicated to devil-worship that we should avoid at all costs? I gotta tell you, I DO wish to avoid it all costs, but not for spiritual reasons, necessarily because the devil doesn’t own my days – not any of them. Dare I say I think it falls under the Romans 14 directive for disputable matters?…I do. Let the stoning begin…
Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so!
This year my home church decided not to have the Halloween alternative they usually have. And nobody knows quite what to do.
When I was growing up (in my very Christian, very strict Pentecostal preacher’s home), our parents let us trick-or-treat. In retrospect, that seems crazy. I couldn’t cut my hair, wear make-up or listen to the radio, at least “legally”, but I got to trick-or-treat. Strange. The church hadn’t been super-sensitized to the meanings and origins of the day back then. They still really thought it was just kids dressing up and getting lots of candy. And even after it became a “test of righteousness” in Christian circles, the churches my dad pastored still usually offered an alternative like a “Harvest Fest” with fall activities and the kiddos dressing up. I remember church bulletins reminding everyone that no “ghosts, ghouls or goblins” were allowed to attend, but costumes were welcomed.
Dave’s family was an absolutely-not Halloween family. I was from the use-the-opportunity-to-witness stream. My earliest memories are of my mom explaining to me that I had to do a “trick” to get a “treat,” and wow, was I ever willing! My trick was always to sing a song of some sort and since we didn’t do secular music, my song always had something to do with Jesus. The first year I could sing it all, I did – at every. single. house. “…for the Bible tells me so.” Deep breath, the person tries to give me candy, I whip my bag away from them , my mom reminds me, and whale on, “Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!…” They were prisoners to the end. But I would not take that candy until I had witnessed of the Lord’s love the full way through.
Pagan Roots
It seems H’ween has its roots in pagan Celtic festivals, the Druids dancing around bonfires and offering sacrifices to the spirit world for the harvest. So actually – having a church “Harvest Festival” is not an improvement on Halloween, necessarily. During the ancient pagan fetsival, Candy Corn would begin to fall from the sky, just kidding…just checking to see if you are still reading. ;p Haha.
In the 8th century, the Pope moved All Saint’s Day to November 1, so October 31st became “All Hallows Eve” and most people think he did it to claim the 31st back for Christians, which frankly, I applaud. What I bind on earth is bound both here and in heaven. We do have some authority in Jesus’ Name, people!
I digress.
So, then there is a biblical scripture-storm that erupts annually against having any part. One of the scriptures often cited is Ephesians 5.7-12 NLT:
7 Don’t participate in the things these people do. 8 For once you were full of darkness, but now you have light from the Lord. So live as people of light! 9 For this light within you produces only what is good and right and true.
10 Carefully determine what pleases the Lord. 11 Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, expose them. 12 It is shameful even to talk about the things that ungodly people do in secret.
Or, there is Deuteronomy 18.10-12 NLT
10 For example, never sacrifice your son or daughter as a burnt offering. And do not let your people practice fortune-telling, or use sorcery, or interpret omens, or engage in witchcraft, 11 or cast spells, or function as mediums or psychics, or call forth the spirits of the dead. 12 Anyone who does these things is detestable to the Lord. It is because the other nations have done these detestable things that the Lord your God will drive them out ahead of you.
And there are lots of other verses that are used to promote total abstinence from any type of Halloween participation. And they are important scriptures with definite guidelines for what we should and shouldn’t be participating in. But I honestly don’t see them saying “Little kids dressing up and trick-or-treating is anti-scriptural.” I just don’t. My grandbebes, who will dress as Nacho Libre or a Strawberry or as princesses or Batman this year? They will NOT be calling forth spirits of the dead or hosting seances. We will not sacrifice them as burnt offerings. They will NOT participate in drunken parties and godlessness of that sort and I will teach them to speak up for righteousness through their vote as citizens and to protect the helpless and feed the hungry. That is how they are being raised. They are being raised to be who God created them to be (light!) and to do what God has ordained for them to do and to fulfill their destiny for God in their generation. Period!
The devil doesn’t get my grandbebes. I truly and humbly do not see trick-or-treating as the step into a dark realm. If anything, I see it as “Hallowed,” like the old Pope wanted it to be because he went to enemy’s camp and took back what was stolen (know that song? Don’t make me sing it here!). My days are the LORD’S. All of them! And it is a great time to show our babies the difference between light and darkness by not worshipping death, not giving in to demonic influence and avoiding rebelliousness (which is as the sin of witchcraft and rarely gets corrected in Christendom).
Renunciation.
