37 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-25-17”

  2. I am tired, but am staying up to get my boarding pass for tomorrow night’s flight. What was I thinking to book a 10:30 flight? Then after I finally land I have to drive over an hour home. It will be very late night.

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  5. Good Morning….that is a very handsome rooster up there! Cockadoddledoo!!!! 🐓
    I cannot sleep….the house is quiet and all I can hear is the ringing in my ears…tinnitus can be very loud when you are surrounded by silence…
    Praying for your flight and then your drive home Jo….it would appear you have had a very nice time here in CO….wasn’t the weather beautiful today?

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  7. My tree is mostly up. The front door is decorated. The boxes in the breakfast room make it look like a bomb exploded in there. I cannot get the tree topped the way I want it so I gave up in frustration and will play with it today. The main problem is that I have no energy, which is why I went to the doctor earlier this month. Nothing is wrong with me according to all the blood work.
    Posting on the Prayer Thread

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  8. Peter, I chuckled at your mention yesterday of helping your in-laws with hay in their barn 20 years ago. I had a similar experience about 25 years ago, when we’d been married two years, still lived in LA, and were visiting my Michigan in-laws.

    Mrs. B’s stepfather invited me to help him unload his hay wagon in the barn. I think he wanted to find out what this city boy was made of. The first time we took a break and he asked me if I’d had enough, I was ready for more. But the second time he asked me that I cried Uncle. I was 36. He was twice that and strong as could be.

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  9. I posted this on the news thread, but not everyone here goes to that thread, and it relates to the book we discussed on here a few weeks ago:

    Sufism has sometimes been called Islam for the common man. In its devotion to Muslim saints and visiting their shrines, it greatly resembles the Catholicism of the common man. It is generally peaceful and accommodating of other beliefs, as Sufism regards jihad as an internal and personal, rather than an external, struggle. Nabeel Qureshi, the man who wrote Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, came from a family who belonged to a Sufist sect. In West Africa, as it is throughout many Muslim countries, Sufist orders (they are sometimes called Brotherhoods and should not to be confused with the political organization of the Muslim Brotherhood) are the dominant form of Islam, and there is a Sufist shrine in Senegal that to attend is regarded as the equivalent of going to Mecca. Sufism, with its devotion to saints, is regarded as idolatrous by puritanical Islamic extremists. As a result, Sufist leaders and devotees and Sufist leaders have often been targeted by extremist groups like the Taliban in places like Pakistan. It is therefore not surprising, but still horribly tragic, that the Sufi of Egypt should become a target of ISIS: https://world.wng.org/content/deadly_mosque_attack_rocks_egypt_s_sinai_peninsula

    The militants who attacked a Sufi mosque in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula killed 305 people, including 27 children. Another 128 suffered injuries. Egyptian officials raised the death toll Saturday as horrific details about the attack began to emerge. Survivors said between 25 and 30 militants descended on the mosque, arriving on all-terrain vehicles. They positioned themselves at the mosque’s 12 windows and doors and began firing on the worshippers just as the imam was about to begin delivering his message.

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  10. This scene is from an enormously popular Hindi (northern India) film, Bajrangi Bhaijaan, depicts the main characters visiting a Sufist shrine in the Kashmiri region of Pakistan. As you can see, the practices include things such as musical instruments, that would be considered worldly, and thus sinful by the Islamic puritans:

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  11. I need energy today, I’m determined to get the living room in order.

    I felt better after talking to a former co-worker who’s been doing major work on their house since before I started mine. She said everything simply becomes much more of a mess than you would ever expect it could; and takes longer to get back into order than you would ever expect it could. She’s still dealing with parts of the aftermath of her ordeal, 4 years later.

    I’ve completed an estimated 10-15 projects in the past year and a half, many (most) of them major. It’s uprooted virtually everything from every room, every closet, every cupboard, every bookcase — and the garage.

    It’s Humpty Dumpty. It was a great fall. Pieces scattered everywhere. Now I am trying to get it all put back together again, one piece at a time, where I can, when I can.

