Miscellany Monday

Thought I would take a minute this Monday morning for a little update and some miscellany.



1. I love sunshine. It's amazing how a nice day of sun and above freezing temperatures can make me feel like a new person and like all is right in the world.

2. I'm reading Donald Miller's book Searching for God Knows What. I LOVE Donald Miller. He is probably the exact opposite of me, the way our brains work, but I still love his books and I feel like God teaches me a lot through them. This is probably due to the whole his brain working different from mine. He talks about how God is not a God of formulas and rules. I like formulas and rules because I can understand and control them. And often times I try to take what I am reading in scripture and make a formula or if-then statement out of it. Donald talks about trying to listen to what God wants to say to you when reading scripture. So simple, I know. And I feel like an idiot that this is an epiphany for me. But I am always trying to fit scripture into some formula or something that makes sense to me, rather than just asking God what he wants to say to me. So I'm going to try that approach. I'm pretty excited about it!

3. Did you know that they are coming out with a new Oregon Trail game? Did anyone else love playing Oregon Trail in elementary school? Unfortunately it is going to be a facebook game and I don't really like facebook and I especially don't like facebook games. This is probably a good thing because the last thing I need to be doing is spending time playing computer games.

4. Sometimes I check to see what kind of jobs are available in my company's Honolulu office. Today was one of those times.

5. Sweet Callie at Through Clouded Glass gave me a lovely little blog award. You're supposed to list 7-10 things about yourself and then give the award to 5-7 other bloggers. So here are my 7-10 things:



a. I LOVE to ski and have been going to Colorado to ski just about every year since 7th grade.
b. I'm not great at decorating. Derek has decorated much of our house. I like looking at pretty rooms and  houses and wish my house was better decorated, but I hate spending money on decorations, so I go with the less is more philosophy and don't do anything.
c. I used to have an obsession with Robert Smith, running back for Ohio State and then the Minnesota Vikings. I became a Minnesota Vikings fan in 6th grade when he went there to play football. I was a huge Vikings fan until he retired and then I stopped following them. I tried to do school projects and reports on the Vikings. Recently Derek found my confirmation workbook from 7th grade. One question asked who you wanted to be like. I wrote the Saints (like the holy historical people, not the football team) and Robert Smith. I was such a strange kid (and by kid I mean teenager, when it's no longer cute to be strange.)
d. I have a huge irrational fear of throwing up and being around anyone who is throwing up. This makes me concerned for pregnancy and motherhood.
e. I don't like trying to come up with things to say about myself because I feel like there is a lot of pressure to make yourself seem interesting and not put the obvious boring stuff down.
f.  If I could have one thing, guilt free and money was not a factor, I would have a boat. I love being out on the water in the sunshine.
g. I hate carbonation. For that reason I do not, nor have I ever drank any sort of soda product. It is a painful and unpleasant experience for me.

Whew! I made it through the hard part. Now the fun part of passing this along. This one goes out to:

Kristin at Windy Poplars
Chloe at Tryin to Throw my Arms Around the World
Carissa at lowercase letters (the lovely host of miscellany monday)
Amber at the Survival Guide for the Young, Fabulous and Newlywed
Molly at Stilletos and Diapers

Happy Monday friends!

The Great Banquet

The Parable of the Great Banquet

 ¹⁵ When one of those at the table with him heard this, he said to Jesus, “Blessed is the one who will eat at the feast in the kingdom of God.”

 ¹⁶ Jesus replied: “A certain man was preparing a great banquet and invited many guests. ¹⁷ At the time of the banquet he sent his servant to tell those who had been invited, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’

   ¹⁸ “But they all alike began to make excuses. The first said, ‘I have just bought a field, and I must go and see it. Please excuse me.’

   ¹⁹ “Another said, ‘I have just bought five yoke of oxen, and I’m on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’

   ²⁰ “Still another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’

   ²¹ “The servant came back and reported this to his master. Then the owner of the house became angry and ordered his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame.’

   ²² “‘Sir,’ the servant said, ‘what you ordered has been done, but there is still room.’

   ²³ “Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and compel them to come in, so that my house will be full. ²⁴ I tell you, not one of those who were invited will get a taste of my banquet.’”

As I said in my post yesterday, we talked about this parable at our young life leadership meeting on Friday. There were lots of good things that came out of it, but one question that we discussed, I cannot get out of my mind. The question was this - Why do you think the poor, crippled, blind and lame were invited?

The answer I thought was easy - they have nothing better to do. Of course they would come to a great banquet, they probably never get invited to anything.

And to me this was convicting. How often do I have too many other things to do than be with Jesus? I probably wouldn't say out loud that I have better things to do, but when you look at my time, that would likely be the conclusion you draw. 

