Our Daily Thread 2-14-15

Good Morning!

And Happy Valentine’s Day!

I think Cheryl’s lovebirds are an appropriate header photo for today.

______________________________________________

Quote of the Day

1 Corinthians 13

¹If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, 5 does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, 6 does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never fails; but if there are gifts of prophecy, they will be done away; if there are tongues, they will cease; if there is knowledge, it will be done away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part; 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known. 13 But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love.

______________________________________________

For my sweetie. 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLFZSoeXbnI&feature=player_detailpage

______________________________________________

Anyone have a QoD?

68 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 2-14-15

  1. Good morning.
    I think I told you how I met Elvera and dated her the first time in October of 1955. We kissed the first time under the mistletoe. By Valentines Day 1956, we were a couple. Not serious, we didn’t think that far ahead. But we were a couple.
    So, I gave her a Valentine. It was a hand drawn paper card with something nice written on it. I forgot what.
    (I stopped this to go in and ask her if she remembered it. She said, “Yes, it’s probably around here somewhere. I wouldn’t have thrown it away.” Someday, Chuck, Linda and others will be cleaning out our stuff and never know the significance of that paper.”
    Anyhow, I folded the Valentine over and drew some hills at the bottom and labeled it “Hillmark Cards”.

    Liked by 6 people

  2. It’s appropriate to have love birds as the header. A better one, if someone could catch it, would be what I saw once in Annandale. You know that during the winter, a male cardinal will have nothing to do with the female. I saw, in my back yard, a male cardinal was bringing some food to the female.
    I said to myself, “It’s springtime!”

    Liked by 1 person

  3. Good morning! I met my husband at work. We both worked in the Fiscal Division of a Georgia State government department. We were not love birds to start with, and did not work in the same area. I was in General Accounting to start with and he was in Health Insurance Accounting. Our original positions did not interact. Later he moved to the new Deferred Compensation unit that was getting off the ground. Then we had a bit of overlapping work, but not much. Originally I was in a long term relationship with a college sweetheart who had moved to TX because of the oil boom. My husband was married to his first wife then, but things were not going well for them. My boyfriend and I broke up. He would have been fine with living together, but I would not leave everything in Georgia to move there unless we got married. End of that. Husband and first wife got divorced, but remained friends (they had no children). My husband’s mother said she never really considered them married because the wife laughed during the marriage vows, and she had been married previously.
    This was probably TMI (too much information as my son use to say). I was not a full blown Christian back then, but husband was willing to attend church with me. He was the only guy that I ever dated who would go to church with me. ♡

    Liked by 2 people

  4. I met my husband in my grade 12 chemistry class. He sat 1 row over and 2 seats back. I kept turning around to look at him, because I thought I knew him from somewhere. (I didn’t) Our first date was watching Gone With the Wind along with the rest of the school (boarding school). We’ve been together ever since. 🙂

    Liked by 4 people

  5. I met my husband at college when we were introduced by a man I dated a couple of times. Later this man was the best man in our wedding. My husband and I had a history class together. We were friends before we dated. I never considered dating him and was surprised to be asked. We dated a few times when we both decided not to date anymore, but had already committed to do something together. We both decided that a commitment was a commitment, so went through with that date. We were both praying about the relationship. After that ‘last’ date we became a couple. The proposal and wedding were not far away. The Lord definitely brought us together. There is no other explanation. The Lord has kept us together, too, through all the hard times. We are both grateful for that!

    Liked by 3 people

  6. Well, y’all know how I met my honey. 🙂 I had posted a photo of me and Misten on some dating website and some guy from my hometown, now thousands of miles away, showed up. He and I talked by phone for more than a year but he never had any interest in meeting me in person, and I had no interest in forever being some guy’s female-friend-with-no-romantic-asperations. So I went back on the site, and this time I spelled out more clearly that I wasn’t interested in a long-distance relationship; the guy had to be in easy driving distance from me and willing to drive to see me regularly. And since I didn’t want to live where snow was a regular feature of the landscape (I spelled this out), that basically meant he had to live in the Southeast.

