TenThousandBeside

“For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, “In repentance and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”

But you were unwilling, and you said “NO! We will flee upon horses”;  therefore you shall flee away; and, “We will ride upon swift steeds”: therefore your pursuers shall be swift.  A thousand shall flee at the threat of one; at the trheat of five you shall flee, till you are left like a flagstaff on the top of a mountain, like a signal on a hill.

Therefore, the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himslef to show mercy to you.  For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.

Today I am going to try to choose repentance, rest, quietness and trust instead of fleeing on my own swift steed.

Hogan was a cute puppy that grew into an even more adorable friend, and we won’t forget him though it would be much easier if it were possible!   We could not have asked for a more obedient and loyal companion.  (OK, so he did jump up on visitors at the door, but that was his love language!)   I could never have predicted the depth of loss and sorrow upon being without him; he truly stole my heart – like he stole some other things….!   We have been blessed to have had such a unique and loving and soft and funny and outgoing animal to love and be loved by.  He expanded our concept of God as creator, and giver of good gifts; and the circumstances of this untimely loss have caused us to meditate on the finality of death and the temporal nature of life.  We are so thankful for our time with Hogan!  We have been helped by the love and condolences that we have received from many….thank you so much.

Hogan: aka Critter, Hogie, Hogie-Bogie, Bogram, Crit, wolf

Favorite Food: pizza, cheese, ham, carrots, clementines, ice, gingerbread houses (see slide show)

Favorite Places: under the dining room table (his den),  the back of the couch, mom & dad’s bed, anywhere near/touching a member of the pack

Unique Traits: greeted everyone in the family in the morning upon rising, or when they returned home; stood on hind feet for extended period of time & waving hands to beg; while riding in the car, barked or growled only at people wearing hats or sunglasses; always stayed “up” until mom went to bed; “super-dog” jumps from the couch to a visitor at the door or passing dog; recognized the sound of Thomas’ jeep at a very early age; recognized the places we would go in the car, and if pack members were not there as expected, whined!; thought he was a wolf; thought he was a person; waited by the door whenever anyone picked up some keys….hoping to go along wherever we were (obviously, with the keys) going; gave hugs, both full body and nudge style;

Tragic Flaw: amazing bolt speed, and propensity to exercise this skill whenever the opportunity arose to greet another dog

FOUR FEET

by Rudyard Kipling

I have done, mostly, what most men do,
And pushed it out of my mind;
But I can’t forget, if I wanted to,
Four-Feet trotting behind.

Day after day, the whole day through —
Wherever my road inclined —
Four-Feet said, “I am coming with you!”
And trotted along behind.

Now I must go by some other round, —
Which I shall never find —
Somewhere that does not carry the sound
Of Four-Feet trotting behind.

I am interested in this word because my daughter is desiring to learn Hebrew.  Latin, french, and greek are not sufficient for a consuming mind.  (actually I couldn’t be more thrilled, and I hope to learn a little along the way myself)   I discovered this word as I was researching a blog author.  I was reading her tips on journaling as a spiritual discipline and remembering the prayers in my own journal this morning and for weeks….please Lord, “clarity and confidence” as i forge ahead in my chaotic life.  It feels like the cacaphony just before the orchestra plays….if I could just get all the pieces together maybe there could be beautiful music.   Sometimes a measure or two of a song is faintly heard…. though mostly just tuning:  a lot of potential but no symphony.  Anyway, I was reading all these blog entries from The Relevant Conference where Christian bloggers are talking about  “how we’re called to do this blogging thing differently than everyone else in the larger blogosphere  may be doing it, so He can do things through us in the blogosphere that no one else is doing.”   I was a little skeptical, quite frankly.  I come from a long line of good judgmental stock, and these self-important bloggers just want to get read it seems to me!  (I, of course, just want to keep in touch with my fans…er I mean family!)  But I must now humble myself and admit that  I came upon a direct and magnificently specific answer to my prayers by reading Ann‘s writing, and can confidently say God did it through her in the blogosphere.   I’m not positive on copywrite and all that (my lawyer brain has suffered significant atrophy to the point of nonfunctioning) but I assume that if I provide a link and a source that I may here below quote to you some wonderful truth elegantly wrapped in a sincere offering of prose that glorifies God, and edifies me.  (and hopefully you too!)

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Do You Feel Broken and Fragmented? by Ann Voskamp

God has only one loom.

You wouldn’t think so by the fragmentation of our lives. Our days look like the scrap floor of a studio, frayed bits of work, remnants snipped off family, a heap of countless fabrics—ministry, creativity, worship, volunteerism. We’re ripped into pieces, and putting our lives together again is like turkey stitching a crazy quilt—driving us a bit crazy.

We’ve sheared the textile of our own lives. And it’s time to put down the scissors. Why cut up 100% pure avodah?