And the truth is I like it that way. I like filling my schedule up with all sorts of things to make me feel important and loved. And if I look around at a lot of us who call ourselves Christians, a lot of what I see is people who claim to love Jesus, but still try to fill their lives up with the things of this world. We're not that different from non-Christians. We might not get drunk when we go out on the weekends, but we still want to fill our weekends up with friends and fun. We may try to avoid certain sins, but we still spend more of our time on ourselves, our families, our houses, our stuff and whatever we can to make us feel good. And I know a lot of times (in my case especially) we spend a lot of our time doing stuff "for God" that there is no time left to just be with Him.

Ironically, after leadership on Friday, Derek and I didn't have anything to do. And I felt kind of bummed. I was pretty sure that some of our friends would be hanging out, but no one had called us. And when stuff like that happens, I always feel so bummed out. I wonder why no one called me. I've gotten better at dealing with this (see my post on the idol of importance) and I know that it's ok if I'm not invited to everything all the time, but it still kind of stinks when it's a weekend night and no one called you to see what you were up to.

After talking about this parable though, for the first time, I think I was glad to be in that situation. I realized that when I have time like that, a whole evening with nothing that I feel compelled to do, then I am available to be with Jesus. And that to be the person that everyone calls when they want to hang out may not actually be the best thing. I realized that I don't always have to have a full calendar of things to do. I want to have "nothing better to do" than to just be with Jesus. What a blessing. 

Now, before you go feeling sorry for me like I have no friends (or before the friends I have read this and feel like jerks) I must say that we do have great friends who we do spend a lot of our time with that I love and are a huge blessing in my life. And I am not mad at my friends for not calling me all the time to see what I am doing. I don't call them all the time either. I know we have probably all felt this way at some point. My point is that I don't need to always have something to do or someone to hang out with. To have "nothing better to do" is really a blessing. And I need to work on making my schedule more like that of a social outcast than a social butterfly, so I won't miss out on the best thing - being with God.

So Friday night, Derek and I went home and spent some time reading scripture, talking, praying a lot and just being with God. And it was so good. And there really is nothing I would have rather been doing. I hope this is a lesson I keep with me for a long time.

Weekend Recap

This weekend was such a good weekend. I want to write it down so I don't forget. Not that it was anything extra special. Just a good weekend. I think we are always looking for something really special and exciting to happen all the time, but I want to remember just the ordinary days because that's where most of life happens. I won't have any pictures this post either, because I didn't take any this weekend. Again, it was ordinary. But here are the highlights for my own reference.

Friday
I have the day off! Derek does too (for the most part) and we stay in bed til after 11. We decide we should go to the gym so we put our gym clothes on. Derek is having basketball goals fixed at the church so he wants to stop by and check them out real quick on our way. While we're there, one of our LCA guys shows up. They know Derek works there so he came in to see if D was there. Friday was a snow day and a bunch of them were meeting at the church to go sledding. So once Derek got done with work stuff we go out and watch them sled and encourage them to do dumb stuff while we watch and laugh. A good hour later everyone is freezing and ready for lunch. So we join them at Cane's (fried chicken) instead of going to the gym. Oh well.

The cats have an afternoon vet appointment. Our efforts to put Topanga on a diet have been for not as she has only managed to lose a half a pound in a year. Now we must feed the cats separately and we have new special food for Topanga. After a rough weekend they are adjusting better. At first Feeny wouldn't eat because Topanga wasn't there. I tried to have her eat in the bathroom but Feeny just sat outside the bathroom and wouldn't eat. So I let them eat together and tried to just keep them eating out of only their own bowl. Well of course Feeny wanted the special (very expensive) food and Topanga wanted the regular food. So after some experimenting they are eating separately and both are eating a combination of both foods. Or they just got hungry enough to eat whatever I gave them wherever they were. Hopefully Topanga loses weight fast so this feeding ordeal will be temporary.

We had young life leadership Friday. We are talking about parables, specifically we talked about the parable of the banquet. This will get its own post soon, but it was good. After leadership we went to Brooklyn pizza and talked, like really good conversation, then went home and read scripture together and prayed. I loved it. I love that we can be honest with each other and really share what is going on. I wish we did that more often. But it was really good for both of us. Then we watched Twilight Eclipse. I know what you're thinking - how do you go from reading the Bible to watching Twilight. But the heart wants what it wants and we wanted to watch vampires. I blame my sister in law Kayla for getting us hooked when we watched the first two visiting her in Pennsylvania.

