75 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 9-12-15”

  5. I need to go somewhere like that.
    Last night was fun. I knew more people than I thought I would. The years smooth out the edges. It was interesting to watch. The one who traveled the longest distance was from California. He only came in for 24 hours and will be leaving today. The next was from the Texas-Mexico border. I think because it was a party after the homecoming game it was better. No one was dressed to the nines and the party was BYOEverything.

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  6. This was posted on FB by one of the agents I work with. He is in a different office but I know him to be a good man and just for Linda, he once was a Baltimore Oriole

    WHY ALL THE UMBRELLAS? – Because it is going to rain!
    Home Depot sells umbrellas for $5. A real bargain. I bought a couple last spring. A few days later I passed a fella pushing a shopping cart down the service road as a wall of those big dark Mobile rain clouds approached. I stopped and handed him one of my umbrellas, said you might need this. He agreed, smiled and thanked me. Be a blessing.
    A few days later I see another fella walking through a neighborhood, tool bag in hand, dirty from the day. It had just started to rain and he was about to get soaked. I rolled down my window and handed him my other umbrella. He was all smiles. Told me very enthusiastically, “Boy you ain’t nothing but a blessing, just a blessing! God is so good to me!” A $5 umbrella hand delivered out of the blue by a white dude as it began to rain not only brightened this man’s day, it re-affirmed his faith in God’s timely provision. His witness, his enthusiasm, did the same for me. A blessing in return.
    The next morning I went back to Home Depot and bought 20 umbrellas. I put most in the shed and left a handful in my truck. Soon thereafter I am riding across town with my boys and Captain Questions asks me “why do you have so many umbrellas in your truck”. Fair question. I told them the story above, that it is a way I can directly help other people in a time of need, that there is joy in giving, that God love’s a cheerful giver. The lesson alone was worth the $100. Another blessing.
    Here’s the thing. The point of the story is not, “look at Shane look at Shane”. The point is, you don’t have to perform great dump truck size, biblical parting of the seas, I just destroyed the death star, acts of giving to make a difference in someone’s life. Small simple acts of kindness can make a big difference in another person’s day AND YOURS! There is a real joy that is found in giving and I believe with all my being that God multiplies our efforts for His glory. I mean seriously, why wouldn’t he?
    Don’t walk around looking for a blessing, step out and be one! On many occasions God has answered my distress call in a time of great need and it was always, ALWAYS I SAY, delivered not by a bolt of lightning or in a puff of smoke but by another human being. Make yourself available. Go be a blessing.
    Nose to Toes.
    Like it? share it.

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  7. We reluctantly saw War Room last night. Wrestling with my reaction. There are some good lessons but I squirmed through most of the movie.

    I think I work much better in the subtle and as a long time lay counselor–yikes! This did not reflect my experience with counseling people. But if it helps some. .. .. . I’m sorry Chris Fabry, who wrote the novelization, didn’t write the dialogue.

    We laughed in the credits. We’ve never seen credit given to the child care crew on a movie!

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  10. One day this past week, God put it on my heart to pray for a young lady I know (a single-but-engaged young mother), & to tell her that I was praying for her.

    So I wrote on her Facebook “wall” that God had put her on my heart & I was praying for her. A mutual friend commented that she, too, had felt impressed to pray for her. The young lady thanked us for the prayers.

    A day or two later, she posts on Facebook, “I’m so relieved! Thank you for all who have prayed for me.” 🙂

    I don’t know what the situation was, but I pray God will use this to draw her back to Himself.

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  11. Any news from Janice about her husband?

    I haven’t been to the other threads yet.

    Our heat wave is slowly, slowly, abating, backing down from the monster-high temperatures we’ve had all week (along with uncharacteristic humidity). Something awful just camped right on top of us and wouldn’t budge.

    I woke up to see (not clearly without my glasses, but still … ) about 7 monarch butterflies fluttering around my bougainvillea bush right outside my bedroom window. Annie, who was on the bed with me, was mesmerized.

    Off to get a haircut today, but other than that, my weekend is pretty free & unstructured.

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  15. It’s costly and environmentalists don’t like it.

