24 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 5-10-16”

  2. Good morning everyone. Re: Yesterday’s discussion:

    Mumsee: I posted this before. A long time ago. But it’s about my angel
    There’s another I may get to sometime.
    A strange thing happened to me years ago. I debated to myself whether I should tell it, because Random and others will say, “Just coincidence, doesn’t prove a thing.” And maybe it was a coincidence, but it was strange. The problem is, it’s a long story. Maybe too long for here. But here goes.
    I was a seminary student in Ft. Worth, ’59 or ’60. I went down with a buddy to work at a mission similar to the one in Same Kind of Different as Me. We talked at a man, and he trusted Christ for his salvation. He wanted us to go talk to his wife. We did, in our car. But he was afraid of leaving his car on the street in that section of Ft. Worth. Afraid someone would steal it. A reasonable fear. To keep someone from running of with his car, I removed the distributor rotor and put it in my pocket.
    I don’t recall the conversation, but I think his wife also trusted Christ. Then we returned to get his car. Now putting a rotor into a distributor is no big deal. Like putting a three-prong plug into a receptacle. You can’t do it wrong. So, I installed the rotor and closed the cap. The car wouldn’t start. I checked again. No way the car would start. I prayed; not because I feared for anything, but we had just witnessed to this guy, and apparently broke his car.
    Then, a guy came up. He said “What’s the matter?” I told him. He looked under the hood, did something and walked away. The car started immediately.
    I had things to do, and didn’t think about it again until maybe 20-25 years later when I was preparing a SS lesson. That was a weird thing to happen. Not that a guy helped, but the way it happened. He just appeared as I was running out of options. He didn’t dilly around but took the rotor and went under the hood. Less than a minute, he was gone.
    Now. Let’s consider how that usually happens. A guy walks up. “What’s wrong?” I tell him. He says, “Let’s see it.” He inserts it, and says, “Now try it”. The engine roars, and he starts to leave. I say, “Thanks a lot”, and reaching for my wallet, I say, “Let me give you something”. He says, “Naw, glad to help”. And he leaves, knowing he helped someone.
    Other than answered prayer, I began to wonder if God sent an angel to fix that problem. The adversary was obviously spiritual. I knew how to fix a distributor rotor. No big deal. Something/someone was working against me. This was unusual, not only because he came and went so suddenly, but the unnatural way it happened.

    Some would say it was a coincidence.
    Some would say I was lucky that a “guy” walked by at that time.
    It would make sense if I had seen him walk up and walk away. but I didn’t.
    There in no repartee between men as it always happens in cases like this.
    He came, he fixed it, he went.

    Make what you will of it.,

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  4. Sounds like a God assisted (Heaven’s armies) witnessing tool to show the couple who would be in charge of their lives. It was not you and your buddy who saved them, as some might be inclined to think who are new to faith, but the Almighty God. He gets all the glory!

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  7. It was an uneventful night at the hospital. Sunrise was beautiful. It may take me all day to work the kinks out after sleeping in the recliner chair. I believe Art may get to go home this morning

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  8. There is a lovely younger couple who have joined our Monday night Bible study. As you know we are studying the Great Divorce to give everyone’s brains time to recover from the Revelation study. As our night ended M, the priest, asked for prayer requests. They shared that they are going through a 10 week course through the State and through a ministry called Life Line to become foster parents. They have been through the infertility process (I don’t know to what extent) and had signed up with an Agency out of Birmingham called Life Line to start the adoption process. It is a Christian based agency, and in the process of doing that they decided to shift their focus and become foster parents. Life Line has partnered with the State to give extra support to foster parents. When they eventually receive a child, the child will be assigned a social worker through the State and they will have a Christian social worker through the agency. Isn’t this a wonderful idea?
    I got a chance to talk to the woman after our study ended last night. I am proud to say I had her laughing with some of the indignities I suffered while going through infertility treatments. What saddened me and I still find hard to believe is that in all of Baldwin County there are only 10 foster homes available right now!!!!! I have to find a way to verify that number because I find it hard to believe, but perhaps not.
    They, understandably are a little nervous and told about all the classes they are having to take. They are also undergoing counceling where they have to journal and examine their emotions and background because of the issues often found in foster children. I assured them they are much better prepared than I was. I mean, “THEY” let me take a perfectly innocent 2 day old baby home from the hospital with no training or preparation AT ALL!!!! I mean, she has made it to 18 with me as her mother, so if I can do that surely this couple with training will be OK with a foster child, don’t you think?

    Anyway, please pray for a nice, childless couple who are giving of their hearts. C and C will do for their names.