Saturday
Today Derek woke up early to go to work. I slept til 10:30. Who am I? How come I love to sleep so much recently? Anywho, this was a low key day. My big goal for the weekend was to organize our pictures. We have so many pictures from the last 5+ years that were all in 1 big box, not organized or anything. So I put them in chronological order. Now I just need to find some cheapy cheap albums to put them in. And still go through all the digital photos and print off the good ones of those. Luckily I have a $25 shutterfly credit, so that should help. I walked Moose, caught up on blogs and generally just hung around the house until I met my friend Carly for Starbucks. We talked for 2 hours. I loved it. Clearly we have not seen each other enough recently. Then I met my friend Kaelyn for dinner and we went to Centenary to watch her boyfriend's basketball game. He plays in the league Derek runs so I got to see D too! After that game Derek was done for the day so we went to get some dinner at Shamrocks with our friend Keith and watched more Boy Meets World. Happy night!

Sunday
Woke up for 9:45 church - are you impressed? Loved the service. Found out the church is starting some small groups to read the book Radical together. We have been wanting to get more involved with the church, but it's hard because we spend so much time doing young life stuff. We decided on a whim to join a small group that meets after church. It's at the house of the parents of some LCA students. And I'm so glad we went. First of all, it was good to be some of the youngest people there. We spend a lot of time with high schoolers, making us usually the oldest ones. There were 3 couples in our group who have high school aged children, and I loved sitting from the vantage point of being the younger ones. Also,  our discussion was great and I think that God is going to do something really cool with this. I am excited to see what happens.

The rest of Sunday was spent grocery shopping, reading my Bible, cooking (a new recipe - holla!) and with our first campaigners (Bible study with high school students) of the semester. I love love love our LCA students and we ended up having a really good discussion in which I was able to speak some hard truth to some of them, and they were actually appreciative of it. You know how it's so much easier to just agree with someone when they feel justified in their sin. Well God totally gave me words to speak truth and encourage them to live like Christ instead of the world, and they totally got it! It was such a great feeling to see that they got it, and to know that I was bold and spoke truth when I wasn't sure how they would react and it wasn't what they wanted to hear. I must remember this and do it more often. God is so faithful.

So that was the weekend. Sorry for long post with no words. But I'm glad I wrote it down so I can remember  one day what our typical every days at this point in our life looked like.

Learning the new camera

So I mentioned that I got a new fancy pants camera for Christmas. Well one reason that I wanted said fancy pants camera is because I wanted to be able to push the button and picture to take. Not push the button, wait while the camera does whatever it does and then have the picture take a second or 2 later. By then I usually missed the shot I wanted, especially if it was a picture of one of my nephews or of my pup. I can't tell you how many pictures I have had to delete because who/whatever I was taking the picture of moved and was no longer doing what I wanted to take a picture of, was looking away or was out of the shot all together.

Since we have had a lot of snow, I thought I would take my pup outside and mess with some of the different settings and see what happened. And I got some fun pictures that I have never been able to get before - Moose running. And they are in focus (mostly) and he is in the picture! Such a happy day. Here is what I'm talking about:

This last one is my fave. I know these aren't quite as sharp as one taken when he isn't moving:

But when you consider that he was coming at me full speed, I am pretty pleased that I was able to get some motion shots that are so clear. Yay for fast shutter speeds!

For this post I am linking up with Farm Girl Paints for her thrive project. She is taking photography classes and sharing what she is learning and then having a link up where you can practice those skills and show what you got. So these are my pics with a fast shutter speed. I'm loving learning all that this camera is capable of!

Things We Love

I absolutely love Fridays - especially when I don't have to work. And last night there was a snow storm, meaning we were stuck inside. With no where that we had to be today. So we watched episodes of one of our favorite shows:

In  my opinion (and Derek's too) season 4 is probably the best season of Boy Meets World. We laugh, we cry, we relive our childhood. Ok, so we don't really cry, but I've come close a couple of times. It's such a good show! Anyone else out there a Boy Meets World Fan?

Pretty

Today I don't have a whole lot to blog about so I thought I would share with you a collage of pretty things I made on Polyvore.

Find me on Polyvore

Dream Home

Derek is real excited this year about the HGTV Dream House.

He enters to win twice most days.

When he sees commercials for it, he refers to it as "my dream house".

He says that everything about this house is his dream house.

The other night when we were in bed, I asked him if he could live anywhere in the world where would it be. He said Stowe, Vermont, in the dream house.

I asked him what he would do there. This was his reply:

Make fires.
Have snowball fights.
Make ginger bread houses.
Make pizzas.
Go for hikes.
Read.
Go skiing.
Sleep in bunkbeds. {He said that we would share a bunk.}

I asked if he would be willing to up and move from Lexington. He said yes. But he said we would keep our house as our summer house. Since you also win $500,000. I guess he's thinking pay off our house while we're at it and keep both.

I asked what we would do for jobs. He said he would write books and I would edit them. In case you didn't know, I'm an engineer. If I'm the one editing his books I think we're in trouble.

The contest ends February 18. I'll let you know if we win.