I am so glad for the gift of friends.  Not just people I know, but people who are indeed friends.  I know many more people than I have friends, but I can honestly say that God has given me the treasure of many good friends.  They are not all like me, but I like them and they like me.  They don't all live in one place, but where ever I go and return, there are friends waiting for me.  By the grace of God I am a rich man in friends.  I am boasting in the Lord when I say that.  Earlier in my life I was a loner and lonely, so it hasn't always been this way for me.  In fact right before I r

Last night I played my electric Guitar for over an hour.  I am not a pick user, so my fingers do all the work.  Usually I have my finger nails long enough on the picking end of things to take a lot of the abuse of hitting the strings a lot.  Last night I started without that advantage and before the time was over, my finger was really hurting.   But I kept on playing, enduring the pain for the sake of the gain of what was happening.  My eyes are shut most of the time in this activity as I concentrate on the Lord.   So I was unaware of the fact that more than pain was happening.     

A question occurred to me this morning.  Would I like to wash my face in dirty, polluted water to get ready for the day?  And my answer, like yours, no doubt is:  Absolutely not!  Thinking about using filthy water to wash up in turns my stomach.  I look for clean fresh water to come out of our well, flow through the pipes and into my hands out of the faucet.  Splish splash. 

More times than not, I wake up groggy.  I am sure I am not the only one.  It takes me a while to get going.  Winter is worse than summer.  I seem to have a biological alarm clock keyed to the first early dawn light, so getting up before then is extra hard.  That is one of the reasons I like the summer.  The light clock goes off much earlier, and after it does I can't sleep.  Not that I am totally awake by any means, but the light definitely helps.  And it gives me a good jump on the day.

Yesterday we had a wind and rain storm that took us out off the electric power grid for over 24 hours.  So we were forced to unplug.  Time went slowly.  Projects got canceled. We endured and did some things that helped us cope.   We had no cooking ability, no water from our well, no heat from our boiler, no internet from our computers, no light from our lamps.   All because we are dependent on electric power to do all these things.  Everything we do in our normal day requires power.

Recently I had an extended and wonderful time with all five of my grandchildren.  Three of them were in our home in Oak Harbor for almost three weeks, and the other two were in and out frequently during this same time.  I have come to call this time a time of controlled chaos.  I was able to stay in control of emotions for my need for having things in order, and the grandchildren were able to have freedom of action to provide the chaos. 

So I was looking at one of my house plants yesterday, and it was drooping, leaves hanging over, stems bent down...not the way it normally appears at all.  Then I remembered:  It has been a while since I watered that plant.  Even though it has grown up in some wonderful ways, its previous growth was not able to sustain it in its present condition.  So it was drooping.  The stems which normally are able to uphold the large leaves were not strong enough. Some water and a few hours revived the plant.  

Most walls are higher than we can jump, unless of course they are the walls we place in the way of little children to keep them in a certain room.  And walls are almost always impossible to climb, with the exception of climbing walls, and even they are no walk in the park.  And walls are not easily broken through, without a great deal of effort and mayhem.  Finally most walls are not something we would want to break through.   But what if there is a wall in front of us that is designed to keep us in a small room, or back from a wide open and expansive future?

Sometimes we feel like our life is going down a certain track in a runaway train.  We can't stop, we can't turn around, we can't jump track and we can't change the apparent destination.  When this happens we need help.  I am so glad God can send that kind of help when we need it.