Despite waking up to a fresh blanket of snow again this morning, I kept hearing the very clear sound of a Spring songbird just now.
Soooooooo after much difficulty, I have managed to narrow down all of the name suggestions you guys gave me from my post “What Should I Name the Cat”. That was hard! There were so many good ideas, but I did finally get it narrowed down to two.
Since moving into this house last August, we have been dealing with mouse problems. It’s an old ranch house; what can a person expect, right? Well, part of the reason it was so bad is probably due to the contents of the shed/garage outside. You see there are at least six massive seed sacks (the ones that require a skid steer to move them) filled with seed peas stored there.
The answer to that question is found in the story about how I was motivated to create this blog in the first place.
I was really challenged by the devotional I read this morning to ask myself this question: Am I living above my circumstances? (When I am honest with myself, the answer most days is probably not.) The phrase “living above your circumstances” is one of those phrases that sounds REALLY good, but we don’t really understand what it means, how to get there, or if it’s even possible.
Amanda on her third birthday.
Some of us were raised in a family that make birthdays a big ordeal while others were raised in a way that birthdays really weren’t much different than any other day. Either way I’m sure we’ve all experienced birthdays where we were a little disappointed for one reason or another. Maybe you didn’t get any gifts, maybe you ended up spending the day alone with no one to celebrate with, or maybe you had an awful day at work. Your expectations and hopes were far from being met on “your” day. Are you familiar with what I am talking about?
Have you ever read the children’s book called Are You My Mother? It follows a baby bird who hatched from his egg while his mother was away from the nest. He ends up leaving the nest and searching for his “missing” mother amongst every other imaginable species (i.e. dog, cat, cow, equipment, etc.).
Here is my story of one species taking another species as their own!
What habit or character trait do you wish you could change? Are you a chronic “snooze button slapper”? Maybe your weakness is always eating whatever sugary delight is available even when you know you should stop. Or maybe you get sucked into that dangerous addiction of scrolling Facebook!
Most of us have some “secret” tendency or trait about ourselves that we have been trying to change or get rid of for as long as we can remember. We don’t like it! No matter how frustrated we get with ourselves we can never seem to drum up the discipline to change this tendency for good. We bounce back and forth between renewed determination to change and a frustration that makes us stop trying altogether.
Can you relate?
I wanted to share this short poem with you all. It’s definitely a personal favorite probably because I have had SO many similar experiences to the one it’s describing. Can you relate?
The little cares that fretted me,
I lost them yesterday
Among the fields above the sea,
Among the winds that play,
Among the lowing of the herds,
The humming of the bees.
