conversations, meditations, reflections
And Ol’ Man Winter fighting back!
Mar 12th
March 11, 2010
It was blowing hard last night – first time in this house that I could hear the wind catching the building. They had snow in Coquitlam and the north shore – several centimeters of very white but very wet and mushy stuff! And snow on Haida Gwaii a couple days ago, too! Guess old man winter is doing his best to get in a last fling or two (I think the weather guy said El Nino is weakening…)
Beautiful Spring Day!
Mar 12th
March 10, 2010
So today was beautiful and sunny. I swept all the house and hubby washed the floors! I washed the winter hats, gloves, and scarves, and dried them outside in the sun and wind. I knocked down a bunch of boxes in the shed and took them to the cardboard recycling bin. I made 5 loaves of bread. I had nice phone conversations with one of my daughters and with my sister, and BD dropped by for a nice chat. I put away winter blankets and afghans, and cleaned up the shelves in the laundry closet and front entry closet. I took the plunge, and ordered a bund of writing books from Amazon. And am signing up for the Christian Writers Guild! (lol… now I’m really tired!)
“Godliness is not the consequence of your capacity to imitate God, but the consequence of His capacity to reproduce Himself in you.” GB status on facebook, Mar 10/10
Cures for my tired brain!
Mar 6th
March 5, 2010
LOL… well, more and more I’ve been finding that I’m really getting “brain dead” by midafternoon… and so later afternoons and evenings are pretty much a total loss for any thinking type activities I’d like to do…
I’ve been trying to get exercise and fresh air (like walking to and from work) and that does help… but this morning I read the results of a study that said a nap of ½ to 1 ½ hours mid-day makes a big difference. So I slept from noon to about 1:30 this afternoon… and then topped it off with a healthy sandwich (whole grain bread, field greens, meat, cheese) … and a pleasant conversation with one of my beautiful daughters!
So we shall see how long and well my brain functions for the rest of the day. (It was really getting groggy by noon… of course I was up before 4:30 am and have done a lot of “thinking” stuff today!) Well, now I am feeling quite excellent ? So we’ll see how long that lasts! Oh yes, I also opened the front and back doors and let the lovely fresh spring air blow through the house… and I’m sitting writing this, right now, to the tune of birds singing in the trees!
Some interesting ways You’ve been talking to me!
Mar 6th
5 March 2010
Woke up 4:20 am. Spent some time sitting by hubby in front of the TV watching a bit of Stargate… then checked face book… and sent an email or two… then had a bit of breakfast… and then a shower… followed by a long soak in the tub: first real “bath” (other than many showers, of course) in this house, lol! My toes are finally really clean from last summer’s very ground-in dust, from wearing bare feet or sandals for so long! Anyway…)
Hoo boy! Father, You sure have had some interesting ways of talking to me in the past day or two:
- facebook statuses
- scriptures I “just happened upon” when a planner fell open
- email letter I was writing to a friend, that turned into a conversation with You
- that guy who I’d never met before, and who just dropped into the office… and we ended up having a long conversation – with You in the midst of it, eh!
- a caring phone call
- and just now, that blog email that just arrived…
I did try to “read scripture and hear Your voice” last night, but I really didn’t get “grabbed by it” … but meanwhile You chose to speak to me in so many other ways…
Not to mention, as well, the glorious sunshine yesterday that kept popping through no matter how hard the clouds tried to stop it! It was as much as 16 C by 2 pm! Wow!
And I learned a lot about my “giving questions” when I was talking to that guy who dropped into the office… and then there was the happiness and joy I saw in those street folks when they received shampoo and body wash, such a simple thing, and yet so wonderful to them! ….
And then that blog email spoke to me very clearly about how “me-focused” I’ve become – or maybe have been all along, oh dear… in this whole business at work…
Not to mention, also, how You’ve encouraged me… and opened my eyes to Your greater vision about Your church… and about helping the poor, too!
(You can find more on this at : “My Church Journey” at http://normajhill.blogspot.com/ … Feel free to check it out if you are interested!)
I love the surprise and adventure of giving my days to You!
