Summer and Sundays

We've seen some crazy weather systems this summer.  

One early morning in June (and I mean '1:30' a.m. early) we found ourselves ~ a small band of the PJ-clad and the utterly fascinated, woken from sleep and standing slack-jaw in front of an upper story bedroom window.  

Slack jawed and naive I might add.

The violence & fury of thunder & lightning of that night (along with the hurricane force winds bowing our trees every which way) was matched, perhaps even trumped! 

at the end of August ~ 

a storm we watched from a basement window this time around.

Saner yes, but not near as much bang for your buck as the saying goes.

                            And yet ...

Who can watch such a display of power and might and not feel very small indeed?

This is what I've come to appreciate most about Storms in general, whether they be spiritual, physical, emotional or geographical...

they put me in my place and in a proper perspective.

Dependent and very much at the mercy of the Creator of the universe.

The same One who scoops the ocean in his two hands,

measures the sky between thumb and pinkie,

who marches an army of stars out each night, 

counts them off, calls each by name...

Calls each by name!

Seriously, who do we think we are?

Who even comes close to being like God?

We had a terrific sermon this morning covering 

the comfort message of Isaiah 40.  

What a great Word that is.

Need some encouragement?

You'll find it there in spades.

Happy Sabbath Rest to all.

Summer Sweeping By

Four grandchildren are heading off to school for the first time this September.  

Apparently, my angst over this fact shows up all over my face.  Now, when this delightful passel of pure innocence barges through the door ~ all tripping over each other in the mad crush to be the first to update me with the latest school supplies, they check themselves.  They even assume an apologetic tone and quickly assure me that they can still visit when they have holidays.
Pfft!!

      I am trying to put on a braver face and act more mature.

The grandkids are wearing their crochet hat creations by Tricia.
As soon as I can recover the name of her business, I shall set up a link here.

L'il Ones Custom Crochet Creations

Thanks Amy!  :)

One thing I AM celebrating with great pleasure

is the completion of my first ever blog book!

 A Once-in-a-lifetime trip to England in 2008 with my baby girl was encapsulated in my first ever blog which in turn has finally become my first ever blog book.
I had set aside July to get that job done and missed that deadline by a mere three days.  

160 high quality gloss pages showcasing more than 600 photos and accompanied with copious amounts of  journalling and memories.

 I am extremely pleased with the results.  And trust me, 

ANYONE can do this if I can.  

Look up Blurb Booksmart  and let your imagination go!

A fitting tribute to summers end may be a picture of my first ever sighting of the Cicada.

Who can even imagine the haze of those hot summer days without the piercing buzz of the Cicada? 

One of these locust-looking insects woke me up at 4am from its perch on the foyer wall a few weeks ago and I simply had to take a picture.  

Then I had to find some courage to 'dispose' of it somehow so I could get back to sleep.

This particular specimen was about two inches in length, VERY leggy and three dimensional.

 I could not stomach the idea of splatting it against the wall so I swatted it with a wad of wet paper towel and scurried it out the front door.

*ish*

It was minus two legs ~ carnage I found in the morning.  Ugh.

Cemetery Sentiment

The monument went up this week.

We quite like it.  Once the landscapers in my life have spruced up the grounds surrounding it, we'll re-post another portrait of mom's resting place.

To clarify, our sister's tombstone is flat and was right beside mom's 'plot' (that word just sounds strange in my ears) and it was moved to become the new foot-stone of a double side by side burial plot  * spot/place/grave?!    A headstone wide enough to straddle both spaces :) and engraved with Moms chosen scripture verse, turned out to be a convenient and meaningful way to respect our mothers' desire for a more 'family' oriented resting place.

I'd like to take this opportunity to publicly thank and recommend the services and staff of Kitching Steepe and Ludwig Funeral Home.   Respectful, compassionate, professional, amazing....these are the words that come so easily to mind in describing our experience with them.

Supply of monuments is a new and welcome complement to their many fine ways 

of assisting families with their final arrangements.

Union Cemetery in Waterdown is old, well-treed and now, almost at capacity.  

