Some of you may recall that although I enjoy watercolor painting, I am often sadly unmotivated. Some people do the artsy things because they just have to, but that (apparently) isn’t the way I’m built. However, if I’ve promised to do a painting for someone, I can get it done. Thus was born what I called the “Lazy Artist Initiative.” I wish I’d chosen another word besides “Lazy,” – perhaps “Inactive,” or “Differently Motivated” – something like that. Whatever.
Here’s the latest painting I did for a friend who signed up to help me get motivated to paint.
It’s a copy of a watercolor painting I saw on Pinterest, but I added the Bible verse. Most of what I paint is a copy of what someone else did, but it’s a goal of mine to start doing more original artwork.
If you, too, would like to receive one of my little paintings, let me know in the comments. The only qualification is that you have to be someone I actually know. It’s a nice extra if you’ve subscribed to my blog, but not necessary. There’s no guarantee as to how long it will take me to do it – sort of depends on what other kinds of things are going on in my life – but I WILL get it done. Really!
That’s it for today! I might be too lazy to delete this in the morning.
When I walk, I think. I see things, I hear things, I muse about things, I wonder about things, I write things. In fact, I’m always writing, telling an inward story, a narrative, that sometimes emerges onto a computer screen or on paper.
The sight of so many withered leaves this morning recalled to my mind one of the first verses I ever memorized: Isaiah 64:6. “For all of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a filthy garment; and all of us wither like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” What a poetic image! A withered leaf hanging on a branch gets swept away by the wind, the same way our iniquities sweep us away. I think I memorized that verse to remind me of the universality of sin, and the futility of righteous deeds in accomplishing salvation for anyone. The only way to be cleaned up is in Christ. Filthy garments and withered leaves create quite a vivid picture in the mind, don’t they?
So, some fairly lofty thoughts going on there for a while as I walked in my heaviest winter coat with a scarf and warm hat to protect against the bitter cold. I often find winter walks more exhilarating than summer walks. I took a few photos of the things that caught my eye: church bells, a circle of Christmas bulbs that came up with the cold weather, the road ahead.
On my favorite part of the walk, a protected path that meanders by the cemetery, the regular sound of traffic was replaced by dull tappings of woodpeckers, a sharp conversation between two blue jays, a cheerful chickadee, a distant chain saw and the steady sound of my own footsteps. And I think to myself, what a wonderful God.
Thanks for joining me.
I’ll probably run a chain saw through this post in the morning.
One of the cheeriest parts of the Christmas season is all the Christmas lights and decorations that go up outside. The darkness of our days lengthens, but the dark nights are made lovely with a grand variety of colorful light displays. We used to walk around our neighborhood on these cold, dark nights with our children and rate the different displays. The rating system was from 1 to 10. The light display at our house received a 1 and all the other houses received scores that were relative to that. I wish I had a photo of the display we had for years and years, so you could see why ours was only rated a 1. Basically we used to put lights only on our balcony – some that went around the sides and top, and on the railing we had the kinds of lights that trail down like icicles. Our kids used to call it “The Gaping Maw.” My husband has bumped up our display since then and now drapes lights around most of the bushes in front of our house, as well as giving the balcony a better look.
So why do we all do this at Christmas time? Because it’s pretty? Nope. Because it makes us happy? Nope. Because we need to keep up with what the neighbors are doing? Definitely nope.
“The people who walk in darkness will see a great light; Those who live in a dark land, the light will shine on them.”
“…that you may proclaim the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.”
Every single house with its Christmas lights ablaze is proclaiming the gospel of Christ, the One who made light, the One who is light, the One who saves us out of the darkness of our sin into His marvelous light. All our Christmas lights at night are a loud hallelujah to Jesus.
I’ll probably delete this in the morning with a hallelujah!
I’m a big fan of whimsical poetry, both reading it and writing it. It doesn’t add much to the literature landscape, but it can bring a smile. Here’s one I wrote for my granddaughter.
The Leopard Did God make the leopard first, Or did He make the cat? One is big and spotted, The other small and fat.
