50 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 1-7-16”

  2. For that reason Chas, I have come to despise buffet’s. It used to be that you could sample something you may not have tried without having to commit to a whole order or eating off of someone else’s plate. Now it is more like pigs to a trough. Because people act like it is the only meal they are going to get for a while the price has gone up (to the point I don’t like to pay $15 for one plate of picked over food) and the quality has gone down. It’s disgusting.

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  3. I received this in an email from the CEO of our company. He sends something out every morning. After reading this I had the thought of what separates people? Why is it that some people can pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and start over? Why is it that some people can do it many times then finally give up? Why is it that some never even try? What is the difference in personalities that makes one keep climbing and one sit down and cry?

    12 Characteristics of People Who Are the Best at What They Do
    Do you have what it takes to be the best?
    Chris Widener January 5, 2016
    What does it mean to be the best? What are the characteristics common to successful people, achievers, doers—the ones who find ways to become the very best at everything they do?

    Would you pass the “Best” test?

    Here are 12 questions to find out if you’ve got what it takes to rise to the top:

    1. Are you an optimist?

    You can’t get to the top if you don’t think there is a top, or if you think you can’t make it. Optimists always believe things can improve or be done better. This pushes them to be their best.

    2. Do you have a vision?

    Visionaries can see ahead of the pack. Their eyes aren’t locked on the here and now. They see the bright future and what things will look like when they reach their destiny. While working hard for today, they live for the future. They “begin with the end in mind.”

    3. Do you relentlessly pursue excellence?

    The status quo is not for the best. They want to experience the best and be the best. That means giving their best. They go the extra mile so that in everything they do, in everything they say and think, they are striving for excellence.

    4. Do you have a lifelong habit of personal growth?

    They don’t want to stay at the level they are at. They want to grow in their work, their intellect, their spirituality and their relationships— in every area of their life. And they discipline themselves to put themselves in situations where they grow. Personal growth doesn’t “just happen.” People must choose to grow.

    5. Do you welcome competition?

    Like the lead runners in the race with someone on their heels, the best know that the competition is right behind them. They love it because they know the competition keeps them from becoming lazy or complacent. The competition pushes them to go faster and achieve more—to remain the best by forging ahead.

    6. Do you strive to be a leader?

    Someone has to lead—it may as well be the best. People who become leaders get there because they want to. They want make a difference. And they want to be equipped with the skills necessary to lead others to a better place.

    7. Do you leave a legacy?

    Leaders aren’t in it just for themselves, though they will surely reap the rewards of being the best. They build things that last beyond themselves, things that can be enjoyed by others as well. They leave a mark for future leaders to see and use.

    8. Do you know how to prioritize and execute your goals?

    Just like weight loss boils down to eating right and exercising, personal management boils down to prioritizing and executing. First prioritize your activities—the important stuff goes on the top. Then execute—do them. The best have habits and discipline that get them to the top, by doing the best things and doing them first.

    9. Do you focus on building relationships?

    Success does not come alone. Everyone who achieves greatness does it with the help of countless others. How do the best get others to help them? They treat them with respect. They embrace them. People become the best because they help other people, and people like them.

    10. Do you make excuses?

    When they fail, they admit it and move on. They get back up and do it right next time. They let their actions speak louder than their words. They stand tall and do it better next time. No excuses, just results.

    11. Do you strive for “good” or “best?”

    Yes, they could say, “This is good.” But that would mean they have settled for less than the best. Many people think that good is good. Good is not good. Good is the enemy because it keeps us from the best. What will it be: good or best? The best choose the best.

    12. Do you dare to dream?

    While others live the mundane and settle into a life they never bargained for, a rut, the best dream of a better life. And then they take the necessary risks to achieve their dreams. They live by Teddy Roosevelt’s quote: “Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.”

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  4. Interesting list.
    I never had a vision. I never wanted to own the DMA, nor even be general. The only promotion I wanted was the next one. That’ why I went to Purdue and the Naval War College.
    NWC was a good experience, but didn’t pay off in a material way.
    It’s still good that I went.

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  5. Good morning from the office. We dropped son at the airport and he is on board now. Prayers for safe travels, please. We enjoyed a nice breakfast out. New computers have been installed here at the office. Something new to learn. But not new in respect tp Windows 10. Husband did not want to go there. My friend, Karen, whose sister worked a lot with computers, chose to take Windows 10 off her computer.

    What you are referring to, Kim, is resilience, the ability to spring back from setbacks. I think a lot depends on what a person learned in childhood, and also whether or not they have a good support system.

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  7. I also hate buffets. They just do nothing for my appetite.

    If I go out to eat, just bring me my specific little portion that I ordered with no one else dipping into it.

    I have to go in a bit early today to listen in on the port meeting (livestream) — but I’m tired since we were rudely awakened by a lightning strike and crashing right-over-our-heads thunder that shook everything — all followed by a Noah-like downpour of rain and hail, just before midnight sometime.

