I can't wait for the prose...

My husband's father made our daughter the most wonderful "stable" (hint...NOT A STABLE AT ALL!).  He researched it and even wrote an essay on the findings but I just couldn't wait to post the pics...

Phillipeans 4:8

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable –if anything is excellent or praiseworthy –think about such things.


Have I posted this yet?  I felt like it was a good verse for promotion of the arts :)
AAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD
I just opened a batch of photos from my sissy and this was one of them...Sigh..............

No giant revelations for today...

No giant revelations for today...

Giving

So we have this Tzedakah money and I've been trying to think of what to do with it... A group I know gave presents to a needy family for Christmas and while that's lovely, I know that "needy" in America is different than other countries.
-Here is a friend's shop JoBead that I like to frequent with proceeds benefiting Wellspring International
-I need to ask another friend about the details of her trip to Africa -I'm not sure exactly which church she attends but while I was searching for it I came across this family's mission work and how inspiring!  Slager Family through Community Church -Fond du Lac
-Yet another friend and her husband packed up a couple years ago and spent months helping a school in Belize.  They were at the top of the giving ladder as they taught English and helped the students learn basic work and study skills.

Whoops! Forgot yesterday but i

Whoops! Forgot yesterday but i was thinking about tseduko donation options and chatted about being a millenialist...

My gift of "donation in

My gift of "donation in your name" to time of grace was very well received :)

I will lift up mine

I will lift up mine eyes to the hills whence cometh the help-

Christmas -A time for everyone (mostly)

This year has brought about some unexpected events but more than that, it's brought about a connected feeling in me.  For the past few years I was a scrooge of sorts.  Dishing out the presents and cards my own way but never being very spirited about it.  Last year- My musically finicky husband turned on the Christmas music and that was pretty cool.  This year- I embraced that Christmas music from Thanksgiving on and the joy in my heart has amped up :)  Thanks also to some tunes suggested by my mom and my sissy-in-law and a cd combo sent by my friend...
Anyway.
Christmas is not the be-all end-all but it is a wonderful season and it's really neat to be able to feel like everyone's on the same page for at least one day a year.

Happy almost Jesus birthday !

So much to say




:)
And so little energy to think about it all.  The gift-giving season has left me tired and hungry but I'm thankful.  So very very thankful.

123 45 678 9 10

123 45 678 9 10 11 12
(you.ll understand when i get to posting that cool song)

Tzedakah: Charity

I don't remember if I've linked to this exact page before but I remember reading it before when researching Tzedakah and I found it really lovely today as we are knee deep in the Holidays!
Judaism 101: Tzedakah

OH!  And I will have to research this a little but a wonderful friend gave me a holiday CD by a huge baptist church in Texas and I simply LOVE their jazzy rendition of the 12 days of Christmas :) I promise to find a way to post it soon.

Value of life

My friend's father is dying of liver failure (after surviving throat cancer!  But he can't survive the alcohol abuse...) so for whatever reason, after talking to his girlfriend tonight I typed "value of life" into my favorite bible search engine.
1 Timothy 4
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons.  Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.  They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.  For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
     If you point these things out to the brothers, you will be a good minister of Christ Jesus, brought up in the truths of the faith and of the good teaching that you have followed.  Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives' tales; rather, train yourself to be godly.  For physical training is of some value, but godliness has value for all things, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

A few things...

Put a twenty in our Tzedakah box because we have SUCH generous family and friends...It's not even Christmas yet!  And we've been showed with lovely and amazing gifts.
The more I know about who I am and the God I believe in the easier it is to let comments roll off my back (no more bristles at Republican jokes?!).
Just a little bit of scripture goes a long way.  I mean.  Just cracking my Bible can cure the ache for His word.

Hebrews 5:11-14
We have much to say about this, but it is hard to explain because you are slow to learn.  In fact, though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again.  You need milk, not solid food!  Anyone who lives on milk, being still an infant, is not acquainted with the teaching about righteousness.  But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil.

1 Corinthians 13:11 or The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XXI

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.

Parenting mag

My parenting magazine had an article about being spiritual.  Maybe believing in God will come around to being popular?