Mar 6th
01 March 2010
Good morning Father!
Please be with me every moment of today! I do give it all to You – for my joy and pleasure and contentment, just as for Yours! I love giving my days to You! I love the sense of adventure, knowing that You can be counted on to make my days far more interesting and unexpected and delightful than what I would plan myself (of course I do make plans… but I love being flexible to let You turn them upsidedown if You so desire!). I love that You love me, and that I can totally depend on You to provide a day that is totally for my good, for the good of others I will be with, and for the increasing good and wonder of our relationship – Yours and mine – and by extension, all my other relationships where You place me.
I love that You do delight in letting me make “my plans,” especially when in the making of them I allow You the flexibility to surprise me! Sometimes, surely, the surprises aren’t at all what I would plan – and yes, sometimes I still do “worry” and get stressed and fail to trust that You are seeing the big picture and are working all things together for my good… hmmmm…. Guess that means I’m forgetting that You love me, because love is always kind and never fails, eh! Well, I’m sorry about that… but You do know my heart – and it is absolutely true that as I have been learning to trust You – as I have discovered that YOU REALLY AND TRULY DO LOVE ME! – my worry level has been dropping off significantly!
(Which is probably why when I fall into “little worries” now, I feel so sick and notice them so much more than before: because they are no longer a “regular part” of my life, so I’m not used to their effects! Yes! Oh Father, I long to reach the point of trusting Your love so deeply tat I cease “falling into worry” – cease doubting Your love! At all!) (And, yes, cease listening to the insidious whispers of my flesh and of the enemy).
Ha! Anyway, I know Your surprises are always for my good, and so very, very often they come in the form of blessings that I can see and enjoy right here and now, right in the moment! (Which is why I’m becoming more and more inclined to also view and expect the seemingly “unpleasant surprises” to be “blessings in disguise” … just as I can look at an ugly little caterpillar and already see in my mind’s eye the beautiful butterfly it will one day become! Or look at a tiny, bare, brown seed, and see in my mind’s eye the beautiful flower it will one day become! So then I begin to see the beauty and delight even in the “ugly caterpillar” or the “bare, brown, seed” kinds of events and circumstances that sometimes cross my days… A lot of beauty and delight in them! Hurrah!
(To you, the reader: this bit of writing is part of an ongoing series of blogs over at another of my blog sites: “My Church Journey” at http://normajhill.blogspot.com/ … Feel free to check it out if you are interested!)
Quotes etc.
Feb 27th
February 26, 2010
Woke up at 5:00 am – silly internal alarm clock! It was supposed to be my “sleeping in” day!
Checked face book and copied down a couple of great quotes:
“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly” … and …
“When it rains on your parade, look up rather than down, because without the rain there would be no rainbow!”
Made pancakes for hubby and myself for breakfast (he’s on his days-off). Then we watched a bit of Stargate Atlantis together … or at least he watched, while I caught bits of it while I ran around doing other stuff around the house!), and then bits of an historical show about fire disasters in Canada, and especially the northern Ontario fire of 1916. Very interesting!
Oh! Another interesting quote (I’m not sure I totally agree but it is interesting and worth thinking through…): “People begin to become successful the minute they decide to be.”
Getting back to writing – from my memories!
Feb 27th
February 25, 2010
I was just writing about some interesting dreams I’ve been having… and I realized how much fun I was having, writing about them.