    So pretty much dead in the water for now?

    http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/can-desalination-counter-the-drought

    ” … Environmental groups in California have filed fourteen legal challenges against the Carlsbad plant; all have been denied, but many Californians still wonder about the impact of the technology on both marine life and the atmosphere. It would be counterproductive, after all, to try to solve problems created by drought with a technology that would contribute to climate change—and, arguably, drive more drought. …”

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  16. Is the world getting better?

    http://gptsnews.gpts.edu/2015/09/is-world-getting-better.html

    J.D. King: “I wish that many of my fellow Christians would gain a better grasp of what is going on in the nations. We need to let go of our pessimistic ‘doom and gloom’ worldview and truly embrace the good news of the gospel. Jesus is on the move, and He is bringing His blessing and life to a world that has been ravaged by darkness.”

    King says that what is now transpiring in the nations really shouldn’t surprise any Bible-believing Christian. “It’s something that the Prophet Isaiah assured us centuries ago:

    “The government will be upon his shoulder, and his name is called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the growth of his government and peace there will be no end. He will rule over his kingdom, sitting on the throne of David, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:6b-7a).

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  18. I guess that September has always been an eventful month in my life. The first date stamped in my memory from this month is September 12, 1979

    http://wkrg.com/2015/06/03/hurricane-frederic-in-1979/

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Frederic

    In my memory we were without electricity or running water for over 2 weeks. For a child it was an adventure. As an adult I wouldn’t want to live through it again. I remember the sounds of the tornadoes. 11 trees fell in our yard. Some were twisted off 15 or 20 feet above the ground. One landed on both my mother’s car and my father’s truck, totalling them both. One went through the roof and a limb scraped the side of my dresser. In the middle of it, my father moved us all to the hall bathroom where there was a large mirror. He covered it with a quilt, so if it shattered the glass wouldn’t go everywhere. The widow down the street came to be with us. She kept saying how much she would give for a cup of coffee. My dad assured her if we survived the night he would make her a cup of coffee. We did and he did.

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  19. Husband is having an echo cardiogram right now, which is much like doing an ultrasound on a pregnant lady. This is a thirty minute test. Because it is the weekend, docs and other folks have not been on a regular weekday schedule.

    Husband has been watching the GA Tech game so he was in a good mood when I got back from my trip home. Miss Bosley had torn down a fabric panel on one of the window coverings in the kitchen. This is rough on her not having anyone home at night.

    We are at a satelite of Emory at the Catholic Hospital. The main campus at Emory was pretty full and doc gave us choice of this one or downtown location (where husband was born, Emory at Crawford Long). This hospital is great. I will try to send some photos of the religious decor I did not expect that in a hospital. They offer mass at 11:00 every day.My friend, Karen, said this was her favorite hospital. She had good results here. So I am hopeful, but we don’t know too much at this point.

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  22. I forgot to mention that we had three or four earthquakes yesterday and I have already felt one this morning. Nothing to worry about, except in my dreams. I dreamed my family was in the large one that is predicted to hit Portland and the Pacific Northwest. I don’t think that I got much sleep, because I had to figure out ways to help them.

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  23. To deleted: The brothers who made “War Room” are the same who made “Courageous” and several other Christian themed movies. They come from a Baptist church in North Carolina, and in the earlier movies, used church members as actors. I think they still use some of them. The boss in the movie (can’t remember his name) is one of the Kendrick bothers (the movie makers), and has been in all the movies.

    We saw the movie tonight. Parts were rather cheesy, as parts of all their movies are. Perhaps the jump rope competition could have been left out. And some of the dialog was stilted. Overall, though, I enjoyed the movie, though I don’t think I’ll see it again.

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  28. The other evening we got lost on our way home from the Christian Library International dinner. We ended up in the Auto Nation car lot, LOL! It is a maze if you ever accidently drive into their lot. You do not want to go there. 🙂

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  30. Speaking of Dr Pepper. Chrissy mentioned a soda called Mr. Pibbs, & said it was the Southern version of Dr Pepper.

    I replied, “I thought Dr Pepper was the Southern version of Dr Pepper.” 🙂

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  33. Emory tends to only carry Coca Cola and not Dr. Pepper because of Coca Cola funding. I brought Dr. Pepper in from the grocery store. I am not having a good diet here in the hospital.

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  34. It rained last night, & it’s supposed to rain a lot today, but it’s not raining right now, so I’m still wearing sandals to church to show off my pretty pink toenails. 🙂

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  37. Janice, I only recently caught up with all that is going on with your husband medically. You are lucky to live in Atlanta and have Emory available. Please know that prayers are being offered for the both of you.