    I was left trying to peel Tess off my face for the next hour or so and I never did get back to sleep until nearly 2 a.m.

    Someone said a transformer nearby blew, there was a brief fire on a nearby hillside just a few blocks from me (extinguished by the rain, so that worked out well) — it knocked power out in some areas, but not mine.

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  11. Peter, Tess was protecting Donna. It worked–Donna is still among us.

    How to get photos like the ones above: (1) Buy your thistle seed at Wild Birds Unlimited, not at Wal-mart. Goldfinches like it fresh, so get the smaller bag unless you really go through it quickly. (2) Wait for the feeder to be nearly full, not one or two birds, but three or four. (3) Watch for other goldfinches to come to the tree. (4) Focus your camera on the feeder, with some room to spare at the sides for action. (5) When you see a goldfinch launch off the tree and you suspect it’s coming to the feeder, push the shutter. You may or may not get something good, but I got several photos with action following that course. About one out of three shots that I took that way were pretty good action shots. These are my favorites from them.

    Last summer our seed wasn’t as fresh as it is now. It would be interesting to see what shots I could get in summer, with the goldfinches in their bright beauty, if we had fresh seed.

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  12. I wonder if your revulsion of buffets has to do with being an only child? Some of grew up with siblings who got to pick over the food first!

    You’ve also now convinced me to steer clear of buffets, though I was never a big fan anyway! Lol

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  13. Fantastic photo, btw. QOD– has viewing Cheryl’s great photography hindered or improved your photo taking?

    Following Kim’s CEO’s line of thought, it’s inspired me–though not provided Cheryl-quality photos with my IPhone! Lol

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  14. I don’t understand the possibility of her photography being a hindrance to another person’s photography?
    Individuals all have their own style of photography, and their cameras are all so different that any kind of comparison would be like the old apples and oranges cliche. Since frequenting Instagram, I have found a few people who take photos in a similar style to my photos. I might learn from them as far as increasing the variety of my subjects.

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  16. There should be some nice lightning-over-the-ocean shots being shared today — we have some photographers who will go out whenever, even in the middle of the night or before dawn, to get just the right shot.

    Huge surf is on the El Nino menu for us today.

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  17. Deleted, I don’t think it is from being an only child. I was never catered to as to what I would and wouldn’t eat. I had to take a bite of everything and if I didn’t like it I didn’t have to eat it. To this day I can eat a casserole or salad and not ever get a bite of something I don’t like. For example I love Hot and Sour Soup but I don’t like tofu. My stepmother chops up the tomatoes in her salad. I can eat the salad but never get a bite of tomato. They are left on my plate. When my father was alive he would ‘clean my plate” now my husband does it—Waste not, want not and all that. 😉

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  18. Ah, Michelle. Thank you. I’ve had a lot of fun learning “tricks” like that one that allow me to get better photos than I did two or three years ago. Taking photos has helped me better see the world God has made. I’ve always appreciated the beauty and wonder in even small things–watching ants, for example. But the last couple of summers I’ve seen flowers so tiny I would never have even seen them before I had a camera that could do some level of macro photography. And I’ll zoom in on a flower and hidden within it is the tiniest insect or spider–sometimes I don’t even see it until the photo shows up huge on my computer screen. Or I’ll see patterns on the unopened bud of a flower. I have many chances to wonder at God’s creative extravagance.

    I never noticed before last year, for example, that female cardinals come in such a variation of color patterns that you can tell them apart. Last winter we had a very dark one, one with distinctive red eyebrows, one with quite a mask, etc. We also have at least one chickadee that has quite a few white feathers sprinkled among the black markings on his face, so he looks like a wise, grizzled old man. (We may have more than one, because the original one may have passed the gene to its offspring. But we at least have one. Those white feathers where colored feathers should be are referred to as “leucistic.” Most white birds in colored species, like white peacocks, are not albinos but have a lot of leucism, but a few leucistic feathers might be seen in any species, any part of the body.) And we have a flicker whose chest marking looks like a heart, and last summer I started seeing his daughter coming around, too–recognizable because she inherited Daddy’s heart.

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  19. Janice you may be on to something with your thoughts on resilience and childhood. I think the key is getting a taste of success. Once you have experienced it you want to do it again. People who continue to fail haven’t found success or have given up.

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  20. Kim, because the family dynamics are so important to the young ones learning to get along in the world, with good traits of both mother and father used as examples, I think if one part is missing from the early experience that it can potentially mar a person’s chances of being resilient. That is not to say it has to be permanent, but maybe new learning has to override the old learning to get to resilience.

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  22. Also, I’ve tried hard not to compare myself to other photographers, and it helps that I see the utter impossibility of doing what the professionals do.