    Some guy in Indiana, a widower with two children, read my profile and decided Nashville wasn’t too far to drive from Indiana, and just completely ignored the part of my unwillingness to live in snow country. But mine was the only profile on the site that interested him, and he signed up in order to contact me. Actually, it was a few weeks before he signed up, because he actually wanted to wait to get to know a woman . . . but in the meantime he noticed it had been five months since I had been on there (and he thought I might well have found someone else in those five months) and he contacted the website and asked how long they’ll leave a profile up for an inactive member, and they told him six months. Since he didn’t know exactly when the six-month point would come, he decided to go ahead and contact me. That was early March, and we married in the end of October, so my very first Valentine’s Day to have a man in my life (other than the just-friends variety), I was already married.

    So why did I myself ignore my stated desire never to live in snow country again? The photo of that handsome man and two sweet teenage girls, a widower with daughters, was exactly the family I wanted, and his profile bore that out. It seemed at least worth getting to know him. Plus, I realized that working from home with a husband there with me was not one little bit like driving to work in Chicago traffic in the snow, and that it would work out.

    This morning I had to drive one of our daughters to work in what was at times white-out conditions; I couldn’t even see the road I was driving on, and could see headlights of cars coming the other way only as they prepared to pass me. I would not want to do that every day; I wasn’t bred for this stuff. But marrying this man and claiming his family as my own was definitely the right thing to do. And Misten prefers being a family dog with a country backyard, too!

    Liked by 4 people

  7. In my post I did not mention that my first day on the job, April Fool’s Day, 1980, my boss wanted to take me to lunch, but he had another commitment. He went around the office to see who might go to lunch with the new employee. It turned out that Art and his assistant were available so that is the first time we met. There was no romantic attraction at all then. We did not marry until March 9, 1985, about 5 years later. So in a few weeks we will have our 30th anniversary.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. Thank you for the email card, Donna. I like the message you wrote. I think I can’t play the video because I don’t have Flash on this phone. Seems I tried to load it once and was told the Smartphone does not support Flash.

    Like

  9. And here’s what our port looks like these days as stalled longshore contract negotiations continue going nowhere, prompting employers to shut down terminal operations through the weekend as ships wait to be unloaded.

    Like

  10. I met Mrs L in a Spanish class at college. I was in a two-year electronics program and didn’t even need the class, but wanted to learn my heritage language. She entered the room wearing an orange t-shirt with the name of a church softball team on it. A few classes later, we ended up next to each other and the instructor told me I should get married, so I turned to the future Mrs L and asked her to marry me in a joking way. She turned me down. Several weeks later there was a walk to raise money to fight hunger. I saw her at the sign-up table and asked her to sponsor me. She grabbed a form and said “If you’ll sponsor me!” We walked the 20 miles together and talked (or I did most of it) the whole time. We were engaged a month later. When we asked her parents for their blessing her father said, “I can’t do anything about it.” That was his way of saying yes. I think he didn’t like me at the time, since I was a city slicker and she was a farm girl, but her mother did.

    Liked by 3 people

  11. Today’s gravatar is brought to you by the wind. This is what it looks like out there today (and it isn’t sharp and bright because the snow is getting tossed around in it too). Downy woodpecker.

    Like

  12. Donna, I played the card, but it didn’t have a message written at the end. (It said it was a preview version, and your message would go here.) Did you e-mail out a personalized version?

    Like

  13. We met in the usual way. He returned to town early from a ski trip because he had noticed me and wanted to get to know me. We clarified that I could never date a smoker. He quit. He claimed to be a Christian so the only remaining hurdle was political affiliation. I explained that I could only marry him if his politics lined up somewhat with my dad’s. He wrote what he was on a slip of paper, I told him he had to be a Republican, he showed me that he had written Republican. We got engaged on day five. He had already shown me that the other side of the paper said Democrat. We got married a few months later.