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  38. I’m still wearing sandals to church because it’s still very much summer out here — and we’re meeting at the church near the beach.

    Janice, did you stay up all night at the hospital? I did that with Carol once, she went in for emergency surgery around midnight (I’d taken her in earlier in the evening for tests and next thing I knew the docs said she had to go into surgery immediately). It was a very long night, they had a waiting room and I had my Bible and some other books, and ran into an aide to the then city councilwoman (now our congresswoman) which was strange (she was a patient, car accident recovery I think, and rolled into the waiting room in her wheelchair when she couldn’t sleep).

    Anyway, very long night but Carol was pretty frantic and made me promise I’d stay there until she was out of surgery.

    Keep us posted on your husband, hoping you both are back home very soon.

    Heard through the grapevine that the evangelical Quaker church I used to go to (25 years ago now) has dwindled to about 50 people. They have a very large church, there were probably 300 of us when I was a member, so it’s hard to imagine only 50 people in that big sanctuary and campus. 😦 They don’t have a choir anymore, either, sadly (I was in the choir there for several years, which I loved.)

    It was a conservative church but the denomination was a mix of conservative and liberal churches so there were always struggles over things like SS materials. Meanwhile, the individual church I was in also was moving away from more traditional worship and in the direction of the Willow Creek model (popular at the time, in the late 1980s, early 1990s), with a very young pastor (who gave very short, “relevant” sermons not from the pulpit but walking around with a lapel mic) & worship songs and a let’s-reach-the-young-people goal. It definitely left me cold and unfulfilled spiritually — I was needing a lot more meat at that point. I left not long afterward (due in part to a move that put me geographically too far away from the church but also due to my wanting to find a Reformed church with more substantive sermons and teaching).

    It was a hard break identity-wise, I’d been with that denomination for a lot of years, but I was glad I made the move. After I discovered Ligonier Ministries, their amazing conferences (only went to a few throughout the 1990 decade, but they left such an impression) and Sproul’s teachings & books, I could never go back to the “light” preaching I’d gotten before. 🙂

    And I felt even then that going the (then) popular “hip” route in worship — looking so much like the world — was superficial and would be seen and experienced as exactly that by those seeking a deeper encounter with a holy God.

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  40. You know “traditional” worship worked for almost 2000 years. Why in the last 20 or so have we felt like we “contemporary”. Perhaps it is un-Christian of me but if you want a contemporary service YOU be the one to go at an odd time, leave the traditional 10 or 11 am service time for those of us who are more traditional.

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  41. Cardio nurse indicated Art might get to go home later today. We will see after he sees the doc.

    I slept some in the afternoon at home so I was able to stay awake for a long time last night. I did sleep, interupted a few times by hospital activities, from about 4:00 a.m. until 7:00. I will catch some more nap time when I go home. Thank you for prayers. His numbers are better. I just told him he will have to not get scratched (Bosley) while on blood thinner.

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  43. I haven’t kept up with Quaker polity, but when I left there were a couple of associations available to churches. Our church was in the middle one, the largest, probably similar to a mainline denomination (but not nearly as liberal as some of the more liberal Quaker umbrella associations). There also were some newer, more conservative/evangelical associations in the west that had cropped up so the church would be able to join one of those if there was enough support for that.

    I’m guessing the national mainline affiliation — Friends United Meeting — has likely become even more liberal in the years since I left, though they were trying to represent the “middle ground” between the far left Quaker meetings and the more evangelical churches. But trying to be all things to all people rarely works for very long.

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  44. Churches belong to yearly meetings (the Southwest Yearly Meeting, which we belonged to, was fairly conservative) but then there are the larger umbrella groups with which yearly meetings then affiliate and those range from left to right and in between when it comes to theology and social issues.

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  45. Today was the “installation” service for our new pastor. The minister who preached & did the “installing” preached a good, solid message. After the message, there was a little ceremony that seemed similar to wedding vows, but aimed at Pastor Billy becoming pastor. There was a similar “vow” for his wife Renee, as pastor’s wife. They were then anointed with oil.

    It was a lovely service.

    And it is great to see three or four families that have come back, who had left under our former pastor.

    Janice – I have not started wearing a headcovering. I am still a bit conflicted or confused about it. When I mentioned it to Lee, he seemed to think I was kind of being silly, or having one of my occasional strange ideas, but said he’d be okay with it if that’s what I wanted to do.