    For example, I tried and tried the last two summers to get really good hummingbird photos . . . and then I saw that people were actually “setting up” their feeders with fake color-dappled backdrops, flowers stuck into nectar feeders to make it look like the bird was going to a live flower when it actually wasn’t, and two to four lights aimed on the hummingbird, and I understood that what the “experts” was capturing could literally not be seen in real life, and I stopped worrying about getting anywhere close to that level of brilliance in the bird’s feathers. And you know what, I have some fairly good hummingbird shots, and I never thought I’d be able to photograph that animal at all.

    And the bird photography experts all insist that one must have a super-long lens (costing $10,000 or so just for the lens) to photograph birds. That isn’t in our budget and never will be. So I’ve learned to say, “My photos don’t rival theirs, but my camera with its zoom lens cost less than $400, and look what I can get with it!”

    Finally, for Christmas I asked for, and received, a book on macro photography (that’s close-ups of tiny subjects, such as insects and individual flowers). Well, the “cheating” the authors do to get photos that are impossible in the wild is amazing to me. Some photo of a spider on a flower petal turns out to have been a spider they set on a flower on their kitchen table, with the overhead lights turned on just right and a special lens filter. And then some photo of a butterfly on a flower, they cut the flower while the butterfly was too cold to fly, moved the flower with its sleepy butterfly to better lighting and clamped it to a bush for the background they wanted, took ten photos, and merged the ten photos into one through special software. And I look at it and think, “OK, yes, that photo looks better than any photo I’ve ever taken. But my photo is real. I tiptoed up behind a butterfly, waited till it landed on the right flower, found the best camera angle, waited till its wings were open, and took a bunch of photos of it, and then I chose the photo I liked best. Later I might have cropped it, edited out a twig that’s in the wrong place, and brightened it slightly–but I took a photo of something that actually happened. They might as well be taking photos of lions in the zoo and pretending they’re wild lions that have never before been seen by human eyes because they’re so remote no safari goes that far!”

    That header photo, for example, would never make it as a professional photo. The background is our garage, not some nice fuzzy greenery that gives it an even-hued background. But every bird in that photo was there. I edited out two dark blotches that are bolts on our garage siding, I think I edited out a small twig somewhere, and I cropped the photo a little because I had too much open space on the right side of the frame. But that photo shows an actual life moment for goldfinches, not something I digitally created.

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  23. I enjoyed hearing about Cheryl’s trick to getting that shot. At the same time, given the limits of my phone camera, I knew I could not apply that trick to my equipment. I would just get a bunch of blurry birds that might be fun in an abstract sense, but not to be shared. But all information shared is valuable for possible future use, if one has brain enough to retain it. 🙂

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  25. Janice and Kim, I think it goes beyond resilience, success, skill, good examples, and personality (though it can include any and all of those). Scripture speaks much of gratitude, contentment, and joy, and it tells us of God’s grace and providence.

    I think, in other words, that a proper understanding of our place in the world, our relation to God and to other people, goes an awfully long way. I can, for example, have a realistic assessment that I’m a good editor, I’m not as good a cook as my sister or my younger daughter (though I can practice and improve), and that my interpersonal skills are strong in this area but weak in that one. And with that, I don’t need to fight and fume to be better than other people (or to appear better than other people), and failure doesn’t need to devastate me. God is still good, He is still sovereign, He has chosen me, He loves me, and He has gifted me and placed me in the world to use the particular circumstances and resources He has given me. I couldn’t do counted cross-stitch if my life depended on it. I can’t run a marathon. I will never be a math whiz (though I can do everyday math just fine), and I’ll never bear my own children. I’m not as tidy as I could be and as I should be, though that is something to continue to work on.

    But I can take the talents and spiritual gifts He has given me, the people He has surrounded me with, and my specific resources and circumstances, and use them for His glory and the good of my family and of others. And that is enough, and in that is contentment.

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  26. Cheryl, my great nephew is really into macro photography. He has gotten some amazing shots! He has one that shows an ant tripping over a piece of dirt. He’s 15.

    Donna, you really would be grossed out by our African version of a buffet. Many people eating out of the same bowl, with their hands. I won’t go into more detail. It gets worse.

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  29. Sigh, the problems of writing–can’t include the laughing wink when you’re teasing.

    A chastened Michelle . . . who just got back from a walk on a gorgeous day. I didn’t sleep again last night, sigh, so I slept through my early morning class when my body finally gave up. I took a walk just now.

    The rain overnight has washed the air sparkling clean and we live near hillsides covered in trees peeking in and out of low clouds. The sky is deep gorgeous blue and the sun is shining. A perfect lull between storms–and an answer to prayer if it stays clear while my commuters are on the road later today.