    The window crew is coming back one more time (hopefully within the month) to install the 2 replica wood windows they’re making and to do some work on the double-hung window in the spare bedroom & minor tune-ups on the 2 small hopper windows in the spare/partial bathroom & in my bedroom closet.

    And that will be the last of the major, indoor infrastructure work. I think. I hope. But we’ll see.

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  13. My mother told me last night that the Christmas tree was up and decorated with our special ornaments. It caused a bit of a pang, to not be able to see the tangible memories of all the Christmases of my childhood and youth. I will probably not be going home until the Saturday before Christmas and will be returning immediately after the New Year, possibly on New Year’s Day, due to the strike (that much I do know about making up clinical). I was surprised my parents were able to get the tree up already, as they are busily clearing out the upper floor and doing some painting and putting in flooring (some of the bedrooms have never had proper floor covering), in preparation for Second sibling and family to move in come January (Second wants to deliver her baby with the midwives she has where she is, so they are waiting until the baby – supposed to be a boy – is born before moving). Such a short time I’ll be able to spend with them all, including Eldest sibling and family, who will be there when I am.

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  15. I got some movies at a different library. They all have much more bad language than I would like and think necessary to cover the stories. It may just be that these are newer movies and each year we sink deeper into the gutter.

    The first movie, Trouble with the Curve, stars Clinton Eastwood with Justin Timberlake and Amy Adams. I really liked the story a lot and suggest it to those who like baseball. Just know that the language at times is distracting.

    The second movie, The Thick of It, is a BBC comedy that uses more bad language than I have ever heard in a production. It is actually three thirty minute spots I assume for television. It is the inspiration behind the Academy Award nominated film In the Loop, and the HBO series Veep. It has excellent character development, humor, and plotting, but do people really curse that much in thirty minutes? Watching this actually made me feel more toleration for what I sometimes hear in the work office.

    The third DVD was of the HBO series, Treme, about a section of New Orleans trying to recover after Katrina. It has lots of Jazz music for those who like that (Art really appreciated it). It has great character development, too. We saw two episodes of the third season.

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  16. DJ, one of my brothers considered becoming an interior decorator; he ended up going into art. He and his wife have been married 37 years, and in that time they have lived in two houses. Both have been constantly under construction, as he has added to them and remodeled existing rooms. The current one, their home for something more than 25 years, has probably not doubled in size, but they have added greatly to the square footage including increasing the garage space considerably and adding a wing to the house. The house is a showpiece and beautiful, and he has done much of the work himself. A year or two ago he completed the last room. His long-suffering wife has tolerated it, though I don’t think she has really liked living in a construction zone for decades, and to the best of my knowledge the entire house reflects his tastes and not hers. (I’m guessing she has had a choice to state a preference here and there, especially in the kitchen, which was one of the last rooms finished, but definitely it mostly reflects my brother’s taste in design and decoration.)

    Now in their 60s with a gorgeous house, they should be able to settle in and enjoy the “finished” house . . . except that now he is starting to build his “dream house,” so they spend their free hours clearing brush and otherwise preparing the large acreage on which it will sit. He plans to hire the building to be done (though how he will find construction workers up to his perfectionistic standards, I have no idea). My dad lived to be three years older than this brother is now, and his wife is a cancer survivor . . . so I can’t help but wonder which will be left widowed in a nice perfect house (but not the house in which they raised their children) on a huge piece of property that one person cannot care for (20-some landscaped acres), at the time in life that most of their peers are more sensibly downsizing.

    So . . . it could be worse.

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  17. Out here, we’ve been reflecting on all the people who spent so much blood, sweat, tears andmoney to build their dream homes– only to watch them burn to the ground within a few years.

    We must know a half-dozen people who have done that– and now get to build all over again. 😦

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  18. Cheryl, that sounds awful to me. I can’t imagine — and doing things you don’t have to do … fun to get rooms you love, i wish (and I’ll always have the cutest bathroom ever, born of necessity out of a leak which damaged the foundation, which … ), but …

    Although I’m still dreaming of at least a new kitchen floor someday, but it’s not on this current ‘must-do’ list; I’m focusing on infrastructure and making sure everything is as functional as I can get it to be.

