fifty really is quite nifty

HAPPY 50TH BIRTHDAY 

TO MY HUSBAND, RICHARD --

  A GREAT HUSBAND AND DAD.

GOD BLESS YOU ALWAYS, HON!

  

Monday morsel: "entering into the exuberance" (from I Corinthians)

Yesterday at church the sermon was about this passage from I Corinthians 12, about the body being made up of many parts.  I'm sharing the Message paraphrase version of it today.

 I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.
 

But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?

 The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

Yellow-blue-red and the Rolling Stones

If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you'll know what a "yellow-blue-red" is.  If you haven't, and therefore don't know, let me break it down for you:

"Yellow-blue-red" is what Jonathan calls his all-time favourite activity:  he throws the ball into the top of this apparatus and catches it as it comes out the yellow, blue, or red hole at the bottom.  His schoolyard (pictured here) has one of these, and Jonathan has spent countless recesses out on the yard playing yellow-blue-red.

We found out recently that a new section is going to be added onto the school to accommodate the transition to all-day kindergarten in the fall.  So we'd had warning, but it still came as a surprise when Jonathan and I went to the school this past weekend (after having been away for a week on our trip out east) and saw that the construction fencing was all set up.  And at first it appeared that the yellow-blue-red was confined inside the construction site.  Oh, no!!!

But as we got a little closer, we realized that wasn't the case:  the yellow-blue-red had been moved to a different location.  The principal, whom I happened to bump into at the grocery store on Sunday, told me it had been made clear to the construction crew that they would have to move this item and install it in a location where a particular child could play with it.  And on Monday Jonathan's EA told me that the caretaker, Rob, who is a special buddy of Jonathan's, had supervised this operation and made sure the yellow-blue-red was put in a suitable place.

The Rolling Stones told us way back in 1969 that "you can't always get what you want."  And that's a good thing to be reminded of.  The world can't always revolve around our individual preferences; there are many things we would like to have or do that just aren't possible.  Coming to realize that we're fairly small players in the overall scheme is usually a healthy and humble insight.  

But when it turns out that our particular needs or wants have been addressed, that we've been noticed and accommodated, it feels good.  We may be small, but we matter.  That's how I felt when I saw the yellow-blue-red in its new location outside the construction fence.  Jonathan's needs had been taken into account, and his happiness was clearly important to the school.

Sometimes, apparently, you can get what you want -- without even having to ask.

Monday morsel, repeat edition: "Home"

I almost forgot to post a "Monday morsel" for today!  We were in PEI this past week and I hadn't given it any thought.  So I'm posting a pre-used morsel today.  (I could call it a regurgitated morsel, but that would be gross.)  

This one is from last year:  I wrote it after our last trip to PEI in August 2013, and other than the part about sitting outside under the tree (it was way too cold for that this time!), it pretty much still holds true.

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"Home" (from August 2013)

We arrived home Saturday night after a three-week vacation in PEI with my parents and family.  We had a lovely time:  plenty of sunshine, laughter, relaxing times under the chestnut tree, and ice cream (Peanut Butter Sensation from ADL dairies is my new best friend).

In spite of the great time we had in my childhood home, it also felt really good to get back to our family home in Kingston last night and to putter around this morning with our own stuff and our own routine.  So my small "morsel" for today is this excerpt from the song "Finally Coming Home" by the group Shores of Newfoundland.

And as I walk along

The long and winding road,

I remember every rock and tree

And I don't have far to go.

I'll soon sit in the kitchen

With the family that I know;

Oh, nothing beats the feeling

Of finally coming home.

Whose Fault? - guest post at Tim Fall's blog

Today I'm very happy to have a guest post up at Tim Fall's blog, "Just One Train Wreck After Another."

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Whose Fault? 

The other day I went to take cash out of the bank machine.  The prompts the machine gave me looked a little different from the way they usually do, but I wasn’t fazed:  it had been a while since I’d taken money out, and they update these things all the time, right?

But then a notice popped up saying, “YOU WILL BE CHARGED A $2.00 PROCESSING FEE PLUS YOUR OWN BANK’S CHARGES.”  Did I want to proceed, or cancel?

Click HERE to read the rest at Tim's place....