Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Here are some favorites from the last week:

1. Jeremy’s coming home today! For a whole week!

2. Jesse’s job. Jesse hadn’t found work this summer except for a man from church who called him on an as-needed basis. But this man recently had an opening come up for more regular work and offered it to Jesse, and the hours are flexible so it will fit around his college classes .

3. Sleep. I usually wake up once or twice in the night and usually have no trouble going back to sleep. But for the past few weeks whenever I’d wake up, I’d be awake for an hour or so. That provides a nice time to pray or think, but then it makes me sleep later or else drag through the next day. This week has been more back to normal and has felt so good.

4. Kind comments on my sixth blog anniversary post. Almost made me cry!

5. God’s help — every day! But specifically in a situation last week. The ladies’ newsletter for church needed to be printed out by Friday, and I didn’t find out til Tuesday that the lady who writes up the testimonies and information for our “Getting to Know You” section for new ladies wasn’t going to be able to do that this time. It’s a highlight of the newsletter so I hated to leave it out, but wasn’t sure I could find someone who would be willing to share their testimony and such in such a short time frame. We usually “introduce” two ladies per newsletter and I was hoping to at least have one — but God provided two! And for a number of reasons I didn’t get to actually working on the newsletter until Thursday, though I had been thinking and planning what to do before that. Yet, by God’s grace, it was done by Friday afternoon. (I debated whether to go into all that or just say “God really helped me in a pinch this week,” but then I decided it may be an encouragement to you in your ministries.)

Bonus: Our pastor’s message last Sunday from Romans 16, where Paul lists a number of people who ministered in various ways other than what we think of as the “main” ones of teaching and preaching. He discussed some of those people as well as some of those folks in our church and ended with “interviewing” a lady from our church who teaches English in a closed country and has various ministry opportunities. That was a blessing to me.

Have a great weekend!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been a very full week. Here are a few highlights of the week:

1. The Olympics!

2. Jason’s birthday party. We’d had a family get-together earlier in the month, but he wanted to have a party inviting all his and Mittu’s friends from church and work. Mittu planned it, but they had it here because we had a little more space. It was fun working with Mittu to get ready for it, meeting Jason’s friends from work that I didn’t know, and learning a new party game.

3. Mini trifles. Mittu had me put these together as one of the party foods, and they were soooo good! And very nice for a get-together. It was just a piece of brownie in a small plastic cup, a dollop of vanilla pudding, another piece of brownie, whipped topping, and chocolate drizzle.  I thought I got a closer picture of them, but the only one I got was this one: they’re on the right.

4. Winning a free lunch…that I didn’t even know I was entering for! I “liked” a local restaurant on Facebook, then later in the day a friend alerted me that I had been their 1,000th “like” and therefore entitled to a free lunch there. Very nice!

5. A new pictorial church directory. They had published one just before we came almost two years ago, and many new people have joined since then. It’s nice to get updated addresses, phone numbers, and e-mails, plus to connect names and faces with the people we don’t know yet.

I’ve got a busy day in store, but I’ll be able to spend some time visiting with you all later on. Hope it’s a good day for you!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s a busy day, so I’ll have to be (hopefully) short and sweet. Here are a few highlights of the week:

1. Jason’s birthday was last week but we had to wait to celebrate as a family on Saturday.

2. Handy, helpful, thoughtful hubby. Trying to dust off the light fixtures in my bathroom wasn’t working, but I couldn’t reach them to take them off for a washing. Jesse could, but he couldn’t figure out how to get them off — it’s a design I haven’t seen before. I asked Jim if he could get them down for me: he went “above and beyond” and cleaned them and the base and then put them all back together for me. Plus he fixed the garbage disposal when it stopped working (evidently a corn cob holder had gotten broken and stuck down there).

3. Going through old e-mails. In trying to create some more disc space, I’ve been going through files and deleting things. I’ve been going through the “filing cabinet” of my personal e-mail account, and was able to delete many no longer needed items, but had such fun rummaging through others, particularly notes from my sister who never writes or calls. 🙂

4. Scheduling Jeremy’s flights. He’s coming for a whole week next month!

5 Finding a baby bird in my hanging basket.

He sat there for a long while, blinking and observing, the little tuft on top of his head ruffling on the breeze. Cute!

Hope you have a great week! I will try to catch up with you later tonight or over the weekend.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s actually been a pretty frustrating week, with a computer issue taking up most of two mornings resulting in not getting done even a fourth of what I had planned for the week. So it has been a little harder to come up with five favorite parts of the week, but sometimes that’s when it is most needful and helpful to look for them.