    I do love being able to open and close all my windows with ease now.

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  19. We have known several couples who lived constantly improving their home. I am married to one. It is a good life. One couple had the woman fall through the rafters and break her femur as they were working on the ceiling. She was in her seventies. She healed and they continued working on their home until they decided to move to another and work on it.

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  21. Agreed, mumsee. That applies to all work, of course. Re home improvement, if you can do the work yourself, I say keep on going. I can see how it could become a mission of sorts, though you’d have to be OK with living in a bit of moving chaos most times. I wish I were handy. I’m not.

    (Years ago I tried to fix the wood frame on one of my windows that had been chewed on by a former dog — I bought some wood putty at Home Depot but it wound up looking a whole lot worse than if I’d let it be. The guy who initially set up my window work a year ago said to me, as he was leaving and glancing at the eyesore, “Oh, and don’t try to fix any of the rest of them. Just wait for us.” Don’t worry, I told him. I’ve hung up my tool belt for good.)

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  24. I agree, Mumsee, that it is good not to “stop.” But I think it is easier if the spouse is working on a project in another room and the house itself isn’t always in upheaval.

    My brother does excellent work, and it is fun every five years or so to visit and see which rooms have been added or remodeled since the last visit. But overall I prefer my “adequate” house.

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  25. Something I was remembering on Thanksgiving, as well as the days leading up to it, was that during Hubby’s hospitalization in September, when we thought we were merely waiting for the doctors to figure out how to deal with that bleeding in his bladder, but also knew by that time that he couldn’t go back to his job, I would think ahead to Thanksgiving in my prayers. I prayed (& imagined) that we would all gather around our Thanksgiving table, giving thanks for Hubby recuperating more quickly than expected, & that he would already have a good job ready to go to (maybe even a promotion to supervisor at Diana’s), & that maybe we would even be rejoicing over our daughters’ salvation.

    I realized that much of that may not have been granted specifically by Thanksgiving, but I had no idea that Hubby would not even be with us. That idea was not even “on my radar”, so to speak. I so very much missed him being with us.

    That prayer may not have been answered the way I would have liked, but God has answered part of what was underlying that prayer, which was a prayer for provision. And he has blessed me in other ways.

    Yesterday, Nightingale & I decided to take the leaf out of our dining room table, as it was really too big with it. Now the table has four chairs around it, one on each side. Four. Not five. Looking at that gave me a pang in my heart.

    Nightingale & I also jumped into starting to decorate for Christmas yesterday. The tree is up (which was easy, since it is only a four foot tall tree, & I had put it away still decorated last year 🙂 ), there’s a lovely wreath on the front door that she made, & a couple other little touches of mine in the dining room. (Many would probably consider our “dining room” to be a “breakfast nook” or some such thing, as it is really just a separate area off the kitchen, but not a fully separate room, although there is a partial separation due to the placement of the counters.)

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  26. Kizzie, losing a dad isn’t anywhere near the same as losing a husband, but I remember quite a few similar things. We went from five to four in our household, so we had an empty chair–and then the five-light chandelier above the table had a burned-out bulb. And he died a week or so before Father’s Day and three weeks before my 17th birthday. The Father’s Day displays in the store seemed intended to mock us that year. He also died just days before my little brother’s eighth-grade graduation, and my brother elected not to attend himself.

    The next morning, at least one grown brother and his family had made their way to our house (possibly one other brother had, too, but I really don’t remember–just that the brother who was four hours away and thus the closest had made it up–Dad died at something like 11:00 at night and we weren’t expecting him to die, but hoping he would recover, and Mom had even removed him from the hospital since she thought they weren’t helping him–a choice she never regretted; all four older brothers made it to our house eventually, but they had to get leave from school and jobs and make their way there). Someone started making breakfast, and I remember that briefly it seemed like an insult to Dad that we would eat a few hours after he died, and as soon as I thought it I caught myself–no, we needed to eat. But it seemed a travesty at the first thought. Life would never again be the same–and how could we do anything “normal” on such a day?