I really do need to get back to writing (creative, fun writing – something other than all the pretty serious blogging I’ve been doing lately on my various blogs and in my journal!). I always loved those stories in the series “Stories From Grandma’s Attic”(by Arleta Richardson). But I always thought that I don’t have old-timey-enough memories that would interest young people…
But of course I am a grandma myself now, and when I was growing up we actually did live in what we considered a very modern world – albeit one devoid of personal/ desk-top computers, video games, even hand-held calculators! Not to mention cell phones, or even phones unattached to their settings (but at least we never lost them around the house nor ended up with dead buttons … and, oh my goodness, those calls on eight-party-lines could sure be interesting, lol…) … and of course we had no digital cameras … or even digital clocks or watches! And we had cars you could fix yourself, easily, in the back yard (lol… we still have cars pretty much like that … Big Red and Little Red, both 1990!). And black and white TV with only one, or at most, two channels, much of the airtime being dedicated to “talking heads” … but the programs we did have were funny! Beverley Hillbillies, Hogan’s Heroes… of course today many of them would be seen as “un-PC” but then life was “simpler” in many ways…. Perhaps with chores… and a more “homogeneous” society… we just didn’t have time… or reason… to think about such things (yes, I know, not necessarily a really “good” thing, but…)
LOL! Look at me go on! All those memories could take me in a million writing directions – some just fun story-telling, others interesting historical/ philosophical directions. Ha! Maybe I’d write so much quasi-history that I’d become famous and get an “honorary” PhD in history! Without having to go back to university, lol…. Or maybe I’d get so into history that I’d just go back to university, after all, and get a PhD in history to me with my research for my writing! After all, my Grandpa always said I’d be the first PhD in the family… and the Dean of History at UBC did urge me to stay at the University and pursue a PhD in history, instead of going teaching. LOL … I’ve always had that lingering on the edge of my mind… just won’t go away and leave me be!
Oh, and we had one speed town bikes – and now they are selling them again at the bike store for $600 plus! My parents bought me a hand-me-down (several generations by the look of it!) balloon-tire, heavy, strong, woman’s bike very much like those pricey new bikes – and they paid, I believe, $5 for it (which would have been fairly pricey even so, at the time, on our family budget!). Wonder what happened to it? Those old bikes surely didn’t just break down or rust away – though they bought me a brand new leather seat for it (very hard and uncomfortable), and one of the neighbor dogs loved the smell of it, and chewed it to pieces! So then I got a much more comfortable modern soft plastic seat. LOL – that’s how we replaced things – by replacing the broken parts. Of course the “throw-away” mentality was already coming in, but our parents grew up in the “dirty 30s depression” and during World War 2, and our grandparents had started their lives in a previous century, many of them as immigrants and/or homesteaders, and they also lived through the depression and both World Wars, so they were all still attached to values of thriftiness and – well! “environmentalism,” even before it was invented!
Ha! It is already 5:38 am (I started at 5:05), and I have done my 20 – actually 30 – minutes of daily writing without even thinking about it. Now I’ll have to type it up… sometimes I do wish for a really light, portable laptop, just for writing… but I suspect that, even then, I’d still be using pen and paper a lot… yep, I’m a pen-and-paper-mama, brought up in a pen-and-paper generation (and ha! manual typewriters! I remember when electric typewriters came out; it was a major technological breakthrough!)
I definitely think – and remember – better with a pen. It slows me down enough, I think, to bring in more complex, detailed memories… and deeper reflection, too. That may be why a lot of old-time writing, when we read it today, seems too “heavy” … but what a shame that we’ve seemingly lost the ability to remember and think deeply… Sometimes I think that “Readers Digest Condensed Books” and all manner of other dumbed-down literature, is a great curse and shame to our modern generations… and that a great majority of on-line drivel falls into the same category (including, no doubt, plenty of my own writing, oh dear!).
On the other hand, though, some of the modern blogs are, I think, an attempt to delve deeper once again… and perhaps at the same time try to attract a readership that often seems incapable of sitting down and focusing for more than a very few minutes at a time on anything that isn’t moving fast and furiously (accompanied by pictures/ graphics of course, which assumes that people no longer have the ability to “imaginate” their own mind pictures to accompany the prose…)… anything that doesn’t race across the surface of the mind, rather than stopping to delve deeply and seriously…
(You can read more on this line of thought at “My Church Journey” at http://normajhill.blogspot.com/ under the topic “Has the world really changed that much?”)
Dreams and stuff
Feb 27th
February 25, 2010
Alarm just woke me from an interesting, old-timey dream. We were driving around the countryside in an old care – a 1950s Chevy I think – and everything else n the dream was pretty much old-timey too. But it was very clear and real. We went into a little corner general store type place, and got a home-baked pastry, and the menu (and/or local newspaper… can’t be sure exactly what it was!) was hand-written. Anyway, it was pretty cool.