    Liked by 5 people

  14. There is the usual way for Mumsee, and there is the usual way for usual folks. 🙂

    I love hearing all the meeting up stories. It is interesting how God entwines lives or allows them to become entwined. I think I mentioned before that I had been a member of the group G.A.S.P. (Georgians Against Smoker’s Pollution) so you can imagine that would have been a major reason I would not have been interested in him for quite some time. Major hurdle there. So glad he has finally quit after fifty years!

    Liked by 3 people

  15. Re the header photo: Those doves were on our walkway. I’m pretty sure it’s the male on the right (because he’s bigger), and I watched and photographed them for several minutes as they fed together and then groomed each other. Sometimes as they groomed each other, both had their eyes closed, and it really gave every appearance of genuine affection and pleasure, not just some breeding ritual. I began to feel like I was “spying” on them!

    Among the photos I took of the doves is one where he has his beak right below her eye (her eye is closed), basically touching the bottom of the eyelid. To let a creature put its beak that close to your eye must take an amazing amount of trust. When I found that this photo showed a near-perfect heart made of their heads, I was thrilled.

    Liked by 2 people

  16. Well, hopefully tonight’s supper will be a hit with everyone. One daughter doesn’t particularly like beef, and it’s a beef roast. But . . . we have one last bottle of Heineken beer no one was drinking (it’s really too strong for all of us), so I decided to add most of it to the roast, and I slipped a little bit into the mashed potatoes as well. That seems like a nice “manly” meal (for my husband), and it uses an Irish beer (the daughter who spent a semester in Ireland likes that idea), and our not-yet-21-year-old daughter should simply like the idea it was cooked with beer! I also put onions in it, which everyone but me likes, and I left the carrots out on the table instead of putting them in the roast (since most of us prefer to eat them raw), and made the potatoes into mashed potatoes instead of putting them in the roast, which should please everyone. (I like potatoes in a roast, but I also like them mashed, and at least two of the others probably prefer them mashed.)

    Now hopefully it will taste good.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Our story of how we met:

    Approaching 30, having ended a relationship, & wanting a wife & family, Lee joined a dating service (what we had before online dating sites). He’d gone out with two or three ladies the service had matched him up with, but none of them seemed right.

    In February or early March of 1985, he was matched with a lady named Chris. She liked him, but wasn’t interested in pursuing a relationship with him (I forget why, but it wasn’t his fault). So Chris mentioned her friend Maggie (not connected with the dating service), who was desperately trying to find a husband. (Of course, she probably didn’t tell him that.)

    Lee & Maggie went out & she really liked him, but she had “fallen in love” with a guy she met just a night or two before, so didn’t want to pursue a relationship. But she knew a lady she thought he would like, & would like him. (That was me.)

    Having given Maggie my permission to give him my number, he called me on the evening of March 17. We talked for two hours. We met the next night for our first date (which was really a “blind date”). Then, we saw each other every night for the next couple weeks. (Unless I’m remembering wrong. But if not every night, close to it.)

    Lee proposed in late June, & we were married on March 15, 1986.

    We’ve gone through some really tough times in our marriage, but our commitment to Jesus first, & each other second, has seen us through those times, & brought us through them closer than before.

    Liked by 4 people

  18. Sorry, Guinness. Don’t cook and post. 🙂

    The beef turned out well. The mashed potatoes “worked,” and to me I’m always happy when a cooking experiment works . . . but they weren’t so exciting that I’d use beer in them again, and my husband prefers them with more sour cream. (I didn’t want to add too much sour cream when I was using beer; it seemed like that had potential to get weird really quickly, so I mostly used butter with a bit of beer, and salt and pepper, and then just a dash of sour cream to say I put some in. It was successful in pulling the flavors together, and a real chef could probably figure out how to do it again and do it really well, but for me I’m just pleased it worked.)

    I also cooked a (boxed) pie, but I had failed to read the full instructions, meaning how long it takes to cool, so it will be dessert for tomorrow and not today. But that’s OK, since we had torte left from our daughter’s birthday, and realistically while I would have preferred the berry pie, the rest of the family would probably prefer torte.