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  9. It’s often only when we look back on incidents that we see God’s “invisible hand” providing who and what we needed — all in perfect timing. 🙂

    Yes, it’s jacaranda time here in L.A., big bursts of flowering purple trees everywhere you go. They’re a mess when they start to shed — as someone said, just don’t park your car under one. But they’re glorious when they’re in full splendor. You can see several in a row on some streets and someone suggested the best view is from above, on a hilltop park we have overlooking the harbor and town. I haven’t checked that view out yet.

    This tree overlooks the Main Channel at the port — along with the Iowa in the background you can also see the blurred outlines of our green suspension bridge. In the background of the smaller photo, lower left-hand corner, you can see stacked cargo containers.

    There were a lot of jacarandas in Hollywood, too, when I was up there this weekend.

    I’m hitting the freeway(s) early today to take Annie Oakley to the vet. Poor kitty, hopefully this is nothing serious going on. I’ll have to leave her there and then go to work — then figure out a way to get her picked up before they close at 6, but that’s getting ahead of myself. It’s complicated as my vet is not close to either my home or work.

    So glad Art is going home today. Hospitals are no fun.

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  10. Kim, foster parenting has unique challenges, as Mumsee can well testify. And for a couple who has experienced infertility, it may have unique triggers, too. Just for starters, the kids will almost certainly have lice and they probably will have experienced molestation. You also have strict limitations on how you can discipline them, and they will be kids who aren’t used to obeying anyone. A four-year-old may already be used to scrounging his own food for himself and his little sister, and may have a difficult time relinquishing household authority to anyone else. Most wet the bed; some play with their stools. During training, in our class they told a story about foster children who managed to drop the family’s piano down the stairs and crashing into the room below, and told us that if we weren’t willing to deal with kids who would do things like that, we weren’t ready to be foster parents. Then there are the kids who set fires or kill animals. I got very close to getting a child who had killed small animals and broken a dog’s legs. Fortunately my agency found out in time to decline her (they didn’t handle children with that level of trauma, but they went through a specialized agency), but I could easily have had a child who would have been willing to injure Misten in such a way. That’s the summary version.

    And then I found out, in a special two-day training seminar attended by hundreds of foster parents, that the state deliberately accepted many more foster parents than it actually needed, with the idea being that some of us who said “grade school kids only” would give up and accept babies and especially teenagers. As a single woman who worked from her home and wasn’t wiling to put children in daycare, I didn’t have the resources to handle babies or toddlers or teens. But I found out that quite a few couples have been approved for two, three, even four years without ever having a single placement. I myself was an approved foster parent for a couple of years and had one temporary placement (four days) and then had the same pair of sisters twice, for a total of six weeks. If I had known the agency didn’t actually need me, I would never have kicked out a good, paying housemate and spent hundreds of dollars to get ready for kids (buying bunk beds, toys, etc.). I’m not sorry I took in those girls, not at all, but it cost me several thousand dollars for the hardest weeks of my life. Like going through infertility, it is a very hard, very expensive way to have a child. In addition, the cultural message (e.g., what you hear on the news) is that most foster parents are abusive, and many people believe that foster parents “do it for the money.”

    Some foster parents are abusive, and in states where the rules are different than in Tennessee, some do it for the money. In Tennessee, the only possible way to “make money” on foster parenting would be if you already had rooms in your house that you weren’t using, set up for children already, and a parent who wasn’t otherwise employed took care of the children, and you kept four kids in your home at all times (that was the maximum allowed, with exceptions made for a larger sibling group). A part-time minimum wage job pays far better than full-time care of two children, and that’s before you even figure in such things as buying furniture or kicking out a paying boarder in order to take in children–and by the time you have children for only six weeks out of two years, it isn’t worth continuing to take several hours of annual training, and that’s why I just allowed my active status to slip. I did it, and believe I did it well, and I’m glad I did. But it truly is not for everyone, and taking in teens or extra traumatized children, even more so.

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  11. On neighborliness in the South or New Times in the Old South.
    Night before last our next door neighbor’s dog barked all night. Lulabelle wanted out about 3 am and that woke both Mr. P and me. I heard the dog barking and thought, that’s not right! It is a tiny 3 or 4 pound Yorkie. Mr. P agreed with me and said he hoped nothing had happened to the older couple next door. I thought about calling the police, but he said if they have had a gas leak they will be just as dead at 6:30 as they are now (I know, not the most sensitive thing to say but it was 3:30 by that time). As you can imagine I worried about it until it was finally time to get up and face the day. Not wanting to be rude, I waited until 8 am, walked next door and rang the bell. The man answered, looking rather put out to have someone ring his doorbell at 8 in the morning. I explained that the dog had been barking all night and I was worried something had happened to them. He said the dog sleeps on the back porch.
    1. Who leaves a 4 pound Yorkie outside to sleep?
    2. I wasn’t complaining. I was genuinely worried.
    3. After 9 pm we don’t let our dogs out unless it is an emergency and then I usually go with Lulabelle to keep her from barking and disturbing anyone.