When our kids were young we would often end our family picnics at the Dundas Driving Park with a walk through the old cemetery up on the hill.  Many a pioneer cemetery in Ontario 

(and almost ALL the ones on the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia) have been traversed in quiet contemplation by myself and camera and usually accompanied by someone(s) I love.

Laying the body of my very young sister in the ground (and her still born child before that) was an experience of the soul-shaping sort; one that sparked a yearning 

to be found standing in a cemetery on The Day ~ that final day of this world as we know it.  

On that day, at the sound of God's command and a trumpet call like something 

OUT OF THIS WORLD, 

(uhm...Duh! :) 

I will see Jesus coming down from heaven and THEN...

all the dead in Christ will rise first!

And then, after that?   Those of us who are still alive 

and are left will be caught up together with the throng of rising dead in the clouds 

to meet the Lord in the air!

.... and so we will be with the Lord forever.
I Thessalonians 4: 13ff

Yep.  The Bible tells me so.  And I believe it.

A cemetery will be a front row seat to the unspeakably spectacular.  

The camera won't matter so much.
Being there with someone(s) I love, will.

Hummingbird Bumble Bee

It's not what I had envisioned at all.
Immobile on a holiday Monday and wincing with every little turn of the back muscles.
Felled by the simple act of filling the kiddie pool with tap water, one (too heavy) pail at a time.
But look, not all is lost.
I am fixed to a comfy outdoor chair on the front porch.
Sans hurry and hassle, I've been able to spend time putting the final touches on my first ever blog book and I can pause randomly to marvel at the gardens before me with warm summer breezes on my face.
Moments ago, during one such break noting the brilliance of the purple petunia's cascading out of the urn, a very odd looking oversized bumble bee with an equally oversized beak suddenly appeared out of nowhere, relieving that same profusion of purple from some of its nectar.
I am amazed.  A bumblebee behaving like a hummingbird.
A quick google confirms that that is precisely what it is.... a hummingbird bumblebee.  The smallest bird in the world with a maximum length of 2.5 inches, is often mistaken for an insect.

Delighted to have witnessed this pleasure amidst the pain.  That is a wonder-full treat!

The Cost of Discipleship

Good morning dear reader.  I trust you slept well last night and are enjoying your morning coffee - black.
:)  ??
C.S. Lewis when tired and cranky?  Not so much.
I should know.  I've been ferreting my way through a whack of his stuff lately, celebrating the near conclusion of my first ever blog book:  Off to England!  Oxbridge 2008 -- an account of a two week adventure at the CS Lewis conference in Oxford and Cambridge, England with my daughter Catherine. It has been a marvellous summer so far recollecting that experience, through picture and journal and coming to the end of a project started so long ago.
All things in its appointed time.

Here's a bite size section of his classic Mere Christianity.
....You got that coffee going right?

                                                   *****************

The ordinary idea which we all have before we become Christians is this.

We take as a starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests.  

We then admit that something else -- call it "morality" or "decent behaviour" or "the good of society" -- has claims on this self;  claims which interfere with its own desires.  

What we mean by "being good" is giving in to those claims. 

Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call "wrong":  

well, we must give them up!  

Other things, which the self did not want to do, turn out to be what we call "right": 

well, we shall have to do them! 

But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes.  

In fact, we are very like an honest man paying his taxes.  

He pays them all right, 

but he does hope that there will be enough left over 

for him to live on.  

Because we are still taking our natural self as the starting point.

As long as we are thinking that way, one or other of two results is likely to follow.
Either we give up trying to be good, or else we become very unhappy indeed.  For make no mistake:  if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self....it will not have enough left over to live on.    
The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.
And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.  In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who, as they say, "live for others" but always in a discontented, grumbling way -- always wondering why the others do not notice it more, and always making a martyr of yourself.  And once you have become that, you will be a far greater pest to anyone who has to live with you than you would have been if you had remained frankly selfish.
The Christian way is different: harder, and easier.
Christ says, "Give me All.  I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work:  I want You.

I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it!
No half-measures are any good.  I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there.
I want to have the whole tree down.  I don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out.  Hand over the whole natural self,
all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked -- the whole outfit.
I will give you a new self instead.
In fact, I will give you Myself:  my own will shall become yours."