    How about another story idea, Donna? Travails of emergency responders when it’s raining in LA? I know an EMT you can interview who seldom minces words . . . LOL

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  31. As I started into a new book for review, Jesus Culture, by Banning Liebscher, in reading within the Forward written by Lou Engle, I found this stated:
    “Clearly the Lord is raising up a prayer standard to challenge the darkened, decadent soul of the age. A culture of prayer is what is needed, not a prayer meeting. The Muslims have a prayer culture, but the church has a prayer meeting. How will a nice little prayer meeting contend with the Muslim prayer culture?”

    I thought of Michelle ‘ s current Bible study when I read that and wondered how that statement/question would be addressed.

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  33. Janice–maybe it’s a terminology issue (since I’ve been stumbling today!), but I would say I personally live in a prayer culture, in part because I rarely attend prayer meetings these days, but also because I walk through my life praying all the time.

    As we live our daily lives, aren’t we all praying without ceasing? When I read a prayer request here, and I agree, am I not engaging in a prayer culture? When I read a vicious headline and whisper, “Dear, God,” am I not taking my reaction to his throne?

    I wouldn’t mind attending a prayer meeting again (I loved the four years I was in a weekly one), but I think more of the problem is the wafer-thin depth of understanding so many alleged Christians bring to their spiritual lives. If we don’t participate in spiritual discipline–praying, reading Scripture, applying it to our lives, etc, how can we expect to make a spiritual difference in the lost world?

    And if we don’t understand the measure of mercy and grace extended to us continually, how can we extend that to the lost?

    My two cents.

    Back to Biddy.

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  34. Interesting thoughts, Michelle. I wonder if the writer meant more of a corporate sense of a prayer culture. Individuals have their own sense of a personal commitment to pray without ceasing, but does God prefer for us to have both personal prayer times and group prayer times, maybe even daily? That would be more like the Muslim daily calls to prayer which seem legalistic, but they are group prayer times, making prayer a commitment above other things. In the model prayer, Jesus addressed Father God as Our Father, which would indicate a group prayer, but maybe that was related to the disciples asking Him to teach them to pray as a group of learners. I’ve heard it taught that it means we should be praying in groujps at least some of the time.

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  35. Janice, I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that Muslim group prayer time is nothing like prayer meeting. It would be more akin to praying the rosary, if anything, rote prayers of obligation instead of talking to the Father.

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  36. Part of that, for me, is an awareness of God’s working at all times. His help in holding my tongue and being gracious after my luggage was taken apart and rescreened and then I carefully put everything back in and 5 steps later another guard asked me to put my luggage on the counter for another screening. In and of myself, I was tired and did not have it in me to be gracious, but He did. He gave me the grace to hold my tongue and thank that fellow for keeping me safe. Looking for His presence in even the little details of our lives. He is working and I am grateful.

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  37. American Christianity would greatly improve if the prayer meeting were an actual prayer meeting. I have been in some where it was 45 minutes of sharing needs and 15 minutes of prayer. At a prayer meeting, there should be less talking to each other and more talking with God.

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  38. Yep, Peter. You may appreciate this quote from good ole Oswald Chambers that I’ll be sharing with my Bible study on the subject of intercessory prayer:

    “Intercession is putting yourself in God’s place; it is having His mind and His perspective.

    As an intercessor, be careful not to seek too much information from God regarding the situation you are praying about, because you may be overwhelmed.

    If you know too much, more than God has ordained for you to know, you can’t pray; the circumstances of the people become so overpowering that you are no longer able to get to the underlying truth.”

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  39. And along with what Janice is saying, I suspect some of the reluctance to join prayer meetings–or the need to explain everything before prayer–is people are uncertain about how to pray, what they will sound like, how they will be judged, whereas God doesn’t really care.

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  43. the gulls were very cool. 🙂

    18-foot waves there today, pretty spectacular.

    Long day that had me busy with a 4-hour port meeting and then a long story to write.

    The gardener was here today (I can tell by the full green trash can at the curb, they’re on their own schedule although I know which week they’re coming, just not what day). So the dogs had more excitement after the night of lightning & thunder. Supposed to rain again Saturday.

    El Nino typically results in storms lined up off the coast that come to shore one after the other, with some breaks in between.

    We could probably use a drying out period by now. 🙂

    See? We’re complaining about the rain already.

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  44. Oh, but lots and lots of snow in the mountains, and it was a stellar day for views. I shared someone else’s photo on FB shot from a hill in our town looking northeast toward downtown LA (21 miles away) with the snowy mountains behind the high rises. Gorgeous.

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  45. If you know too much, more than God has ordained for you to know, you can’t pray;

    I’ve heard of prayer meetings that sounded more like gossip sessions. “John is going through hard times at work,” is all we need to know. We don’t need to know who or what is the problem. God knows already. “Mary’s husband is having an affair.” If we hear more details it becomes a soap opera. God knows the details, he just wants us to pray for Mary and her husband. Share the basics and get to praying.

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