1. Electronic means of contact. Within my extended family this week there have been three birthdays, one funeral, a drug overdose and a missing (adult) child for one night. It’s nice for someone in a crisis to be able to send a text message or Facebook message to multiple people and have thoughts, prayers, words of comfort and reassurance flooding back within moments without having to spend hours on the phone. Sure, these don’t replace phone contact (for those far away and face-to-face contact with those close by) but there are times they do greatly help  both the person sending the messages and those waiting for updates.

2. A successful reinstall of Picasa. I had to do that last week and mentioned being thankful I had just backed up photos. I’d been getting pop-up notices that there wasn’t much disk space left, and Picasa finally crashed even though I’d been going through and deleting photos (like ones I had taken just to show something on my blog, or ones where we’d taken multiple shots of the same thing, etc.). When I reinstalled Picasa, somehow it imported not just photos but scans, clip art, etc., resulting in taking up too much space again and another crash. Thankfully through an online help forum I found out what to do and reinstalled it and set it just to import from the My Pictures folder. We do need to get a bigger disk drive some time soon, but hopefully this will take care of things for now.

3. AC. Again. I might say that every week this summer. 🙂 I was doing one project just in the garage, not even outside, and got so hot it took several hours to feel comfortable again once I came back inside.

4. Mini pies. I was lamenting a few weeks ago that I couldn’t find single-servings pies in just a plain chocolate flavor, and I didn’t want to bring a whole one home because I’d be too tempted to eat too much of it. Just this week I found Marie Callender’s Mini Pies — Chocolate Satin for me and Key Lime for Jesse. Good stuff! they also show an apple one I haven’t seen yet in the store but I’d love to try it.

5. Godly teachers, preachers, and writers who carefully handle the Word of God. I’ve been so dismayed lately by a few posts where the author glosses over clear Scripture in order to justify an unscriptural position. By contrast, I’ve been blessed in reading Not By Chance by Layton Talbert on the sovereignty and providence of God. This paragraph highlights his approach in this book and what should be the approach of anyone who teaches from the Bible:

The Holy Spirit is not capricious or careless in His use of words. It is incumbent upon us, therefore, to handle the text of Scripture attentively and accurately. If we are to form a correct understanding of the facts of the story (and, consequently, to arrive at sound theological conclusions), it is vital that we carefully observe the details — and confine our conclusions to the information explicitly communicated by those details (p. 87).

Bonus: Congratulations to Susanne on the 200th Friday’s Fave Five post! She asks how we first came to participate in FFF. I had been reading her anyway, so when she started FFF I jumped right in fairly soon. I think some of my family reads these weekly posts even if they don’t read the rest of my blog, LOL! 😀 It’s been a great way to review the week and remember God’s blessings in it.

Hope you have a great weekend! Jason’s birthday was Wednesday but we’re celebrating tomorrow, and I’m looking forward to that.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

It’s been a blissfully not-as-busy-as-it has-been-lately week. Here are some of the best parts of it.

1. A new HVAC unit. You may remember we’d been having trouble with our AC lately, and a new unit was put in Monday. Though we hated to spend the money on it, it’s nice to have a unit that works well (and should for a long time!) and is more efficient. And a part of that was a digital thermostat — our old one was hard to get right where you wanted it some times.

2. Rain. My favorite kind of rain — gentle, no thunder or lightning. It’s rained a little almost every day this week, and though some weeks that would depress me, it has been sorely needed and it has dropped the temperatures a bit.

3. External hard drives and the fact that I had just backed my photos up last week. When I logged onto Picasa yesterday, it said, “No Photos Found.” :-0 I found their instructions for what to do about that (uninstall and reinstall Picasa), and everything worked out all right, but it was such a relief to know all the photos were safe.

4. Good meals. Cooking is not really my favorite thing, and when it’s busy I tend to reach for frozen or boxed things that require a minimum of effort. But it’s been nice this week to do some “real” cooking.

5. A good visit with Jim’s mom. I’ve mentioned before that it can be discouraging to go visit her at her assisted living place because we can tend to have the same conversations (sometimes over and over in the same visit), or she’s sleepy: one time I just got there (after a 20-minute drive), and she said she wanted to lay her head down and go to sleep, so of course I told her to go ahead. So it’s really nice sometimes to feel like we’ve made a connection and communicated and even laughed together.

Hope you have a great weekend!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

This week hasn’t been quite as busy as the last few, thank the Lord. Here are some of the best parts of it:

1. Unexpected guests. I have to admit, to my shame, when the possibility first came up, my first thoughts were about how much work it would take to get ready for them and the uncomfortableness of having strangers in my home all weekend. But I Peter 1:9 kept running through my mind: “Use hospitality one to another without grudging.” We looked at our schedules and obligations for the weekend, and there was really no reason we couldn’t host these guys. As I mentioned last week, I had done a bunch of cleaning already, so there wasn’t that much to prepare for, and with teen guys, they don’t really care so much. 🙂 There was a youth group from another church coming through on their way to camp, their youth pastor had interned here a few years ago (before our time), and he wanted his teens to get together with our teens. So they went tubing and had Nerf gun wars. 🙂 One of the guys we had hit it off with Jesse immediately, and the other is a fairly new Christian with a unique situation: I think Jim and I were able to encourage him a bit, and we’ve been burdened to pray for him since. All in all it was a very good experience and I’m so glad God prompted us to have them.

