greaterthansparrows

My project was a custom photo book, for which I had prepaid a voucher through Amazon Local.  I had tried out  picaboo.com for a smaller book, on a similar kind of deal, last fall and made a book of pictures of our grandchildren, and it came out beautifully.  This time I wanted to create a book of the forty years we have been married; from our own baby pictures to our wedding through pictures of our children and their marriages.  I got this voucher at Christmas, and it was only good through last Thursday.  After that, the amount I had actually paid could be credited to any subsequent retail purchase, but I couldn't afford the normal rates, and the savings of fifty-plus dollars was huge. Trouble was, I had to find where the pictures were.  The ones that had been in a bedroom nightstand, I thought I knew where they were, but that box was buried in the back room and I couldn't physically get to it.  Hubby has been swamped, and the other rooms are ahead...

It's Valentine's Day...[well, it was when I started to write this, now a week has gone by].  I commend this column from Hannah Bird in the Nauvoo Times. There was a show whose name I forget about a married couple, and some of the story-screen time was in the therapist's office for their individual sessions.  The scene that has stayed with me is one where the wife is talking about how all the focus is on the beginnings, the wedding plans, the blissful  embarking on a new joint life.  She offers the observation that the beginnings are easy, and marriage is easy at the end.  It's the middle that's hard.  How much of it is middle, the counselor asks.  "It's all middle," was the honest reply. Rapture and bliss will not be a normal, continuous state.  Happy marriages are not between people who are happy every second.  True, real love will keep a background, a bedrock, of bliss that doesn't get extinguished through all the 'middle' of a life s...

This is a day to stay focused and keep pushing through. I have done all the dishes, two days of them--keep in mind that I don't have a dishwasher in this old house, and  I've taken down the first load of laundry in the rain--keep in mind that the basement access is outside.   I have a lesson to prepare for tomorrow on the book of Hosea which was almost utterly unfamiliar to me.  I have a personal project on deadline for this week, and I almost forgot that I had a column due.  I got it sent on time yesterday morning. I couldn't sleep last night until past 4:00.  I did not rise and shine early and alert this morning. The reason for my unsleep was twofold.  My neck was spasmed up and the rest of me wasn't that happy.  That's feeling the effects of a weekend I really enjoyed, which is a draft in the list that I need to go back and finish.  This photo project has consumed me, and since I couldn't get comfortable and drop off, my mind wouldn't ...

I had to get up in testimony meeting last week.  It was February. Last February, a year ago, we had run out of financial resources.  We knew that point was approaching, and we kept hoping that Hubby would get work somewhere.  We knew we had to sell the house sooner than the summer target we were looking at, and that we might easily lose the house instead.  We had no idea what we were going to do.  The common assumption was that we would stay and dodge the phone calls and stretch out the process until we were foreclosed, but we wished to honor our obligation and find a better answer.  We didn't know if we would have any real alternative, though. By the last day of the month, this February right now, the sale of our house should close.  At each step along the way between last year and now events and needs lined up in ways that could not be mistaken as chance.  At each step we had no idea what would be next or how quickly, but we found a place to...

The big tree in front, that drips goop on our car in summer.  Across the street is the empty Rite-Aid store.  It was snowing last night. This is probably the only snow we'll get this year.  The storm systems come in, and most often we get rain or just a dusting, where other areas get more snow.  Many times the big systems come in from the north and Everett will get dumped on, say, and it will go east to the foothills and leave snow and curve south and back west, giving snow to Olympia, Graham, the Peninsula (Gig Harbor and beyond, up to Bremerton), but Tacoma is in that center point and Commencement Bay keeps us just warm enough that we don't get the snow. People can have some snow as close as five miles from where we live, but we just get wet. (We used to have snow more often, but in recent years it seems less common.) Taken with the flash, standing on our itty-bitty porch looking north across the street on the side.  There's a hedge on each ...

The post I didn't finish before I wrote about Joel turned into my column for this week.  Teaching Elisha and the story of Naaman the leper from Syria I used this film on DVD from the Church study resources.  It's one of those stories we might remember from Sunday school, but I hadn't looked at it in depth.  As I find over and over again, there is so much more there than we sometimes pay attention to. Here is  my column with the profound effect it had on me and on the class, seeing as if we were there, rather than rushing past the surface of the words.  We have our own struggles with assumptions or pride or faith, and this depiction speaks to them. Sometimes we have to follow the Lord's direction to its conclusion before we can see its purpose or understand its process.  The choice to trust teaches us, if we will continue.

It's been a long time since Christmas.  There are not-finished drafts in my queue, but since they haven't been finished and posted, they don't do much good.  A couple of them will be coming along later, they won't be abandoned. Our Institute lessons were set up on the calendar for four semesters of the Old Testament, to match up with the chapters in the student manual for the course(s).  We checked at the beginning for the first manual, and the teacher materials and student materials matched one-to-one, unlike the materials for the Doctrine & Covenants, where the student manual had a section, however brief or lengthy, for each section of the scripture, and the lessons were sometimes one section and sometimes several.  For a couple of the revelations, there were two lessons. But the Old Testament was straightforward, and matched up precisely, teacher and student sections.  At least the first two terms did, so we didn't check on the third and just made up ...