Don’t go near the leopard, He’ll hurt you with his claws. But the cat will purr in your lap And knead you with her paws.
No, it’s not Turkey Day. I really must be firm on that issue. As Christians, of course, we don’t set aside just one day a year to thank God for our many blessings; we do it every day, sometimes every hour.
Now thank we all our God With heart and hands and voices, Who wondrous things hath done, In whom his world rejoices; Who from our mothers’ arms, Hath blessed us on our way With countless gifts of love, And still is ours today.
But it’s still a beautiful thing to have one day a year when our whole nation (supposedly) gives thanks to God, feasting on the visible fruits of His blessing, enjoying the fellowship of family and friends.
My family when I was growing up didn’t have many solid Thanksgiving traditions, other than cleaning the house to a fare-thee-well and having all the traditional victuals. Oh, and I remember every year we had to get the good silver out and get the tarnish off of it with some sort of paste. It was actually kind of satisfying work. We usually sang a Thanksgiving hymn as a form of grace.
Come, ye thankful people come, Raise the song of harvest home; All is safely gathering in, Ere the winter storms begin; God, our maker, doth provide For our wants to be supplied; Come to God’s own temple, come, Raise the song of harvest home.
What were your traditions?
(I probably could have done a little bit of cropping on that photo before posting it – included the original in a letter I recently sent to someone.)
Happy Thanksgiving, my friends!
I’ll probably be too busying stuffing a turkey to delete this in the morning.
Me: It’s almost time to leave to go swimming. Also me: I’m in the middle of a project. Maybe I’ll go a little later.
Me (a little later): You should swim laps today. Also me: I could always take a walk if I don’t go.
Me: It’s cold and rainy. You probably won’t go for a walk. Also me: I’m still recovering from a cold. I shouldn’t go lap swimming.
Me: The cold you had is in the rear-view mirror at this point. Also me: I just don’t feel like going swimming. What does it matter if I skip today? It’s not like I’ll never go again.
Me: If you leave soon, you’ll still have time to swim laps before it closes. Also me: Sigh. Okay. You’re right.
So, I went lap swimming. Me won the argument against Also Me, which was a sanctifying experience and of course, I’m glad I went. It’s not always that hard, but it was today.
As I was leaving the pool after finishing, the lifeguard sitting way across the other side of the pool waved at me. I waved back. She said something cheerful that sounded like it could have been “have a great day,” but there was music playing and I still had one of my ears plugged with silicon so I couldn’t really hear her. I said, “You too!” and hoped it was a fitting response.
Me: I’ll probably delete this in the morning. Also Me: What if I don’t feel like deleting it?
At last, the penultimate hike of our Hiking Club Adventures! We camped at Savanna Portage State Park in anticipation of doing the 5.3 mile hike in the morning. The park was surprisingly crowded with other campers and we realized that it’s been a while since we were camping on a weekend. Two young couples were camping right next to our site and they had a dog. I had a gloomy premonition of these young ‘uns making a lot of noise late into the night, followed by the dog’s incessant barking. Wrong on all counts, I’m glad to say. Remind me of this the next time you hear me uttering a gloomy premonition. Nip it, nip it, nip it!!
We had quite a bit of rain overnight and the forecast for the day was more of the same, so we decided to wear our rain gear for the hike and I left my big camera behind. With the length of the hike, using both hiking poles seemed prudent; Kris decided to use the extra pole. We took off from our tent site around 9:15 a.m., 61 degrees and overcast, which is actually nice hiking weather.
The early part of the hike took us up the Continental Divide Trail (the pamphlet described it this way: “…as it rises and falls for over two miles.” I was just a titch concerned about that.) Further up and further in! The trail was wide and mostly grassy, lots easier to walk on than the hike we’d just done at Bear Head State Park.
With all that uphill exertion, we both got hot pretty quickly. Kris shucked his raincoat early on, but I waited until later just in case my bare arms might be a magnet for any mosquitos still remaining.