You know what, though? If you came from an occultic background where you used the 31st as part of demon worship and you have walked away from it being born into Christ and you have renounced that past – by all means, don’t participate. It holds something for you it doesn’t for me. Don’t be enslaved into any bondage you have been delivered from again! I would stand with you in that, and I mean that! Or if you just have a strong conviction that you don’t want your family to participate, because to you, it seems like being part of an agreement with the world, part of this godless generation and you’d rather make a stand here – then make that stand. I support you in that, but Romans 14, again…
Figure it out. Study it through. Pray. Ask the Lord. Listen. And be obedient there and let’s not let a disputable matter polarize us as Christians, or get us fighting one another in scriptural-sword fighting. Because? Then the stupid-head devil wins. Geesh, people – it is when he breaks our unity that we are trashed – not when some low-level demon flies around a room impressing the idiots who want that sort of thing. RESIST HIM, seriously. He HAS to flee!
I loathe, despise and abominate* Halloween because of how it separates us and causes holier-then-thou crap and we make each other the enemy instead of THE enemy. And I hate all the blackness and darkness because I am of the Light, but oh, by the way, I shine ever so much more brightly in the dark places. I say kick-him-in-the-butt and bless the little children when they come to your door: give the best candy, the biggest smile, the greatest encouragement and give ’em a God-bless-you, because that actually is within your power to do. Heaven will hear and attend to your blessing! May His will be done on earth as it is in heaven! On Halloween, even!
‘Nuff said.
*In the book version of Meet Me in St Louis, the sisters show their distaste for things by saying “I hate, loathe, despise and abominate {fill-in-the-blank}”. I think it is used a time or two in the Judy Garland movie, too. It is a fav family quote.
“Live as people of light!”
RT @ pastormark via ryan may: “If you’re one of those Christians who is going to give out tracts for Halloween, also give enough candy to make a kid a diabetic!” Haha!
My “leaf-is-falling-but-not-really” photoshoot in the backyard. ;p
It had actually already fallen. I was just replicating it a little {camera in my right hand, leaf stem in my left}.
I quit watering the veggies when I went to Montana over a month ago. I have been gathering regularly ever since, as the vegetable garden seeks to proliferate madly before the end. Then the rainy nights came and they thought they had been asked to stay a while longer. It pains me to tell them no, but I must. Until the spring, my sweet veggies – just until the spring…
“Well, it’s a marvelous night for a Moondance
With the stars up above in your eyes
A fantabulous night to make romance
‘Neath the cover of October skies
And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
And I’m trying to please to the calling
Of your heart-strings that play soft and low
And all the night’s magic seems to whisper and hush
And all the soft moonlight seems to shine in your blush.”
It isn’t the sentiment that it is ok to be mean to some one who needs a shoulder, who carries the pain of the past like a heavy, sorrowful blanket over their shoulders and they have sought professional help – because that isn’t nice. But I really like the technically-non-cussing rant by the drill seargent which I may be able to use sometime myself. Yes, I am certain there will be occasion.
Songs can make you feel energized and happy or melancholy and sad. They can remind you of your best times in life or where you were when you got your first heartbreak. There are songs for everything, for every mood and emotion, for every season and reason. And then there are songs that are just jam-packed with good advice for living. I jotted these titles in my notebook today while I waited parked in the driveway as Averi was snoozing in her car seat.
The Cat’s in the Cradle by Harry Chapin
You WILL reap what you sow, so – spend time with your kids. As they say, “They’ll be picking your nursing home for you someday.”
And the cat’s in the cradle and the silver spoon
Little boy blue and the man on the moon
When you comin’ home dad?
I don’t know when, but we’ll get together then son
You know we’ll have a good time then…
Maybe this song isn’t so much good advice as it is a great reminder about how not to waste your life.
Daughters by John Mayer
On behalf of every man looking out for every girl
You are the guide and the weight of her world
So fathers, be good to your daughters
Daughters will love like you do
Girls become lovers who turn into mothers
So mothers, be good to your daughters too
Totally true! A girl’s choices in love are so shaped by her dad. Even when she doesn’t realize how much, a dad’s approval and acceptance, his loving and wise words mean everything!
Teach Your Children Well by Crosby, Stills and Nash
Can you hear and do you care and
Cant you see we must be free to
Teach your children what you believe in.
Make a world that we can live in.
When you love a woman you tell her that she’s really wanted
When you love a woman you tell her that she’s the one
She needs somebody to tell her that it’s gonna last forever
So tell me have you ever really, really really ever loved a woman?
To really love a woman
Let her hold you –
‘Til you know how she needs to be touched
You’ve gotta breathe her – really taste her
Til you can feel her in your blood
And when you can see your unborn children in her eyes
You know you really love a woman
I love every lyric of this song (even though I couldn’t put them all here) and believe this song should be sung during Promise Keepers meetings. Seriously. They wouldn’t let me embed but there are a couple of great videos, the live version I have put the link to above, and the actual video in a Spanish Casino when the song was used for Johnny Depp’s movie, “Don Juan DiMarco.” Click here, but be warned, it is probably a PG-13 rating http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq2KgzKETBw
I Hope You Dance by Lee Ann Womak
And this one may be some of the best advice of all, especially for me, a girl who was forbidden the dance, but always knew deep down the Creator loved to see her twirl and dance with joy. I need this reminder constantly to break the unholy chains wrongly attributed to the Holy One. {NOTE: Please pardon LeAnn’s extraneous use of the newly acquired mammilla, which frankly, in my humble-o, seem a little out of place for the sentiment and style of this video. }
I hope you never fear those mountains in the distance
Never settle for the path of least resistance
Living might mean taking chances
But they’re worth taking
Lovin’ might be a mistake
But it’s worth making
I hope you still feel small
When you stand by the ocean
Whenever one door closes, I hope one more opens
Give the heavens above
More than just a passing glance
And when you get the choice to sit it out or dance
I hope you dance
What other songs have great advice for me to sing to myself? List, please.