C.S. Lewis Readings for Meditation and Reflection edited by Walter Hooper

Right now, I'm fussing over the chapter in the blog book about Ely Cathedral  

(pictured on the horizon above). 

Ely is a positively gargantuan Gothic Cathedral 

built 1083-1375 A.D. 

Our visit there was a worship experience like none other for both my little girl and myself.  

Captured in no less than 134 digital photos during a one hour walkabout in spine-tingling wordless wonder that left us with an impression SO indelible - it makes me almost too fearful to even try (make record of it). 

But I am pushing myself to get it down on paper and I've given myself the month of July to be done with this once and for all!

  

A far more ancient and demanding vow needs to be fulfilled this summer...  

Organizing all the music in the music room.  

Ugh.

I'm going for a Venti Bold Pike Place from Starbucks.

The Weight of Glory

If you asked twenty good men today what they thought the highest of the virtues, 

nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness.  

But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, 

Love.

You see what has happened?

A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance.  

The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily 

of securing good things for others, 

but of going without them ourselves, 

as if our abstinence and not their happiness 

was the important point.  

I do not think this is the Christian virtue of Love.  

The New Testament has lots to say about self-denial, but not about self-denial as an end in itself.  

We are told to deny ourselves and to take up our crosses in order that we may follow Christ; 

and nearly every description of what we shall ultimately find 

if we do so 

contains an appeal to desire.

If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that 

to desire our own good 

and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, 

I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.  

Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward 

and the staggering nature 

of the rewards promised in the Gospels, 

it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires 

not too strong, but too weak.  

We are half-hearted creatures, 

fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, 

like an ignorant child 

who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum 

because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer 

of a holiday at the sea.  

We are far too easily pleased.

That is an excerpt of The Weight of Glory by C.S. Lewis.

It shows up in the opening pages of Desiring God by John Piper as he expounds his description of that strange phrase "Christian Hedonism".  

Desiring God is the upcoming bible study for small groups in my church family.  

I sense something in the air.  

There's a wind around us setting things astir.

With my beloved I will commit the remainder of my summer to:

pray specifically

for it to pick up speed, 

point out truth

pin us down with conviction

prevail mightily over us and 

push us forward.

When a child is born...

This post is dedicated to my sister Pauline, 

who became a grandmother earlier this month and who 

now knows intimately, 

the vast sweeping 'rebirth' of the heart

that the process brings to bear...

I will never EVER forget the weekend of our own grandparental coronation....

Inexpressibly glorious!

Three live births in one summer weekend, and one little body laid to rest.

...followed close by even more delightful little lives entering the family flock...

Seven with three in heaven.

Awaiting one little one still in his womb.... :)

And what's a 5th birthday anyway when we have all of eternity?

I can't help it.  

I have to finish this post with the words of yet another song playing in my heart.

God of My Fathers by Andrew Peterson 

from his incredible album Counting the Stars

God of my fathers

Huddled in the harbor

Every man an ocean from his home

Their captors could not keep them

When they heard the drums of freedom

The dream of a kingdom

In a land they've never known

And God of my fathers

Strangers in this country

Pilgrims on these dusty roads

Across the great plains

In the bellies of the steel trains

To stake a new claim

In that wilderness of hope

Like my fathers I am looking for a home

Looking for a home beyond the sea

So be my God and guide me

Till I lie beneath the hills

Then let the great God of my fathers

Be the great God of my children still

God of my grandfathers

Gone these many years now

I guess they're shining like the sun

And I envision them

Grinning at the finish

And they smile and they smile,

'Cause they love to see me run

CHORUS

Now we're counting stars and counting sand

Little feet and little hands

We're counting joys

We pray you'll know them

As you knew us when you wove us

As you hold us

Hold them, please hold them

Like their father, they are looking for a home

Looking for a home beyond the sea

So be their God and guide them

Till they lie beneath these hills

And let the great God of their father

Be the great God of their children,

Let the great God of my fathers

Be the great God of my children still

Counting the Stars

You must introduce yourself to this artist, singer-songwriter, published author extraordinaire.

You must and that's that!  :)

Be blessed.