    Liked by 2 people

  19. Well, we’re “lucky” we had our snowstorm today. My husband and I (separately) drove in white-out conditions, and I was thinking, Wow, I haven’t done this since I was in Chicago, and I felt like I had lost my touch a little, though I soon enough had a sense of what to do. Once in Chicago I had a really scary drive home from work–missed my exit to the expressway and had to take the alternate, roughly parallel, expressway, and then heard the radio talking about all the spin-out accidents that were on the road I was on–a road that incidentally I had never driven before. So I got off at the first exit I knew to be a “good” route home, and it was icy and kind of spooky. I was driving in a neighborhood I didn’t know, no cars around anywhere but still it was scary because I couldn’t see a thing and I wasn’t familiar with any landmarks on that road and simply had to keep driving to my turn, and hope I’d see the street sign for my turn. Suddenly I drove past a stop sign I didn’t see till I was already going past it. I had no idea whether there were any cars in the intersection; I just prayed and kept going, and was glad to get to the other side. It took me three or four times my usual evening commute, and my bladder was about to burst when I finally got home. (In desperation I stopped at one gas station on the way home, and found out then what it had never occurred to me before to notice–that gas stations in Chicago don’t have rest rooms.)

    I told my husband tonight that I hadn’t driven in anything like that since Chicago, and he said it’s the first time he’s had to do so while living here, maybe the first time ever. That made me feel a little better, because it’s not an every-winter thing, and hey, this Phoenix-bred girl got one car home safely in spite of really tricky and somewhat scary driving. Then I watched the bad stuff out the window and prayed for my husband’s safety. (I didn’t know what time he’d be coming home, and thus didn’t know whether he was driving in it.) When I could barely see the tree that’s about two yards from our kitchen window and when I watched a red-bellied woodpecker get pulled off the tree by the wind and flung into the yard, I said out loud to God, “Please don’t let him be out in this!” Based on what time he got home, I don’t think he was driving just yet, but he did experience white-outs. I never was happier about hearing the garage door go up, though, and knowing he was home. Driving in wind is bad enough, but when you’re driving in strong wind that is blowing up enough snow to obscure everything beyond part of your hood, it’s frightening.

    Liked by 4 people

  20. If it’s ten degrees in Hendersonville, it must be cold where you are.
    It’s supposed to zoom up to thirty later today.
    We will be going to early service as usual.

    Like

  21. No services here either. They cancelled the whole shebang for today. It’s viciously cold out there, plus more snow.

    I met my wife Cheryl at a wedding. I was in the wedding, she was there as a guest. She came with a guy I’ve known since grade school. But he made one fatal error. He was more interested in talking Nascar than dancing with the gorgeous blonde in the black dress that he brought with him. So me being the nice guy that I am, I took care of the dancing with her part. 🙂 Best move I ever made. 🙂

    A week or so later I tracked her down, I’d lost her number, she told me she dumped him, and we met for coffee at a local diner. The rest is history.

    I still can’t figure out how I got so lucky. 🙂

    Liked by 8 people

  22. There is a lot to be said for a man that can dance.
    We all know how I met Mr. P. We went out on a Friday night and sat on a pier and talked until midnight. He walked me back to my truck and hugged me. I thought probably not. He called the next day and asked me to the beach. Not having anything to do I went. We sat on the beach and talked for about 7 hours. I thought uh oh I almost tossed this one back. He later told me he cancelled a date with another woman to go to the beach with me.

    Liked by 6 people

  23. For those who can’t see my FB page you can read this. The tall, dark haired young woman with the crown next to the king’s red train is my goddaughter. I did not attend the king’s dinner but will attend the queen’s luncheon on Monday. This has been so much fun to watch this year. Probably the only time I will ever do this, but it is nice to see.

    http://www.al.com/news/mobile/index.ssf/2015/02/mardi_gras_royals_crowned_at_c.html#incart_river

    Like

  24. Church cancelled here, too.
    Steve and I met in a bowling league. He still bowls (with son and DIL on Friday nights); I don’t. We got married in the living room of a house we bought together and hosted an open house afterwards. It was officiated by an ordained Episcopal priest who was working as a computer programmer with me. To this day, 35+ years later, my FIL still kids us that it wasn’t a “real” wedding. Son and DIL held their wedding reception in that same bowling alley 25 years later.
    QOD: is it cancelled or canceled? Is it programmer or programmer?

