Wordless Wednesday: Our Hope

For our ladies' annual luncheon, I decorated this table with one of the themes of the luncheon: Hope. I tried to make it look like a little bit of Heaven. Impossible I know, but it was just symbolic. I was dissappointed that the dry ice fizzing over with fogginess didn't show up well in the pictures. There was a bowl on the other side of these candles, but you can't make it out. We had bone china with gold rims, gold flatware, lots of fluffy tulle with twinkle lights underneath, divinity fudge and a halo draped over each chair, to be worn by the attendees. It was really a lot of fun and it did turn my thoughts toward our future Hope of life with Christ in that intriguing place He called Paradise.

***To see more entries or to join in and do your own, go to Wordless Wednesday or 5 Minutes for Mom.***

Good news and bad news

Well my friend Kim has helped me get my old header back up on this new blog, but I've lost all my sidebar links and things. Pooh! It was my own fault. I hit a wrong button when I was transferring the html.

Hey, if I had done it the easy way, it just wouldn't be me. So I'll get those back up and running soon...I hope.

Feeling fragile

I've been in a sad frame of mind the past two days. There was a tragic accident that happened in the town we moved here from. It's a very small town, so things like this accident affect the whole town. My daughter was having a hard time understanding how events like this seem to happen more and hang over a small town's history in people's memory more than in a city.

I had to agree....in the 9 years that we lived there, we had a horrifying, tragic event happen every few years with the town's young people and some with adults. Every tragedy seems to affect the whole town. Yet I know that horrifying things happen in Phoenix every day, and I am not impacted by it at all, except for a fleeting thought and prayer. In a small town, you know everyone, or of them at least. You associate people by family names, what churches they go to, and places they've worked. I could not tell you the companies some of my closest friends work at here in the city.

So when I found out there had been an accident, I was immediately in a state of anxiety over who was killed, were they friends' children, did they go to our former church? I called the church secretary there and she read me the names. There were familiar family names, churches affected went through my mind as well as faces of young people we had known there. There was only one that I had known personally, a girl who had been in a Sunday school class I taught for middle school girls. Her grandmother is a friend of mine there and a fairly new Christian of a few years. I'm sure her heart and mind are just tortured over this. I can only pray for the peace of Christ to surround her and carry her through this.

My daughter told me that a friend of hers that worked at the Young LIfe camp just outside of town was the first one who came up on the scene, just after it happened. I can't imagine the horror that is stuck in her mind forever now.

So pray, if you could, for our former town, for the people affected by it closely, for the people who had to help at the scene and for the girl who survived it.

I can only sum this up in what my daughter Hannah said the other night, "Life is so fragile."

It can be gone in the blink of an eye....

Wordless Wednesday: Lillies and delphinium, perfect together

This is for Michele, over at Laundromat.

***To see more entries or to join in and do your own, go to Wordless Wednesday or 5 Minutes for Mom.***

Blahgging

Little frustrated here.....

I am trying to upload a picture...my old header...for this blog's header, but Blogger will not apply the change. It says it is saved and the picture is there on my layout page under 'header', but it does not show up on the blog.

Anyone?

Little help?

Kim???

Rich quoteses

I am trying to get a new blog design. The one I want has a quote on it that is not really 'me', so I am awaiting an answer from the designer to see if I can get a different quote on there. I looked up Rich Mullins' quotes because he had such a weird and honest take on Christianity and how people understand it. (and he has a habit of not completely finishing his sentences, but that's okay) Here are a few....the quotes with asterisks are the ones I am considering for a header:

Rich Mullins Quotes:

***"Never forget what Jesus did for you. Never take lightly what it cost Him. And never assume that if it cost Him His very life, that it won't also cost you yours."

"So go out and live real good and I promise you'll get beat up real bad. But, in a little while after you're dead, you'll be rotted away anyway. It's not gonna matter if you have a few scars. It will matter if you didn't live."

"It's so funny being a Christian musician. It always scares me when people think so highly of Christian music, Contemporary Christian music especially. Because I kinda go, I know a lot of us, and we don't know jack about anything. Not that I don't want you to buy our records and come to our concerts. I sure do. But you should come for entertainment. If you really want spiritual nourishment, you should go to church...you should read the Scriptures."