    Guess I won’t worry about them again.

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  12. I had a colleague years ago who got a dog that they left outside all night; he kept complaining that the dog barked all night long. Uh, yeah. I think they got rid of the dog

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  15. I’ve had crayfish as pets. I refuse to watch. (Not that I think it’s evil to eat them, but just I have no interest whatsoever, and I couldn’t eat lobster either.)

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  16. I got to see something interesting this morning. I saw a hawk circling erratically around our backyard. Well, usually when I see a hawk doing crazy loops, it is because it has gotten too close to a smaller bird’s nest or roost and the bird(s) is chasing them, so I looked, but in fact in this case it was the hawk chasing a smaller bird. I’d heard that Cooper’s and sharp-shinned (two nearly identical hawks, and I don’t know which it was) are excellent at maneuvering to catch a bird in the air, even if it means flying through trees, but previously I had only seen them with a bird they’d already caught, or had seen them dive into a bush to grab a bird that was sitting.

    I don’t know what species it was after, likely a sparrow. But it was a bird much smaller than the hawk, and as rule, the smaller the bird, the better it can maneuver. My money would be on a chickadee or a hummingbird or a goldfinch every time, though I think house sparrows may be fairly slow flyers and not all that agile compared to the tiny birds. But still, a house sparrow is much, much smaller than either of these hawks and would be assumed to win in a game of keep-away. But the hawk had prey when it landed on the fence, so it won. It was truly amazing to watch. They had zigagged several times, the smaller bird never losing the hawk, and finally the hawk won (though it was at the back of our yard and I didn’t see the strike, I just saw the hawk land on our fence and sit on it plucking a bird.) As long as it was a lowly house sparrow or other common bird, I’d definitely root for the hawk. Any woodpecker larger than a downy, I’d root for the prey, and with a goldfinch I would be torn (they aren’t nesting yet, and we have a lot of them, but they’re so lovely). Bluebird, I’d root for the bluebird! I don’t want a hawk catching either party of our nesting pair. But it was probably a house sparrow, and the hawks are welcome to all they can catch, especially if in the process they’re willing to show off their aerial prowess.

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  18. Turned out Annie had a pretty high fever — indicating some kind of infection of “unknown origin,” as the vet put it after examining her. Still awaiting a urine sample result but they have her a shot of antibiotics and we’re back home. She actually wanted to eat — vet said the fever would have killed her appetite and caused the lethargy I was noticing as well.

    Hopefully just a virus or respiratory thing, he said, that the antibiotic will knock out.

    They also gave me their other brand (Hills) of prescription food for her to try to see if that is any more appealing to her. But for now, the vet said, feed her anything, important that she eats. (She did lose about a pound, which actually was good — she should weigh about 9 lbs and she was up to 11 lbs at her checkup a few weeks ago; now she’s at about 10 lbs.)

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  19. We are home. I went to the pharmacy to pick up meds. I am amazed at how tired I am. I did not have much coffee this a.m., just tried a little off of Art’s breakfast tray. I am going to take a nap now and see if that might me feel like a living person again.

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  21. Well, we went this afternoon to David’s Bridal (Michelle and Kim, check your e-mail), and I will say that I think it’s super annoying that their website and their store have virtually no overlap. 😦 Not only did they not have the one dress I’d picked out as particularly wanting to try on, but looking at their website again after I got home, I see several others I liked on their site but didn’t see in the store. And of the four I tried on and either I or my daughter particularly liked, only one (this one: http://www.davidsbridal.com/Product_cap-sleeve-sequin-lace-dress-with-cowl-back-644794_dresses-mother-of-the-bride-dresses ) can be found on their site.

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  22. I like that dress, Cheryl. And that you are giving us (me) the links – it helps in my search for a dress for my son’s wedding.

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  23. Kare, that doesn’t end up being the one we chose, but it’s somewhat similar (the same color and a lace top, but a somewhat different design on the dress’s shape on the top).

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  24. I’m glad you found a dress. I’m still not sure what I’m going to do – I don’t think a “normal” size will fit me as I’m so tall – unless there is not a waistline – then I might be able to.

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