42 thoughts on “Our Daily Thread 11-28-17”

  1. Good morning. That photo was taken beside a local library which was built about three blocks from the home in which I grew up.While there I feel a bit of regret that it was not there when I could have walked to it and felt it was my get away place. But then I suppose I would have had fewer outdoor adventures like playing in creeks and going through trash piles that were considered the greatest of joys. We discovered a place where people dumped things along an industrial road nearby. We did not go over there often, but it was great fun when we did.

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  2. The foliage was still pretty as we drove down to Greenwood.
    I was in the back seat of Chuck’s car.
    That was the first time ever that I could look out while going down I-85 and I-26.
    (In my first attempt, I said “driving down I-26…”)

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  3. Clinical went fairly well yesterday, considering how long we’ve been away. The good news is that we won’t be attending clinical up until Christmas. The bad news is, we will have to make up our lost clinical hours in the summer. For me, that means having to pay for not only tuition but also rent in the summer in the city where my asthma flared up so badly last summer, and it also means that the remote northern practice placement I was hoping to complete in the summer would not be possible, and also that I will not be able to be finished by next December as I had hoped. I’m going to talk to the academic advisor and anyone else that might be able to help to see if there is another way for me to make up those hours, but it is a slight chance that could happen and as things stand, the strike has cost not only myself, but many others, very valuable opportunities.

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  5. Roscuro, I am sorry to hear how things got so tangled up and seem to have dashed your plans. Sometimes God causes divine delays. Since you love Him and are called by Him for His good purposes, I know you can trust He can turn what seems bad into good for you. I hope you can rest your anxieties in His goodness knowing that our struggles and disappointments help us to rely even more on Him.

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  8. This seemed timely: https://www.challies.com/articles/but-others-have-it-worse/

    This is our temptation in suffering, to compare it to what others have endured and to downplay our suffering in relation to theirs. “I can’t possibly complain when he has endured that much while I’ve only endured this much.” “Yes, it has been difficult, but then I think of what that other person has endured, and then who am I to complain…”

    This isn’t entirely wrong, is it? Stubbing my toe doesn’t earn me the right to commiserate with someone who has lost a leg. Losing my dog doesn’t equate to losing a child. But that’s not the same as saying those things don’t matter or that they aren’t genuinely painful. That’s not the same as saying those things don’t comprise true suffering. And that’s certainly not the same as saying those things don’t matter to God.

    It is in times of pain and turmoil, whether light, moderate, or severe, that it becomes especially important to remember that we relate to God as children to their father. A loving father does not demand agonizing misery before he will express heartfelt sympathy, but sympathizes with every pain and wipes away every tear. A loving parent does not demand a child’s pain grow more severe than that of his siblings before he takes him in his arms, but immediately sweeps him onto his knee with words of comfort and hands of mercy. Why would we think any less of God?

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  9. Kim, DJ mentioned “Guy” last night, referring to someone involved in work on her house. That got me thinking about The Guy We Used to Call Guy, and I wondered how the aftermath of your job change went.

    If I remember right, you set a date before which you were available to answer questions, but after which you were no longer available to him. Did he respect that deadline? Are you in touch with him at all since then?

    Also I remember in the early days of your new job there was big concern about when and how much you would ever get paid. I haven’t seen that concern in awhile, but I missed any resolution of the issue. Is everything okay now?

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  11. Guy and I are fine. Recently there was a fire where he has a second home. I sent him a text asking about his house. He called me because he wasn’t aware of there being a fire. He said his house was fine and thanked me for the concern. He isn’t all together a bad person. He and I just don’t mix well.
    I am being paid. I have a contract, but the person who was to sign it never did. I am busier than I have ever been in a job but also happier than I have ever been.
    Secretly I have a lot of insecurities. It seems that when things have been going well for me something happens. I am trying not to let those insecurities overshadow the happiness I have now.

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  13. Kim, so glad it’s working out so well.

    Roscuro, that stinks, affecting program completion times makes it all a pretty/very big deal.

    Janice, ah, trash piles. For us it was the freeway construction site near our elementary school that left tall mounds, virtual mountains they were, of excavated dirt we delighted in climbing. We’d race home, change out of our school dresses and into our jeans, sneakers & T-shirts, and run back for an afternoon of exploration. After days when it had rained, there would be new, deep trenches etched into the sides of the dirt, giving us even better footholds as we scrambled up and down. What fun we had.