    Liked by 2 people

  25. Linda, my understanding is that the consonant is doubled when the accent is on the last syllable, but not doubled otherwise. So, those would be canceled, & programmer. (I think maybe your auto-correct was not letting you type “programer”. 🙂 )

    Like

  26. Karen, spell check allows both spellings of both words. I always put two m’s in programmer, and since I was one for 35 years, I think have the “right” :-). Most of the time I see it with just one, so it’s interesting that auto-correct adds the second.

    Like

  27. I have a confession. 😉

    I wrote a somewhat passive-aggressive post on Facebook this morning. On its surface, it may not seem passive-aggressive, but I know that I posted it because of my feelings about some of the things YF posts.

    Here’s what I posted:

    “Do you ever read some of these pithy posters that go around Facebook (the ones that are illogical &/or over-simplified, like comparing apples & oranges to make a point), shake your head, & wonder “How do they come up with these things?!” I often do. I think some of these things are made up by people who have such a strong bias against those with whom they disagree that they go for any jab at them, rational or not. Often, I think they didn’t even think through what they were writing.

    “And then when people who consider themselves to be intelligent & educated share these posters, I wonder if they checked their logic at the door upon entering Facebookland.

    “What is it that makes some people have to disparage those with whom they disagree, & denigrate their intelligence & character? For some people, it’s not good enough to say “This is what I think, & why.” They seem to feel compelled to paint their opponents as morally bankrupt &/or ignorant & uneducated. It’s kind of sad, & sometimes disturbing.”

    (For those not on Facebook, these posters look like cards with a brief saying along with a photo or drawing. Some are on point or inspiring or otherwise nice, but a lot are snarky & rude.)

    Liked by 1 person

  28. That was prompted by YF’s frequently posting those kinds of posters, many of which truly don’t make any sense or are ridiculously overly-simplistic, but are anti-Republican/conservative or anti-Libertarian (she only started posting anti-Libertarian stuff when I started being interested in Libertarianism) or anti-pro-life. Even Emily, who shares many of YF’s social & political views, agrees that the things YF shares often don’t make any sense or are overly-simplistic.

    And, I’ll admit part of it was also prompted by YF often making comments disparaging my intelligence or education. Quite frankly, the last comment she wrote to me was quite insulting, & I was still smarting from that when I wrote that post. But what I wrote is something I’ve been thinking of writing anyway, so it wasn’t completely prompted by her.

    Like

  29. Linda – Thinking about it again, I realize that programmer really has the accent on pro, not gram, so it should be just one m, but that looks really wrong.

    Like

  30. It is the difference between the British and American spelling of the words. programmer should have two m’s. Canceling, canceled, etc should have two if you were going with the rule, but they are one of the exceptions to the rule.

    Chas the one standing to the right of the king

    Like

  31. Kim!! I must have spent fifteen minutes looking for a tall woman standing to the right of the king. I saw a little girl sitting to the king’s right. The only young woman I see is the pretty dark haired girl to the king’s left. She shows up in lots of the pictures.

    Like

  32. She is the queen of Mardi Gras. My young woman is in one of the group photos of the court. She is standing with a knight. She is on the front row on the king right. She has had a great “season”.
    She will graduate this Spring from Tulane. I introduced her parents many moons ago.

    Like

  33. Has anyone ever dry poached chicken. I just did. You do it in the oven. Smells wonderful and tonight’s dinner will be poppy seed chicken over rice.
    Mr. P and I have been busy little bees today. The house is clean and you can walk into the garage.

    Liked by 1 person

  34. Well, I liked what you said, karen. 🙂

    I realize many young people can be completely knee-jerk in their thinking — but I’ve seen it among some older ones, too. I have a couple of FB friends (one is a retired city attorney, the other a retired school teacher) who are very liberal and oversimplify and vilify quite a bit. It truly does get old.