When we got near the top of the Continental Divide Trail, we stopped off at Wolf Lake Overlook for a breather and to read the signs. We learned that Savanna Portage is so named because it is at this juncture that Lake Superior and the Mississippi River watersheds come closest together and there was a 6-mile canoe portage that went from one to the other. First the portage was used by Native Americans and later on by European settlers, fur traders, voyageurs, etc. Thinking about a 6-mile portage carrying canoes and gear made me exceedingly thankful to be hiking without carrying anything.
The Hiking Club hike is essentially a triangle of three trails with a sharp left turn from the top of the Continental Divide Trail onto the Old Schoolhouse Trail. We were getting a little giddy with the thought that we only have one more hike after this. Kris began singing, adapting the words to an old sea shanty:
One more hike, my Johnny, one more hike Oh rock and roll me over, one more hike.
Why don’t we have hiking shanties? The definition of a shanty is thus: “A song with a boisterous chorus, sung by sailors while heaving at the capstan or windlass or hoisting up heavy weights, to enable them to pull or heave together in time with the song.” I guess that answers that question, but begs another one: what should we call hiking songs? Trekkies? Huffy Puffies? Walkies?
The sun came out briefly along the Old Schoolhouse Trail. You know what song goes with that, don’t you? “Here comes the sun….here comes the sun…and I say, ‘it’s all right.’” A nod to the Beatles for that. A whole generation of us can’t help singing it when the sun comes out after a dreary absence – it’s practically Pavlovian at this point.
By the time we’d taken the final left turn onto the Anderson Road Trail, it was just starting to rain lightly. It was so humid that the rain felt good. We spent most of our time on that trail talking about making all of these hiking blog posts into a book. I don’t have any illusions about anybody wanting to actually publish these in book form, but there are some websites that are designed to help you make your own one-and-done book from blog posts. I’ll be looking into that. Here’s a working title for the book: “A Wimp’s Guide to Hiking Minnesota’s State Parks.” Thoughts? Suggestions?
The autumn colors made for some beautiful avenues along the way, and there were some orderly stands of tall pines that stood as an army of sentinels along the last part of the trail. I like to think that they were saluting us for finishing the hike.
One more hike, my Johnny…
Knee Score: 6 or 7 out of 10. The hiking poles were very helpful on this hike.
Jesus told Paul that he was sending him to the Gentiles “to open their eyes, in order to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God…”
Darkness to light Blindness to sight Damascus Road Kicking the goads From death to life An end to strife. Therefore be brave The gospel saves.
Isn’t that charming? This is one of the gifts my husband gave me for my birthday, so that each day I can read a poem and enjoy some beautiful artwork. Here’s today’s offering:
Pine Tree Tops In the blue night frost haze, the sky glows with the moon pine tree tops bend snow-blue, fade into sky, frost, starlight. The creak of boots. Rabbit tracks, deer tracks, what do we know. Gary Snyder
What do we know, indeed? I’m going to enjoy this book so much.
When my children were learning parts of speech, I created a fun game called Silly Sentences that was fairly popular for a time. Then it fell into obscurity, like so many things do, and sat in a plastic bin in our storeroom for the last 20 years.
In an effort to prune through our stuff, I came across the game bin and decided it was time to open it up and get rid of things. There were a lot of homemade games in that bin that I’d forgotten about – games that the kids made when we were all enthusiastic about the idea. It was fun looking through them all. The kids probably don’t want to see those again, but I set them aside for them anyway.
But now that I’m looking at Silly Sentences, I’m not sure if I can throw it away after all. You always started with a noun and as you went along the board, you collected the other parts of speech. When you came to one of the “Silly Sentence” markers, you had to put a sentence together with what you had. There were also options to add in a rhyme or a simile if you already had a verb. Then you’d start all over again with a new noun. You might end up with more than one of each card for your sentence.
So, randomly picking the top cards from each set, I’ll give an example: Noun: teddy bear Verb: Fly Adjective: Weird Adverb: Slowly
The weird teddy bear flew slowly over the field.
The weird teddy bear flew While the wind slowly blew
The weird teddy bear flew as slowly as a drifting feather.
This just might be too fun to throw away. I wonder if my husband would consider playing it with me?
This weird teddy blog will slowly fly away in the morning.
Lynniebeemuseoday 