    Now I drive that same freeway (the busy “405,” the construction sadly also took our rental house at the time, but we were able to move just a few blocks north to another house in the same neighborhood that our landlord also owned — my parents eventually arranged to buy it from him).

    Meanwhile, yesterday’s work on my house is continuing today. it’s (of course!) taking longer than anyone thought it would. I have all new plumbing now under the kitchen sink, the troublesome and old garbage disposal is gone, but there’s still a leak under the left side and the guy can’t figure out “why.” No bueno. My big worry is that this will be yet another big/expensive deal to fix.

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  14. Big editor meeting at our paper today about potential changes in how the new regime wants us to cover cities. Sounds like they expect mostly in-depthy, government watchdog type stories, which is great, but they have no suggestions on how we balance that with the constant demand to turn in daily stories throughout the week. Many of the higher ups, of course, have never worked as reporters.

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  19. Well, it turns out that we are not going to probate court today after all. The Boy started throwing up last night, so he is home from school. Nightingale & he just left to go to the doctor, for a different matter. And she has to leave for work at 2:30.

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  20. Roscuro – I feel the same as Cheryl. 😦 But I also agree with what Janice said, that God can still work good for you in this disruption of your plans.

    Praying & hoping your “slight chance” will come through for you.

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  22. I did something today I have not done in probably 10 years, I took a sick day. This cold just won’t let go, so I decided I needed a day of almost total rest. I say almost because the visiting family over the weekend left us with a lack of some groceries. So I’ll take Mrs L to the store later. Meanwhile I can finally read the biography everyone’s talking about.

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  26. Sorry to hear about Little Guy, Kizzie. That is no fun to have to deal with.

    People get sick right after the holidays because of visitors from distant areas who bring along new virus germs looking for hosts. At church on Sunday, the men’s quartet could not sing because they were not well.

    I felt I had another cold yesterday, but it seems gone today. I even smelled the cold! Some people don’t think you can smell a cold, but when I worked in the preschool, there was a definite scent related to at least some colds. My friend, Karen, who also worked in preschools and has background as a nurse has confirmed that she, too, knows that smell.

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  28. Two of my former Bible study ladies died in the last four days after some time in assisted living situations. Bea was 99, a firecracker of a Lutheran who was our original “donut lady.” Ellen, 86ish, was the adoptive mother of three fine kids and another cradle Lutheran.

    They both had vivacious and memorable laughs and we all felt sad at Bible study today.

    Jo, my favorite 99 year-old, announced she can’t handle the mornings anymore (we meet at 9:30) and is now looking for an afternoon Bible study.

    We all felt sad.

    Our church will have two funerals next week. We had two funerals last week. It’s a difficult time of year and everyone is emotionally depleted and tired, deeply tired.

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  29. That is really sad, Michelle, to lose two beloved ladies so close together in time. We have lost several in a week before with my church having had so many who reach toward 100. Some are still alive who I believe were founding members. They have seen so much change. And soon we will have a new church name. It must be sad for the remaining few founding members to see their church transformed to something quite diffetent.

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  30. Today I received a letter telling me that our local funeral home is arranging to have a tree planted somewhere in Connecticut in memory of Hubby. I had forgotten that they mentioned that back when we first spoke with them. They were so helpful, & made an awful situation flow more easily.

    In other news . . . At last, I was able to close an account without any hassle! Hubby had a Capital One card that I have paid off, & I was actually able to close the account online, without having to jump through any hoops. Yay!

    Which reminds me. . .There have been a few of his accounts, maybe only three (with Capital One & PayPal being a couple of them), that he had neglected to leave his user name & passwords for. The user name turned out to just be his own name or his main email address, & then I did the “Forgot your password?” thing to change the password so I could get in. Since I knew him well, I was able to answer the security questions in order to do that.

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  31. The moose “captured Canada’s attention” did it? Never heard about it.

    Thank you all for the sympathy. I’ve done what I could for now, it remains to be seen what will come of it.

    Janice & Kizzie, I have a saying that I’ve repeated many times to my mother, who understands what I mean, “I trust the pilot enough to stay on the plane.” The first time I flew on a passenger flight was on a mission trip bound for northern Mexico. I had flown a short flight in a four seater as a young child, but my fear of heights had gained in proportion to my age (I was 21 when I went Mexico). As the plane lifted off, I couldn’t help recoiling in fear. The woman, who was part of the team I was with, tried to console me with the reflection that the pilots knew what they were doing. My reply was as I quoted above. I stayed on the plane, because I believed the pilot would safely reach the destination, but that trust did not take away my fear of heights. My distress at this latest blow does not affect my trust in the Lord, it is merely an expression of my human limitations.

