Brad and I were sitting here watching "Dick Clarks Rocking Eve" (I know pretty pitiful right), and it reminded me of Addie Lane.
She has such a sweet heart and is so concerned about people not believing in Jesus. For the past week every day she asks "mommy, can we pray tonight that Hannah Montana will love Jesus".
(somehow she found out who she is, even against mommy's strong efforts to shelter her).
I just had to share that b/c I thought it was so sweet and then also b/c I am so challenged by her little heart! She can't fathom why someone wouldn't believe in Jesus! I pray she never looses that!
Isn't it amazing how our kids teach us things!
Monday, December 31, 2007
Rejoicing in Jesus
Pics to share
I think I may have figured out how to post pictures as well!
I wanted to share pictures from our Disney trip earlier this month!
We had a wonderful time (this was a Christmas present to the girls from Brad's brother and his wife).
You should be able to just click on this link to see the pictures from our trip!
thoughts as another year ends
OK, I decided to start a blog (as you can see).
I love reading friends blogs (when I remember to check them) and seeing pics of their kids growing up. I have been wanting to start one so I could share new pics of the girls and updates on them (and to have especially when we are in Baltimore for Lillie's surgery). So here we go... (we will see if I can do this!) Brad will be so surprised if this really works! He thinks I am computer illiterate! :-)
I also love to share encouraging things I am reading and learning so I thought too, rather than continue to bore people with emails I decided I would post that here too so people can read as they choose.
I was just reading on Piper's blog (which I am addicted to by the way) his most recent post and I thought it was so challenging as we think about a new year approaching. (He was actually quoting from someone he really respected in life). I was challenged to really consider what I am investing my time, energies, life into. There is so much around us to distract us from our "first love" and I thought this was great to bring our hearts back to Jesus and the important things in life....
Happy New Year!
may we all be more "lovers of Jesus" this coming year than we were this past year!
--------
10 Resolutions for Mental HealthDecember 31, 2007 By: John Piper Category: Commentary
On October 22, 1976, Clyde Kilby, who is now with Christ in Heaven, gave an unforgettable lecture. I went to hear him that night because I loved him. He had been one of my professors in English Literature at Wheaton College. He opened my eyes to more of life than I knew could be seen. O, what eyes he had! He was like his hero, C. S. Lewis, in this regard. When he spoke of the tree he saw on the way to class this morning, you wondered why you had been so blind all your life. Since those days in classes with Clyde Kilby, Psalm 19:1 has been central to my life: “The sky is telling the glory of God.”
That night Dr. Kilby had a pastoral heart and a poet’s eye. He pled with us to stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, but instead to drink in the remedies of God in nature. He was not naïve. He knew of sin. He knew of the necessity of redemption in Christ. But he would have said that Christ purchased new eyes for us as well as new hearts. His plea was that we stop being unamazed by the strange glory of ordinary things. He ended that lecture in 1976 with a list of resolutions. As a tribute to my teacher and a blessing to your soul, I offer them for your joy.
1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.
2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: "There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing."
3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.
4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.
5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.
6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their "divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic" existence.
7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the "child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder."
8. I shall follow Darwin's advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.
9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, "fulfill the moment as the moment." I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.
10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.
I love reading friends blogs (when I remember to check them) and seeing pics of their kids growing up. I have been wanting to start one so I could share new pics of the girls and updates on them (and to have especially when we are in Baltimore for Lillie's surgery). So here we go... (we will see if I can do this!) Brad will be so surprised if this really works! He thinks I am computer illiterate! :-)
I also love to share encouraging things I am reading and learning so I thought too, rather than continue to bore people with emails I decided I would post that here too so people can read as they choose.
I was just reading on Piper's blog (which I am addicted to by the way) his most recent post and I thought it was so challenging as we think about a new year approaching. (He was actually quoting from someone he really respected in life). I was challenged to really consider what I am investing my time, energies, life into. There is so much around us to distract us from our "first love" and I thought this was great to bring our hearts back to Jesus and the important things in life....
Happy New Year!
may we all be more "lovers of Jesus" this coming year than we were this past year!
--------
10 Resolutions for Mental HealthDecember 31, 2007 By: John Piper Category: Commentary
On October 22, 1976, Clyde Kilby, who is now with Christ in Heaven, gave an unforgettable lecture. I went to hear him that night because I loved him. He had been one of my professors in English Literature at Wheaton College. He opened my eyes to more of life than I knew could be seen. O, what eyes he had! He was like his hero, C. S. Lewis, in this regard. When he spoke of the tree he saw on the way to class this morning, you wondered why you had been so blind all your life. Since those days in classes with Clyde Kilby, Psalm 19:1 has been central to my life: “The sky is telling the glory of God.”
That night Dr. Kilby had a pastoral heart and a poet’s eye. He pled with us to stop seeking mental health in the mirror of self-analysis, but instead to drink in the remedies of God in nature. He was not naïve. He knew of sin. He knew of the necessity of redemption in Christ. But he would have said that Christ purchased new eyes for us as well as new hearts. His plea was that we stop being unamazed by the strange glory of ordinary things. He ended that lecture in 1976 with a list of resolutions. As a tribute to my teacher and a blessing to your soul, I offer them for your joy.
1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.
2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle, and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death when he said: "There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendor, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing."
3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence, but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.
4. I shall not turn my life into a thin, straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.
5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.
6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their "divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic" existence.
7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the "child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder."
8. I shall follow Darwin's advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.
9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, "fulfill the moment as the moment." I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.
10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.
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