Hallelujah! We Are Not Alone

When Rusty and I married, I picked the Blue Lily pattern for my Corelle dishes.  In 1990, Country Blue was the popular color.  I wanted Corelle because that's what Mom always had. It was marketed as being chip & break resistant.  While they were durable and lasted longer than most, break resistant doesn't mean unbreakable.  Mom and Dad's first house had red brick pavers for the floors. They were beautiful when they were polished but those floors did a number on dropped dishes. Corelle may have been harder to break, but when it did, it shattered into what seemed like a million pieces. Have you ever felt shattered?  Maybe you're normally strong and resilient. It takes a lot to break you and in the rare times it happens, you pick up the pieces and bounce back quickly. Then one day, you're hit with something so hard that your normal ability to withstand the pressures of the world seem to have vanished.  You find yourself broken into a pile of pieces and all...

I always think it's strange that people will pay lots of money for jeans that are faded, have rips or holes, and look like they need to be thrown in the trash. Nowadays, it seems the more worn they appear, the more expensive they are. When something is popular or stylish, it doesn't seem to matter whether buying it makes sense or not.  As much as I know this is how it goes with clothing, I was surprised while looking at towels in the store recently. There on the shelf sat brand new bath towels that were frayed on the ends. While they may look trendy, I have plenty at home that look just like that from years of use.  My first thought was... Why would I pay money for something that looks like what I already have?  My second thought was...   When we become tattered and torn, does that make us more valuable?  In Matthew 5 , the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, we find the Beatitudes. Jesus gives a list of those who are blessed... The poor in spirit, the on...

I recently sent this picture to a friend. There was a total of nine blooms all held by one stalk. I thought it was pretty impressive. I take special joy when I have anything blooming at my house because I’m not good with flowers. So, I make sure to document them with pictures. What you can’t see is how I made sure to get a good angle and carefully crop the photo so the only thing visible were the flowers.  The tall unkept back yard and pile of junk ready to be burned, isn’t in view.  Maybe it’s just me, but I think most people do the same with lots of things in life. We only allow people to see what we want them to. If you judge others solely by what they share publicly, it would be easy to assume that everything is going well for most. That’s because they don’t share their everyday hardships. Not airing our problems is probably a good thing, as long as we don’t fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to others. It would be false to assume that everyone else has it all toget...

  Dad was always interested in the price of silver as he thought it may one day hold its value better than the US Dollar. One thing he bought each year though, regardless of the price, was a roll of uncirculated Silver Eagle coins. One Troy Ounce of .999 pure silver. He gave them as birthday gifts to immediate family members. Some of us older folks now have a decent sized stack. Although I love my coins and now plan to buy my own each year in remembrance of something Dad started years ago, I’m also reminded that no matter how many treasures we have on earth, it’s the ones in heaven that matter the most. Jesus speaks of this in  Matthew 6 as part of the Sermon on the Mount .  Then  in Acts 3 , Peter tells the lame beggar that what he has to offer him is far better than silver or gold.  These are just two biblical examples that speak of the overall insignificance of wealth and things we consider to be important.  Are you striving for things that can lose...

Dad was very patriotic. So much so, that Mom had a flag engraved on the back of his headstone. At the end of our lane here in Arkansas, he fashioned a flag hanger from black walnut that had been milled by my father-in-law.  A solar light keeps it illuminated at all times and I change it out regularly. One morning a while back, I discovered that someone had come in the middle of the night and stolen the flag, hanger and all. I've never understood why anyone would take something that didn’t belong to them. This took some effort to remove as it can't be reached from the ground. The monetary value wasn’t much, but Dad had taken special care in making the custom piece, so it was sentimental to me. Since we didn't have any black walnut, Rusty helped me make a new hanger from treated lumber that we stained dark to resemble the original. We then attached it in a manner that would be more difficult to remove, and I had a custom plaque made for the back side to hopefully discourage a...