Lost confidence

I was just relaying to my sales rep something that happened to me late in the work day yesterday...
This client -She behaved so abnormally that I immediately lost my confidence and I felt like my "decision maker" was broken!!  All of a sudden I couldn't determine how to resolve my project issue for the life of me.  I just felt helpless and powerless and that is anti-Nell...Especially at work.  But the slowness of her voice and the dramatic pauses and the misunderstanding of my simple explanations is the opposite of every other business owner I've worked with and that dramatic shift made me feel helpless because I couldn't even begin to predict what to expect!!!
And I wonder if people have felt that way about God?
I wonder if people have felt abandoned by the norm and felt that they all of a sudden don't know what to expect and loose confidence in God??

I was browsing all morning for some bible verse that spoke to that and I'm not sure I've come up with it yet but I heart the first chapter of Hebrews:)
...but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.  The Son is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being,...After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven...when God brings his firstborn into the world, he says, "Let all God's angels worship him."..."therefore God, your God, has set (him) above (his) companions by anointing (him) with the oil of joy"...

It is so easy to

It is so easy to be joyful when unexpexted good things happen... And so easy to be frustrated when unexpected negative things happen

Spiritually Prude

I listened to an interview today with the author of The Butterfly Mosque and one of the things she described was how she'd always had feelings about God from even a very young age but she never knew how to express them.  She pointed out that Americans are really quite spiritually prude.  We don't frequently even have the vocabulary to describe what we're feeling!!
(of course, this is my very very super basic run down of what her well-spoken words really were)

The Butterfly Mosque

A Young American Woman's Journey to Love and Islam

By Willow Wilson

Twenty-seven-year-old G. Willow Wilson has already established herself as an accomplished writer on modern religion and the Middle East in publications such as The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Magazine. In her memoir, the Colorado-raised journalist tells her remarkable story of converting to Islam and falling in love with an Egyptian man in a turbulent post–9/11 world.
When Willow leaves her atheist parents in Denver to study at Boston University, she enrolls in an Islamic Studies course, hopeful that it will help her to understand her inchoate spirituality. As she reads through the teachings and events of the Quran, Willow is astounded and comforted by how deeply this fourteen-hundred-year-old document speaks to who she is, and decides to risk everything to convert to Islam and embark on a fated journey across continents and into an uncertain future.
She settles in Cairo where she teaches English and attempts to submerge herself in a culture based on her adopted religion. And then she meets Omar, a passionate young man with a mild resentment of the Western influences in his homeland. They fall in love, entering into a daring relationship that calls into question the very nature of family, belief, and tradition. Torn between the secular West and Muslim East, Willow—identifiably Western with her shock of red hair, shaky Arabic, and candor—records her intensely personal struggle to forge a “third culture” that might accommodate her own values without compromising them or the friends and family on both sides of the divide.
Part travelogue, love story, and memoir, The Butterfly Mosque is a brave, inspiring story of faith—in God, in each other, in ourselves, and in the ability of relationships to transcend cultural barriers and exist above the evils that threaten to keep us apart.

Also in my listening today were snippets of comments on meditation.  I know that's not typically a very Lutheran thing to do but from what I've read and heard it really sounds like an amazing habit...

Not much to say today

Not much to say today except i think im hitting the "convo about something spiritual every day" goal...

Creche

Thanks for expanding my vocab!  A creche (with a little thingy over the first e) can be a word for: Nativity scene: a three-dimensional representation of the scene at the birth of Jesus Christ.

Here are my daughter and her aunt/God-mom setting up the nativity set :) It's the same style that she will have when she's all grown up!  Last year was baby Jesus...wonder who'll come first now...Mary or Joseph?

I like what you said Mom about the spiritual world!  What a super lovely thought.  I guess I'd never really pictured an angel being right here but on another dimension.

It absolutely IS good "to look for it, to consider what the words say and look at how just about everything in the Bible can be interpreted and applied to our specific lives".  Which reminds me of when I was scribbling out Christmas cards and my husband wandered by and I excitedly showed him the verse that I'd picked to write on the cards and then he asked me what I thought the verse meant.  .  .  .  .
     And I totally stumbled over that question!
How silly but it took me a while to gather my thoughts and to try and explain even though I'd spent a good half hour picking it out and had already written it thirty times and mulled it over for hours while doing all that.

Charles Francois Poerson

The season is so full

The season is so full of "meaning". Not sure what exactly to do with so much of that...