    In the first place, an injustice was done, not only to me, but to the other half a million students, as union, colleges, and politicians used our vulnerable position as students to seek to benefit themselves. God names himself the Judge who brings the unjust to judgement, so I know he was angry at the treatment we received. We are never commanded to not be indignant at injustice, in fact, much of Scripture would indicate that we should be angry over injustice.

    I Know that God can bring good out of any circumstance, but I also know from experience that the circumstance while gone through is not any the less painful because of how God is working through it. God effected our salvation through the death of his son, Jesus Christ, a great and marvelous good, yet Christ prayed in agony in the garden, “Let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.” The writer of Hebrews observes that “no chastening, in the present, seems good, but rather grievous” and Paul, Peter, John, and the rest of the Apostles, and so many more attest that suffering must still be gone through, no matter the good that will be brought from it. That good may not ever be seen in our life. Some of the prophets of the Old Testament never saw the good that came from their prophesies. Jeremiah lived in continual agony, but he wrote that God “does not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men” (Lamentation 3:3). Jeremiah and the Psalmists make it clear that laments of grief and plaints about injustice are not acts of unbelief.

    So, I walked out of the building where, for the second time today, I had received vague responses from someone whose show of concern could not help me, and I sat down on a bench in the university quadrangle and let the tears that had welled up in my eyes roll down my cheeks, because I trusted God, but the circumstances were too difficult for my human mind and body and I needed to show the Lord my distress.

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  32. Kizzie, congratulations, half the time I can’t even remember the answers to my own security questions.

    Silence from home — no word on how Day 2 of fixing the kitchen sink leak is going. I sent him a text at around 2 p.m. asking how it was coming along, no answer. Hmmmm.

    That could be either good or bad.

    Roscuro, yes, feeling your your frustration at the injustice.

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  33. Sorry about your friends, Michelle. That’s hard.

    Kim, we like that she’s an LA girl. So she probably says things like in-depthy. But yes, I can almost imagine her being something of a kindred spirit of Diana’s. There’s that indpendent twinkle in the eye …

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  36. Kare, the funding that the government set up from the money the colleges saved from the strike is only up to $500 dollars per student. That would pay my rent and phone bill for one month. The cost to myself, as well as the other students, is far higher, in learning that is crammed for lack of time, lost opportunities due to lack of time, delayed graduation dates – thus setting back the opportunity to write licensing exams, which are only offered at certain times of year – and the loss of that competitive edge that comes from the timely completion of a program. The government cannot give back the time lost. When our clinical instructor told us the makeup plan that she was given and listened to our concerns, she said sadly, “The problems created by the strike are worse than the problems of the strike.”

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  37. Roscuro, I’m so sorry. The ads from Ontario seemed to indicate that Kathleen Wynn was going to pay for “everything” that the strike affected. Talk about misleading.

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  38. I am thinking of the ramifications if the truckers go on strike as some are threatening, over the new mandatory elogs they will have to use starting in a few weeks. Lots of small trucking companies could go under if that happens.

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  41. Roscuro, I really do believe it is a horrible injustice. I am sorry if my comment did not convey my thought about that. I just assumed you would know that I think it is almost unbelievable in its scope of injustice. It is not only an individual injustice as so often happens, but it is a massive injustice. I have never ever even heard of anything worse on campus except for the students who have been killed by being caught up in student riots. Even that is not so massive. Yes, I would fully expect for you to grieve in the moment as many must be. I was just thinking mostly of the advantage of being a Christian at just such a time as this. I can not imagine how hopeless others must feel. I would not be surprised if some are so down that they might even commit suicide. I hope that does not happen, but given what some might be experiencing on top of this, this could push someone to consider that. In my original comment, I was just trying to stay positive. But it is true that we are suppose to mourn with our brothers and sisters in Christ who are mourning. I am truly sorry that you have suffered this change of plans and shock of facing the future after this senseless use of the nation’s students. But I still praise God for how He can open His storehouses of provision to take care of you as His beloved daughter and cherished worker in bringing people to better health.

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  42. Roscuro – Like Janice, I did not intend that comment to make light of your troubles or imply that everything will end up hunky-dory. It was indeed an injustice that has been done to you & so many others.

    I can certainly relate to what you wrote about trusting the pilot, but still fearing heights. Believe me, I understand, especially in my own current life situation.

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