That’s what God’s weaving. God doesn’t experience a disconnect between our screens and our sanctuaries, between the people on our street and the paintbrushes on our desk. We have these labels for the bits and pieces of who we are and what we do. But God takes up the all the threads of being and weaves them into a seamless silk. He calls it avodah.

The Fabric of Work

He began the weaving in the beginning.  “The Lord God took the man and placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it” (Genesis 2:15). We read the translated word “work” and think that is what God meant for us to do. The Hebrew word is avodah. It is the same word in Exodus 34:21, in the writing of the Ten Commandments, “Six days you shall work….”  Six days you shall avodah.

The Fabric of Worship

But we know we’re meant for more than work. We know we’re meant to glorify God, to worship with our lives.Exodus 3:12 speaks to God’s serious call to this life of worship: “When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will worship God on this mountain.” We read “worship.” In Hebrew, the word reads avodah.

The Fabric of Service

And yet God Himself calls us to even more than work and worship. Deuteronomy 10:12 records the question and answer: “So now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” We read the English translation: to serve—to minister unto God, unto his people, unto the needy, the seeking, the hurting. The Hebrew original: avodah.

The Fabric of Creativity

We work. We worship. We serve. But there’s another integral element to our identity as human beings, the part that we’ve inherited from our Father who can’t stop creating, producing designs, dreaming beauty. 1 Chronicles 28:21 refers to these innovative, imaginative efforts: “The divisions of the priests and Levites are ready for all the work on the temple of God, and every willing man skilled in any craft will help you in all the work.” The text renders it as craft—creative acts, the arts—and God whispers again: avodah. He emphasizes his singular loom by whispering avodah twice in this one verse: work and craft are both expressed as avodah in the original Hebrew.
The ancient Hebrews even used the term avodah to describe the sacrifices offered in the temple.  And that is the key. To live a fully devoted, interwoven life, we must see everything as a sacrifice to God.

Nearly four hundred years ago, a man peeling potatoes as an act of worship, Brother Lawrence, said, “Our sanctification does not depend as much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God, rather than ourselves.” We don’t need to change activities from monetary work to missionary work to be devout. That very construct is false. All Christians are in full-time ministry. So we can stop tearing our lives into the categories of worldly and spiritual. We can put away the scissors of selfish ambitions and self-seeking comfort and self interests. If our lives feel fragmented, it’s because we are tearing up God’s one-piece fabric.

We wear God’s seamless silk when we mindfully offer everything we do as a sacrifice to God.  Paul explained this clearly to the Romans: “So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering” (Rom. 12:1 MSG).  When we see our lives as a sacrificial offering unto the Lord—avodah—our work becomes art and our art becomes ministry and our worship becomes serving and our serving becomes work.

Just as the “LORD our God is one LORD” (Deut. 6:4), so our God weaves all of life on only one loom, and there is only one word for the whole of lives rightly lived in sacrifice to Him.

100% pure Avodah.

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picture, which lost its caption somewhere, is of Chinese & Chocolate Cake with Heidorns, RayRay, & Tim…..a Wednesday night tradition.  🙂

So as you can see I READ blogs more than I work on my own…..but this blog is my fav in the whole world and you will learn so much, be so inspired, and have so much fun checking in with Edie, and making “hadicrafts” (for all you Charlotte Mason fans…  🙂 )

Not sure if this button will link to Edie’s blog or not, so just in case you can click HERE to experience the 12 days of handmade Christmas.  MY Edie and I will be following this Edie and we hope you can join us!  Blessings!

A little update: we are having a wonderful fall and enjoying the weather with chicken-nugget picnics.  You should try one!

The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship.

The humans live in time, and experience reality successively.

To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change.

And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating Pleasurable.

But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence.

He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call Rhythm.

He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme.

He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.

Now just as we pick out and exaggerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty. This demand is entirely our workmanship. If we neglect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and familiarity of snowdrops thisJanuary, sunrise this morning, plum pudding this Christmas. Children, until we have taught them better, will be perfectly happy with a seasonal round of games in which conkers succeed hopscotch as regularly as autumn follows summer. Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up.

—C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (reprint: HarperOne, 2001), pp. 135-137.

G.K. Chesteron:

A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun: and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.

It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

—”The Ethics of Elfland,” chapter 4 in Orthodoxy.

Reflecting on these visions and principles as I try to nail down our home schooling schedule…..a routine but not monotony.  Variety but stability.  A glorious rhythm and encore of education and discovery. Sorry for not posting for so long!!  This is why.  Also been doing some work to a free desk….it matches another that we have perfectly, so I’m going to paint  them to match for the twins.

And, we celebrated Eden’s believer’s baptism this weekend…it was glorious.