    Four years later we were all together at Thanksgiving, and I have photos of the seven of us and Mom, and also all of us including in-laws and grandkids. By that time there were three married brothers and seven grandchildren. That was the last “complete” family photo ever taken (29 years ago), because since that time the seven of us have been together in the same room only three times (once for Christmas, once for Mom’s funeral, and once for a family reunion)–and we’ve never had all the in-laws and/or all the now-grown grandchildren able to make it. But that “last complete family photo” didn’t have Dad in it . . . so it wasn’t really complete, even so.

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  27. It’s never the same with loved ones missing, and yet there’s a ‘new normal’ that we all somehow find.

    As a single, my holiday ‘traditional’ are constantly in flux, which can be hard. But I adapt, even if for only a few years until the *next* new normal comes around to be figured out. 🙂

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  29. Cheryl – I’m glad your mom never regretted her choice. It was hard to actually let myself say it at the time, but I do not regret giving the doctors permission to not do CPR again. Although I knew it was the right thing, there was a brief sense that I was letting him die or giving up on him. But the doctors assured me that it was the right decision, as he wasn’t going to make it anyway.

    I know exactly what you mean about how doing something “normal” can feel so wrong. As the days go on, that feeling doesn’t remain as strong, but there are many times when I wonder how we can be doing something so normal when life is not normal anymore. Of course, then I think of that term, “the new normal”, & I certainly get it.

    People often say that it is “the little things that matter” in life, & I find it is “the little things” that catch me. So many “little things” that we used to do together, or that remind me of him.

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  30. God is good. We adapt and we carry on. Amazing.

    So dog park Jerry is coming by Monday to check out the leak under the kitchen sink, I’ll leave the sliding glass door open so he can come whenever.

    Real Estate Guy says he’s hoping to connect with “stucco guys” doing a huge project a block away from me to see if they might want to do a side job at my place — putting stucco back on the portion of the house where foundation work was done. It makes sense, they’d already have all the supplies and equipment, it would just be a “side” job in the neighborhood for them. Jerry said he’d also check it out, maybe he can do it, but might be better to have actual “stucco guys” who have equipment, etc.

    The project a block away is interesting, it’s an old Craftsman house that someone has decided to make into a rental property — building a 2nd story onto it, but keeping the original house front and (hopefully) maintaining (sort of) the same style. Remains to be seen.

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  31. DJ, yeah, I had that holidays in flux thing. You’re an only child, or not in touch with siblings? You never mention any. Well, in Chicago I lived too far from family to see them easily for holidays, and flying into and out of O’Hare in winter is really dicey–there would be a delay at least one direction, and the heaviest winter coats might not be needed when I left but would badly be needed when I returned a month later.

    When a co-worker started having me over for Christmas each year, I was relieved–I didn’t even need to try to travel at Christmas anymore, but could just see family in the spring, which worked better except I didn’t like it when I was alone at Christmas. (My single friends all went out of town.) Then in Nashville, some years I went to my brother’s house for Thanksgiving and sometimes I went to a local friend’s house–but Misten was welcome, either way, which was nice. (After I married, she had to stay home on that day.) I then went to my sister’s house for Christmas most years, which is part of the reason I rarely put up a tree–I wouldn’t be home anyway. To me it’s a blessing when I don’t have to travel for a holiday, though driving two hours to my brother’s house and staying there for two or three days, and having a bedroom that was mine where Misten was allowed to sleep, was definitely doable and in fact a trip I looked forward to.

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  32. Nope, no siblings (as my mom later explained it to me, she had what was the “RH” factor which back then was a relatively new and apparently major concern), but I still have a couple (single) cousins close by and occasionally we’ll get together, though not always. No one in our family circle had big families and our parents had relocated from Iowa to California, further disconnecting from what other secondary family connections (beyond their generation at least).

    I do some annual, traditional outings with friends leading up to the holidays every year (a friend from childhood and I will be going to the craft fair out in Pomona on Friday, which we’ve done for years now), but the holidays themselves tend to be different year to year, which is OK.

    I’m guessing that family holiday traditions change over time for most everyone, in one way or another, but probably those with big, connected families who live relatively close by (thinking of Chas here) change the least through the years in terms of the actual gatherings on the “day of.”