"We do not find happiness by being assertive. We don't find happiness by running over people because we see what we want and they are in the way of that happiness so we either abandon them or we smash them. The Scriptures don't teach us to be assertive. The Scriptures teach us—and this is remarkable—the Scriptures teach us to be submissive. This is not a popular idea."

"I had a prof one time... He said, 'Class, you will forget almost everything I will teach you in here, so please remember this: that God spoke to Balaam through his ass, and He has been speaking through asses ever since. So, if God should choose to speak through you, you need not think too highly of yourself. And, if on meeting someone, right away you recognize what they are, listen to them anyway'."

***"I think if we were given the Scriptures, it was not so that we could prove that we were right about everything. If we were given the Scriptures, it was to humble us into realizing that God is right, and the rest of us are just guessing."

"Bear in mind, children, that [parents] listen to you because you are kids—not because you are right. That's how our Father listens to us."

"We never understand what we're praying, and God, in His mercy, does not answer our prayers according to our understanding, but according to His wisdom."

"Yes, it's embarrassing to be born again, but imagine how embarrassing it must have been to be born the first time. At least this time you get to wear clothes!"

"If you've ever known the love of God, you know it's nothing but reckless and it's nothing but raging. Sometimes it hurts to be loved, and if it doesn't hurt it's probably not love, may be infatuation. I think a lot of American people are infatuated with God, but we don't really love Him, and they don't really let Him love them. Being loved by God is one of the most painful things in the world, it's also the only thing that can bring us salvation and it's like everything else that is really wonderful, there's a little bit of pain in it, little bit of hurt."

***"I am a Christian, not because someone explained the nuts and bolts of Christianity to me, but because there were people willing to be nuts and bolts."

"If you want a religion that makes sense, go somewhere else. But if you want a religion that makes life, choose Christianity."

Wordless Wednesday: View

Click photo to enlarge.




***To see more entries or to join in and do your own, go to Wordless Wednesday or 5 Minutes for Mom.***

This is a shot from the top of Bill Williams Mountain in Williams, AZ.

It's gone....

I am quite sure this time that my blog design is not coming back. So if you know of a place to get free Blogger templates (a tried and true place) , please drop me a note! I'll be looking too.

In the mean time, I feel kinda dull here....

Movie review: Charlotte's Web

Having read the book as a child and seen the animated, I think musical, version of the story, we opted not to see Charlotte's Web in the theatre last year. (it's soooo expensive to go to the movies with the whole family these days) Instead we waited for it to come out of dvd. And since it arrived at our door with the other 49cent dvds my husband ordered with a dvd club membership, we finally watched it. Well, we watched it three times this weekend to be exact. I LOVE IT. It is the cutest family movie I've seen in a while.

The live action movie with computer generated animated animals was a little bit reminiscent of the movie Babe, but better much better computerized animation (like the spider spinning the web). And the story and sweetness of it was so much more. Besides the story of the pig, spider and farm animals, it is a wonderful story of a shy little girl's blossoming. Silly, sappy and totally predictable barnyard animal lines and jokes still had me giggling, even during the third viewing. An all star cast provides the voices for these wonderful animals. The scene where the baby spiders hatch is beautifully done, and is so sweet. But one of my favorite parts was the end, where the credits first begin to roll, the song Ordinary Miracle is sung by Sarah McLachlan and is accompanied by really well done still illustrations of the story. It is beautiful! So if you watch the movie, keep the dvd going at least through that song.

And aren't you lucky! I found it on youtube:

Breakfast casserole

I just made one of these to stick in the oven in the morning for a sunday school breakfast. It is called a strata, a menonite recipe from a recipe book put together by local people north of Harrisburg, PA, at a place called Camp Hebron.

I make it several times a year for holiday breakfasts or church things. People always ask for the recipe, it is so good. The bread cubes in it makes it light and fluffy and the mustard gives it a taste that catches you by surprise, but it's a good surprise. ;)

Breakfast Strata

6-9 slices of bread, cubed
1/2 to 3/4 pound of sausage, bacon or ham
1 c. shredded cheese

9 eggs
3 c. milk
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsp prepared mustard

Layer sausage, cheese and bread cubes in a greased 13 x 9 baking pan. Mix mustard with 1/4 c. milk and whisk to keep it from getting lumpy. Combine eggs, milk (including mixed in mustard), and salt with a whisk and pour over pan of layered food. Refrigerate overnight, then bake at 350 for 40 minutes.
You can also freeze this before baking and use at a later time.