2. Magnetic curtain rods helped us cover some windows on two metal doors. I’d thought about getting them off and on for months. They don’t have them in any store I looked at in town, but I found them online.

3. Air conditioning and ceiling fans. I know I have said that before, and I will probably say it again. Temperatures here were in the 100s this week (104 yesterday). The AC has been extremely helpful but had trouble keeping up yesterday, so the fans helped, too.

4. Work for Jesse. He hasn’t found a regular summer job yet. but a man in our church with his own business had some work for him this week.

5. New clothes. I have a hard time finding things I like that fit well that don’t cost a mint, but a couple of my everyday dresses were so worn they had torn. Thankfully I found a few things online.

Hope you’ve had a great week, too.

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

Another busy week…I was wishing we could have a week, or even two in a row, with nothing at all scheduled. Looks like it might be a few weeks before that’s a possibility! But they haven’t been bad weeks for all that. Here are some of the highlights of the last week:

1. Father’s Day. It’s nice to have a time set aside to honor Dads, even though of course we honor them in our hearts all year. The family pitched in to make dinner: Jason and Mittu grilled hamburgers instead of Dad doing so, and Jesse shucked corn and set the table. I try to give one or two fun “nerdy” gifts as well as practical ones, and found some good ones this year (a little tank controlled by an iPhone and a caliper pen) that he liked. We got to FaceTime with Jeremy during the present opening. Grandma was in rare form (though somehow she thought it was her hundredth birthday — she turns 84 next month). All in all it was a good day.

2. The passing of the longest day of the year. The Summer Equinox was Wednesday, I believe. Even though I like having more daylight much better than all the darkness during winter, it has been staying light so late that it’s hard to wind down and get ready to go to sleep at an appropriate time.

3. An inspiration to clean earlier in the week….when I didn’t know I’d be having unexpected company over the weekend. It helped a lot to have a great portion of the cleaning already done.

4. Completing my Spring Reading Thing Goals. I haven’t checked to see how often that has happened, but I think I’ve missed it more often than not.

5. A new CD: By Faith by the Galkin Evangelistic Team. I’ve been wearing it out, especially the song “The Perfect Wisdom.”

Bonus: My Mother’s Day roses are flourishing!

Happy Friday! Have a good weekend!

Welcome to Friday’s Fave Five, hosted by Susanne at Living to Tell the Story, in which we can share five of our favorite things from the last week, a wonderful exercise in looking for and appreciating the good things God blesses us with. Click on the button to learn more, then go to Susanne’s to read others’ faves and link up your own.

OK, so what happened to the slower, lazy, laid-back days of summer? 🙂 They seem to be too fast and too busy, but here are some of the highlights of the last week:

1. A replaced gift card. Almost two years ago when we moved one week and then went back to SC to help Jeremy move, I had a birthday in there, and my main gift was a sizable gift card. Somewhere in all the shuffling, it got lost. I knew I had put it back in the birthday card and assumed I’d find it as I continued unpacking, but didn’t. After some months I told my husband about it. We still had the receipt, so he was going to see if they would replace it. But here that store isn’t near us, so we just kept forgetting about it. We had to go somewhere the week before last that was near that place and finally took care of it, and after taking the information and checking their records, they sent us a replacement. They didn’t even take any off the balance — Jim said it was illegal to do so now. So that’s a relief, and now I can plan a shopping excursion. 🙂

2. Touring a local community college. They seemed really on top of things, everyone was very helpful,  and we were impressed.They have ties with several universities, so after getting a two-year associates degree he can go on to a university and have his credits transfer. And he gets plunged into his major courses right away, so he can find out early on whether the major he is interested in in one that he likes and can handle.

3. Good talks. If Jesse goes to the above college, which seems likely at this point, he’ll be the first of my children not to go to a Christian college. That makes me both sad and apprehensive, but we had a good talk about ways to handle that. A couple of kids from his high school are going there, he’ll be living at home and going to the same church, so hopefully he will stay grounded. Of course, ultimately, whether in a Christian or secular place, one’s own relationship with the Lord needs to be maintained and one needs to walk closely with Him.

4. Mexican food! We went to a Mexican food place for lunch after the tour Monday and then had enchiladas last night.

5. Finishing books. Books are always a favorite. but I was bogged down in a long one for a while, so it was nice to complete that and get on to some others.

I keep thinking the next week will be slower and less busy, but it hasn’t happened so far. Maybe this will be the week that comes true! 🙂