    I think I slept for 9 hours last night, I must have been tired. 🙂 More house work today, but I’ve made really good progress. At least I no longer have chairs and small tables stacked on top of other furniture and under tarps left by the window crew, That alone makes things look a bit better.

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  33. After my mom died, I’d drive to Orange County to have holidays with my aunt and cousin and my aunt’s brother & others (I had only vaguely known some of them from earlier years, this was sort of the ‘other’ side of my family, not necessarily blood relations).

    But my aunt died in the first couple years after I moved into this house & everyone scattered, at least for Christmas — her brother and his partner continued to have the Thanksgiving dinners at their place, always very lavish affairs as they were excellent cooks and had a hillside home overlooking the ocean. But then the uncle died and …

    That’s why it’s so precious to maintain traditions when kids are growing up, I think, and I’m grateful always that I had that as part of my upbringing. But the ‘traditions’ just won’t always be there, or they won’t be the same, they will evolve by necessity. Life and families and friends are guaranteed to change the older we get.

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  34. We had a visiting preacher this morning, our pastor’s older brother, who is a pastor himself. (They were raised Catholic, but sometime in my pastor’s teens, after this older brother had joined the Marines, their family started getting saved, & changed churches.) His sermon was about our thinking, & how to have the peace of God. (He differentiated “peace with God from the peace of God. As soon as we are saved, we have peace with God, but we may not have the peace of God in our hearts.)

    The altar call was for those who need peace – for instance, those who are struggling with anxiety &/or depression. As he talked, inviting anyone who had raised their hands (& there were many) to come forward, I examined my own heart, & I realized that I do have the peace of God in my heart, even in the midst of the grief.

    I shared that with Cindy, the lady who drives me to church, & she said that it was evident in me, even at Hubby’s memorial service. She said she could see it in me, & see the lack of it in my daughters, which made her sad for them. (She is what some of us believers refer to as a “prayer warrior”, & I know she prays for them, & I pray for her grown children, too.)

    I don’t relate this to you to “brag”, but as a testimony of God working in me. This peace in me, & the strength in me that many claim to see, is the working of His precious & mighty Holy Spirit in me. I am beyond grateful, & I pray that my daughters can see these things in me, that they are from God.

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  35. Our sermon was on Rom. 1:21 — we were reminded that we are all at times guilty of forgetting how much (everything) we owe to God. We look at the darkness around us in our culture, at people who commit horrific crimes, and, like the Pharisee, often (in effect) say thank you God that I am not like them.

    When, in fact, our natural state apart from God’s grace and salvation would take us exactly to those places. We have a “partial gratitude” toward God which our pastor said is one of the most dangerous dispositions we can have. It happens whenever we feel frustrated by another’s grievous deeds or words or attitudes.

    He mentioned the old bumper stickers “God is my co-pilot,” saying it’s only by the grace of God that we’re even IN the plane.

    “There is no place in a Christian world view to hold others in contempt”

    And that needs to flavor out own disposition as we continue the battle, a deep and full thankfulness to God.

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  36. Our sermon was on the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. I’d always thought it a bit strange how the foolish ones were not only shut out but told “I don’t know you.” Seems kind of extreme, just for not having been prepared with enough oil. I understand the application of it in the spiritual life, but in terms of the parable itself, based on an everyday-life event people were familiar with, would they really have been treated that way?

    Then preparing for today’s Scriptures (I update the church website the previous week with links to the Scripture passages and some comments to get people thinking about them – and since I am the pastor’s wife, my husband sometimes asks for my input also when he is struggling with how to approach a passage), I read how it helps to understand their culture’s view of when events start.

    Like some cultures even today, they didn’t have set times for events to start, it would start when the important people were there. In the case of a wedding, that was the bridegroom. He might have been delayed but he was not “late” as we think of it, because to say someone was late was to say that the speaker’s time was more important than that of the person spoken of as late. For the foolish virgins not to have made provision for waiting however long was necessary suggested that they did not have the proper respect for the bridegroom and was in a way and insult to him. So it makes sense they would be shut out the way they were.

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