    All we can be are examples, I suppose, showing them that there’s a respectful way to disagree without tearing people down. But in reality I suspect they don’t really want any kind of debate or disagreement — I call those posts “drive by’s,” it’s like shooting out your car window and running away.

    They really don’t want to seriously engage, only yell a slogan, shake their fist, and for some reason that makes them feel better. 😉

    Liked by 1 person

  35. But why they aren’t more sensitive and realize that someone among their ‘friends’ is going to feel offended by the insults, I have no clue. There’s really no good excuse for that — I can see posting those things only to a special called-out “group” of your friends whom you know pretty much are on the same page politically. But just blasting it out like that to everyone really is rude and lacking in basic empathy. It’s like their intent is to insult.

    Wonderful sermon this morning on Rom. 9:14-18 and God’s sovereignty.

    From our notes:

    ” … (Paul teaches that) the sovereign choices of God extend beyond the covenant people — even to the very pagan leaders who would oppose them”

    “In a primary and ultimate sense it is God who makes kings and laws. Those kings and laws can be a blessing or they can be a curse but the Christian man finds his solace in knowing there is a Supreme Governor of events who declares the beginning from the end — whose counsel shall stand (Isa. 46:9b, 10)”

    “In a certain sense to curse the results of an election is to curse the providence of God. Is this an encouragement to call good evil or evil good? Far from it! Does it mean those who believe in a sovereign God should be passive in the affairs of this world? Certainly not! We should pursue our convictions — be they ecclesiastical, familial or political with zeal and vigor.

    “But what we learn from portions of Scripture like that (in Isa.) is that we can rest assured that the world is not left to slapdash, uncertain, promiscuities — as Einstein said, ‘God would not play dice with the universe.’ God has given us just what we need — or just what we deserve — depending on how you want to view it.”

    “The invisible hand of God governs all that comes to pass”

    Some of the other Scriptures: Prov. 16:4, Prov. 16:9, Prov. 19:21)

    Like

  36. Well, it was only about -22 C (-7.6 F) here, and the snow stopped early enough yesterday that the roads were cleared in good time, so we made it to church.

    All this talk of kings and queens… I thought you all eschewed royalty 😉 😀

    On the spelling, my mother, who was a school teacher, taught me that if the final vowel soundwas short, then the consonant should be doubled before adding the -ing; but if the vowel sound was long, then the consonant was not doubled, e.g. ‘shame’ becomes ‘shaming’, but ‘sham’ becomes ‘shamming’. So, using that rule neither ‘cancel’ nor ‘program’ have a long final vowel sound and therefore would become ‘canceling’ and ‘programing’.

    Like

  37. went out to lunch with the older sunday school class today. Love being with this group that considers me young as they are all twenty years older than I am. I feel that this is a wonderful group of prayer warriors.

    Liked by 6 people

  38. We’re going to try to get some bald-eagle photos this week. Wish me luck, since my camera isn’t working as well as it should. (It’s still under warranty and so I’m going to call the company . . . but I don’t want to send it off for repair right now and miss the chance I’ve been waiting for since I got the camera last March, having a camera with a long enough zoom to get the eagles. Last year the camera I had didn’t have the zoom I needed, so the eagles mostly showed up as a white dot on top of a brown dot. Even if I can’t get close enough to get great detail, I’d like the eagle shape to be clear. But I’d also like to get at least a few that are good-to-great eagle photos.) If I get anything, I’ll send it to AJ.

    Liked by 1 person

  39. We’re home after a very fun and very fast trip to LA. Saw and talked to a lot of people, including dropping in on Tess and Cowboy at 10 o’clock last night–Donna let us in!

    We saw all those ships and were really surprised. Amazing.

    Attended a glorious worship service last night–the point of the quick trip– saw the Getty Museum (WWI exhibit, can write off the trip!!), old friends, new friends, old relatives, new relatives (pig), and talked a lot. Tomorrow will be equally busy and I”m tired already–as usual, didn’t sleep much the last two nights.

    But who wants to sleep when they can visit? 🙂

    Liked by 6 people

Leave a reply to kare2012 Cancel reply