    So I asked God to please make it clear to me if this is what He really wants me to do or if it is one of my crazy ideas stuck in my head, & to maybe confirm it in Lee. I also asked Him to forgive me for dragging my feet if this is really from Him.

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  46. Today I am back to being fifty years older than my youngest. She is eight. That makes me fifty eight. Younger than some, right Peter L? and older than others, right Kevin B?

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  47. IT’S MUMSEE’S BIRTHDAY
    Happy Birthday Mumsee.
    Elvera and I had been married just three months and four days when Mumsee was born.
    We had just moved to Fort Worth.

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  48. Beginning to pack for what I hope will be the last time for a long while. I have decided I am old and worn out. Moving is for the young and excited.
    I have it in my mind to quit this job after we close on the house. Today Mr. P asked what I had been doing towards another job and said we couldn’t afford to take too much of a dip in income. As I said, I am tired. Tired of trying, tired of not being enough, tired of putting up with bad situations. Generally tired. I really want to crawl into a hole and stay there for a month or two and just rest. Tired and worn out.
    But tomorrow I will get up, paste a smile on my face and put one foot in front of the other.

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  50. I’m still waiting to leave for church … Going to really appreciate morning worship again when we finally get back to our old place (which should be the 27th, we’re told now).

    These “upside down” Sundays are hard.

    Meanwhile, I went to the store to try to find a 25watt bulb for a small table lamp I have and they didn’t have anything that low. Hate to have to go to a bigger store, but when I looked on Amazon all they had were packages of like 20 bulbs.

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  52. Donna! Why would you want a 25 watt bulb?
    You can’t use it for reading.
    If you want it to illuminate a dark room during the night you might try this.
    Elvera has a “church lamp”. What it is, is a glass church in which a Christmas tree bulb is placed.
    It provides plenty of light for a dark room.
    Try a Christmas tree light. It might work if all you want is to see to get around.

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  56. I almost said, “Did anybody make you a cake?” But then I remembered that my dad’s corny sense of humor would have had him answering a question like that, “No, I’m still human.” 🙂

    If you asked him what a book was about, he’d reply, “Oh, about 200 pages.”

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  61. HAPPY 🙂 BIRTHDAY
    ♡♡♡MUMSEE♡♡♡

    i i i i i i i i i i i i i i
    @@@@@@@@
    @Chocolate@@
    @@Mocha@@@
    WhippedCream
    @@CARAMEL@@
    FudgeCakeLayer
    WhippedCream
    ●ChocoCovered●
    ●TinyBlackAnts●
    ●●●●●●●●●●●●●
    Yummy●●Yummy

    In honor of Mumsee,
    Birthday Girl, who makes the best cakes, always with a surprise ingredient! Crunch, crunch…♡

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  63. Thank you for the lovely cake, Janice! I believe I will have some, but as I am stuffed with chocolate chip cookies and baked beans, I believe I will limit myself to the top layers.

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  64. Funny (to me) that Janice mentioned Auto Nation. I’d never heard of it before, but one of my current projects is for Hyundai and they constantly mention it as an example of an owner of multiple dealerships across (their) districts, so it jumped off the screen at me.

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  65. I think I bought my last Jetta through Auto Nation, they had some deal with our credit union at work.

    I have a cute little lamp that I like to keep on the entry table and I usually keep in on all night, kind of a night light, but it gives off a soft glow under a parchment shade (and the base is a black iron candlestick style, I’ve had it for years, from Shaker Workshop).

    So 25 w is the wattage the lamp is made for, not more.

    this is it:

    http://www.shakerworkshops.com/catalog/view/lamps-and-lighting/Hogscraper-Lamp/19B20

    I’ve loved that little lamp, it’s perfect for just providing a corner of light at night …

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  68. Donna- You can probably put an LED bulb in the lamp safely, as they are all less than 10 watts. The safe wattage is based on the heat put out by the bulb, not on the interior wiring or the socket. Most wiring and ceramic sockets can take hundreds of watts. It’s the material from which the lamp is made that determines the heat it can take, and LEDs are not very hot at all.

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  73. Husband decided to try Ambian so he could sleep better. Emphasis on HE. I do not sleep better because he has had trouble getting to the bathroom and he is so groggy I have been afraid he might fall. The nurse just put an alarm on his bed so we will know when he tries to get up. Ambian is good for sleep, but not for getting to the bathroom.

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