And a couple nights ago I had a dream of my Grandma (my dad’s mom). She passed away when I was 13 – that was 41 years ago – and I surely haven’t dreamed of her for many, many years. But that night that I dreamed of her, I had just scanned and posted up on face book a whole lot of old-old-timey family photos from my dad’s side. And of course, I have recently been scanning a lot of old timey photos as well from my mom’s side, as well as going to the Heritage Week display at the mall, and reading those local history books I picked up there, so all that has no doubt triggered long-ago memories!
Of course when I was a teenager (in the early to mid 70s), my brother had a very cool 55 Chevy, all customized, that we drove all over the place, but the car in my dream was more average, and, I think, might even have been older – early 50s or even 40s… well, maybe from memories of when I was even younger, just a child. My dad was partial to Chevy’s, and I’m sure my first car rides were in Dad’s old Chevy. He didn’t get one with more “modern” lines till about 1961 or so, I think… by which time I was about 6 years old, so of course I have lots of memories from those early times tucked away in my subconscious. Ha! I’ll have to take a look at his old pictures again!
Snow!!! And other wonderful things!
Feb 27th
February 24, 2010
I came home from work, made lunch (chili), and watched 40 minutes of CSI – then started to watch another show, but then turned it off. Did a quick facebook check. Now I’m so tired… oh dear, should have remembered to do something “hands-on” eh! … Anyway, I do want to finish my Bible reading for today before a nap…
Oh! It actually snowed this morning! Very wet and quickly melted, but it was snow and I enjoyed it! A lot! Outdoor coffee time, very wet, kind of chilly, soaked shoes and clothes… but well worth it! Yay!
…. Later… well, I woke up hubby, made dinners, went to the store to buy milk, juice, tea bags, hot chocolate mix, canned milk … and pudding cups! Mostly a “milk run” so to speak!
After supper, and hubby gone to work, I did laundry and cleaned up my emails. Sent some pictures (by email) to N, some funny emails to A, and resent some emails to T (as her hard drive crashed and she lost the originals…. Good thing I hadn’t cleaned up my emails lately, lol!)
Now in my cozy bed. I am tired! But at least much “healthier” tired than I was earlier today… I really do need to do those “hands-on” things when my brain (and emotions) are tired! But still I want a bit more time with You! I love You, Lord!
Proverbs 19:11 A man’s discretion makes him slow to anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression…. 17. One who is gracious to a poor man lends to the LORD, and He will repay him for his good deed…. 20. Listen to counsel and accept discipline, that you may be wise the rest of your days. 21. Many plans are in a man’s heart, but the counsel of the LORD will stand. 23. The fear of the LORD leads to life, so that one may sleep satisfied, untouched by evil…. 25… reprove one who has understanding and he will gain knowledge. … 28… the mouth of the wicked spreads iniquity….
Do hands-on stuff when my brain is tired!
Feb 27th
February 24, 2010
Yay! I am up early and having time with You instead of rushing to boil eggs and do baking! I’m really sorry I didn’t think sooner of doing afternoon baking. I really am not in shape after work to do more “head stuff” … and so I have really wasted a lot of afternoons watching TV etc. But as I discovered yesterday, even when I am “brain-tired” (and feeling body-tired because of it), I CAN do hands-on-stuff! (And feel better for it – especially if I have briskly walked home in the fresh air instead of taking the car!). And then, in the evening, after hubby left for work, instead of just crashing out, I found that my brain was reinvigorated, and I was able to read Your word, and journal, and spend time with You, too, because I wasn’t already in the worn-out-slack-off-groove – although I was kind of getting there, sitting beside hubby watching the evening TV news while eating supper… he loves for me to do that with him… hmmm… what to do about that??? Papa???
Well, here it is just after 5 am – just 8 hours later – and back into Your word! Love it!
(Oh! And thank You for reminding me – in a dream! Lol! – that I’d left the chili out on the counter! So that I quickly got up and put it in the fridge! I’m sure it will be just fine! Thank You!)