And please, brother Joe – do NOT say “Put Another Log on the Fire.” Or else.
Rainy. Cool and rainy. Finally like fall. Gentle and sweet.
Burning my Yankee “Autumn Festival” Candle (a birthday gift).
Baking 10 loaves of zucchini bread with extra cinnamon and a little bit of butter-rum oil in that batter. Buttered and sweet cream to top it off – too much heaven!
R2-D2, the cake for Hunter Magoo’s 6th birthday party. Dark chocolate fudge with buttercream. I doubt I shall ever use a shaped Wilton pan again, but thus, it was baked, iced and eaten.
With ice cream!
Party for me.
Wrex singing a birthday song for me to the tune of the Partridge Family’s “C’mon Get Happy.” Lots o’ music and memories!
Broccoli Cheese soup (super cheesy and made from scratch! almost 5 pounds of broccoli, 4 pounds of cheese, chicken broth, cream, fresh onions and garlic, just the hint of nutmeg…soooooo good!)…tomato soup…bread…goldfish (cracker fish) to swim about in hot steamy bowls of kid-soup.
The grand-fish (real fish) have been visiting for a few days (and I forgot to feed them almost everyday they were here, mea culpa little goldfish). The house loud, music and song, food flying, the grandbebes swinging from the chandeliers…having fish on the mantle makes it feel like we are living in a Dr. Suess book! ;p
Time with people I adore: Dave and the Powers and Kelleys. Rocky & familia and the Phipps’. Tredessa and Stormie. The grandbebes and my mangy dog.
My blog is almost 4 years old. This is the 1000th post. But there are over 30 posts in my drafts folder waiting…just…waiting.
I started blogging 1409 days ago (11.29.06) a.k.a. three years, ten months and nine days ago.
Graphomaniacal. In a word. And if I could always sum things up in one word, there would not be this blog…with 1000 posts.
Oh, and as it happens, today is the one-year anniversary of the day I turned 50. Or as some negative-Nellies like to call it: turning 51. Sigh….
Aka – 18,628 days old.
Tre took the photo of me, Stormie added me to the Sesame Street gang. Some one else had posted the original pic and “1000” sentiment and I swiped it from Google-images. Makes me happy. ;p
“If you move around all your life, you can’t find where you came from on a map. All those places where you lived are just that: places. You don’t come from any of them; you come from a series of events. And those are mapped in memory. Contingent, precarious events, without the counterpane of place to muffle the knowledge of how unlikely we are. Almost not born at every turn. Without a place, events slow-tumbling through time become your roots. Stories shading into one another. You come from [stories…events…people].”
-Anne Marie McDonald in The Way the Crow Flies
In Des Moines
The basement apartment
The Washington Street house, earliest memories
Me at the Washington Street house…on the Anderson-Erikson Dairy milkbox
1310 York Street, 2 doors down from Grandma Baker
1723 York Street, the first one my parents ever bought (across the alley and one street over from Aunt Rosie)
In Davenport
3536 Jersey Ridge Road, the acreage with ponds and baseball games
5506 North Howell
In Cedar Rapids
the “parsonage” on some street I can’t recall
In Robert, La
“the parsonage” on highway 190 east of Hammond
with Ginger (and Miss Clara for a few weeks)
In Gary
4995 Roosevelt Place
In Minot
Dorm Room
Trailer in married student housing park
barn-shaped house
In Kokomo
1106 Armstrong Street
In Sioux City
Leeds neighborhood house for one week (house had major problems ;[ )
Jackson Street-the yellow house
across from school, our first house to ever buy, huge!
In Norfolk (don’t ask)
N 10th, loved this house
N 13th, historical Victorian, loved it, too
Park Place, just passing through
“orange” house, endured
“Bob” Nebraska, torture (not the house, the season)
In Denver
Acoma Street house (where we had “Graceland Home School”)
In Brighton
Pheasant Ridge, land of grandbebes
There was actually some zig and some zag between some of these. But these are all just houses. They aren’t where I am from, though I enjoy looking at them again via Google-maps. They are just places I lived. Home is where my heart is. And where my heart is held with great care
Where thou art ~ that ~ is home. Emily Dickenson
“It’s anywhere I’ll ever go and everywhere I’ve been
Nothing takes my breath away like my front porch looking in”