Keep commenting

Man... It's been a bumpy week.  PMS plus winter weather plus work issues that just won't resolve themselves plus a postponed trip to congratulate and celebrate with a girlfriend.  And I should probably eat/drink better.  Someone on a radio program today said that our bodies are gifts from God and that we should treat them lovingly because they work so hard for us.  AND THAT'S TRUE!  And yet its hard to make good nutrition a priority when I'd rather be knitting than cooking :) And I'm just going to keep on rambling because that's my mood after just getting home from work (you heard me right...I call it a second-shift-Friday just like my husband has Thursday 2s [which is today by the way]).  I think I decided that I'm going to include our little family business card with all the Christmas cards and see if I can grow my readership?  Which brings me to say keep commenting!  I know I don't reply really but it's not because I don't want to -It's because my CPU won't let me (I really should fix whatever function is causing my comments not to post because it means that I can't post on anyone else's blog either which is such a drag because I read everywhere that that's the way to build an audience).  So that should be on the top of my post-Christmas to do list...to mow down whatever internet troll isn't letting me reply publicly to all the great things that are tacked on my website.
Ok.
I think that's it for now.  But I need to read again some more.  My content is thin lately.  I know I know I know.

Oh. And as tempting as

Oh. And as tempting as it was, i didnt use my ups account at work to overnight ship a friends shower gift :)

Schools used to use the

Schools used to use the bible for learning to read! I honestly never thought of that...

It.s almost Jesus birthday! I

It.s almost Jesus birthday! I would buy him "not-cheap" wine because that.s the best gift ever:)

GOD LOVES A CHEERFUL GIVER

Don't let the light go out!

Thanks original-C  :)

ONE MORE DAY

One more day left of being able to get a beautiful live concert in the comfort of your own pj bottoms!
http://www.blc.edu/events/christmasatbethany/

aging and mirrors

Ugh.  As I finish my shower and apply moisturizer I think...What's that commercial for the thing that makes you look younger?  Maybe I should try one of those anti-whatevers because I'm already looking older than I feel.
And then I think about one of the sermons I listened to a couple weeks ago.  The pastor said something about looking in the mirror and as I've gotten a little older I find that I just don't care to look in the mirror that much.  I'd honestly much rather feel the way I feel and not be disappointed by realizing the truth.
And then I think about how easy it is to move through life and avoid spirituality.
Not that it's less pressure to come up with some sort of (ok.  My daughter's potty chair just did it's little princess jingle.  That was pretty funny.  These musical kid things!?) Godly thought for the day but I feel really more at peace with having a tactic or a plan of attack for increasing my awareness and faith.  But I guess that's what I am in life.  A project manager :) whether I know it or not I'm always investigating and assessing and setting goals and checking my schedule.  And that checking the schedule thing is key because I think that's maybe the checking the mirror thing!  How have I progressed?  Better or worse??

Dreidel dreidel dreidel . . .

The story of Chanukah

Since the golden Menorah had been stolen by the Syrians, the Maccabees now made one of cheaper metal. When they wanted to light it, they found only a small cruse of pure olive oil bearing the seal of the High Priest Yochanan. It was sufficient to light only for one day. By a miracle of G-d, it continued to burn for eight days, till new oil was made available. That miracle proved that G-d had again taken His people under His protection. In memory of this, our sages appointed these eight days for annual thanksgiving and for lighting candles.

Immanuel

God is with us

Our friends had a baby!  Due on Christmas :) But even though he was a few weeks early (all you moms, fold your hands and bow your heads.  "Thank you for the quick delivery and recovery Lord") they blessed him with the middle name Immanuel -God is with us.

OH -And today was the first day of Hanukkah I believe.  And tomorrow I'm going to a Hanukkah lunch at my daughter's Jewish daycare-school  :) Pretty excited.

I will consider it an exercise in my trust in the Lord...

Was just thinking of how easy it would be to nervously check on my daughter every time she was sleeping soundly in her crib (especially after a couple days of restlessness...the silence is deafening!) but when I thought through the reason I can live with only putting my ear to the crack of her door once every night it was because I trust that God is taking care of my little girl.  And this may not be a big deal but hopefully its strengthening my truscles (get it?  trust//muscles??).

I pray that every parent can find some strength in letting their children be His.