Thanksgiving Afterglow

This Thanksgiving, my goal is to embrace all the imperfections — to recognize them, in fact, as the perfect circumstances in which to practice being grateful. Every time I catch myself silently grousing about something that’s not going my way, I’ll counter it by naming three blessings. I’ll put more effort into sharing love than I put into wielding control. I’ll remember that gratitude isn’t about your circumstances as much as it’s about your outlook. And if I can do that, I might finally get a taste of what it really means to be thankful.

 — Jennifer Fulwiler is a writer for the National Catholic Register, and she blogs at ConversionDiary.com.

The Third and Final Thanksgiving (for this year)

 We forgot to take pictures at Thanksgiving #2 with Grammy and Grandad on Sunday.  Oops.  Not sure how that happened with so many photographers in the house.

Meet yesterday's Official Photographer: Eva deleted all my pics and replaced them with a few of her own.

Aunt Naomi was kind enough to photograph our photographer--and plenty of other people, too.                              Photography is in the genes.

Two of the stars of Eva's show: Aunt Brittany and Cousin Ashley

Aunt Shirley from the three foot perspective--our hostess and a star of the Thanksgiving show every year

Know Them By Their Fruit

The fruits of philosophy are the important thing, not the philosophy itself. When we ask the time, we don’t want to know how watches are made.

– Georg Christopher Lichtenburg

HT: Feast of Booths

Early Thanksgiving

Our first visit from Cousin #4!  (Uncle Jeff, Aunt Candi, and Noah have been here before, of course.)

Daddy's household from fifteen years ago.

Grandma Otto and her fans

Reality vs. Ideals

Elisabeth Elliot...

"Everything is the King's business, which he looks on in loving sympathy and understanding, for, as Baron Von Hugel said, "The chain of cause and effect which makes up human life, is bisected at every point by a vertical line relating us and all we do to God." This is what He has given us to do, this task here on this earth, not the task we aspired to do, but this one. The absurdities involved cut us down to size. The great discrepancy between what we envisioned and what we've got force us to be real. And God is our great Reality, more real than the realest of earthly conditions, and unchanging Reality. It is His providence that has put us where we are. It's where we belong. It is for us to receive it-all of it, humbly, quietly, thankfully."


"May I offer to Him my feeling of the dislocation between reality and my ideals, that great chasm which separates the person I long to be, the work I long to do for Him, the family I struggle to perfect for His glory--from the actuality? I may indeed, for it is God Himself who stirs my heart to desire, and He can easily see across the chasm. He enfolds all of it, He is at work in me and in those I pray for, "to will and to do of his good pleasure" (Phil 2:13)."

Thanks for the amazing quote, Sara!

Spy Girls

 Anna came across a copy of Talmudge's spy code from back in General Washington's Revolutionary War days.  That was all she needed for inspiration to start a girls' spy club.  After aliases were chosen and a few coded letters exchanged it was time for their first official club meeting complete with homemade dolphin membership badges and a spy history reading.

These girls mean business

Covert operation underway

Cael says, "Spy whuh?"

I AM

Just supposing for the sake of argument that there is a being of such a kind as that He may with any propriety be called “God,” it does seem antecedently very improbable that weak and limited creatures of a day, such as we are, should discover Him by our own efforts without any will on His part to make Himself known to us. At least, I think we can say that a god who could be discovered in that way would hardly be worth discovering. A mere passive subject of human investigation is certainly not a living God who can satisfy the longing of our souls... A divine being that could be discovered by my efforts, apart from His gracious will to reveal Himself to me and to others, would be either a mere name for a certain aspect of man’s own nature, a God that we could find within us, or else at best a mere passive thing that would be subject to investigation like the substances that are analyzed in a laboratory. I think we ought to stick to that principle rather firmly. I think we ought to be rather sure that we cannot know God unless God has been pleased to reveal Himself to us.”

―J. Gresham Machen, The Christian Faith in the Modern World

HT: Feast of Booths

A Fun Friday

Earlier this month, I had the privilege of spending time in Little Rock with the four wonderful people shown above.  Dawson, Elisha, and I attended a piano workshop with Eastman's Tony Caramia in the morning.  Then after an excellent lunch at Root Cafe and a brief perusal of the library book sale, we met Ian and Anna for a tour of Columbus's two surviving ships.  

Okay, they were Nina and Pinta replicas, but they were handmade using techniques form the fifteenth century and they were fully operational.  It was more fun (and cheaper!) to take the tour with several other friends.  

Thirty years after Columbus did his thing across the Atlantic, Magellan was using this same type of dinky ship to sail around the world! 

Our Li'l Punkins

Cael

Evangeline

Jocelyn

Lewis

Anna

Ian?

When She Grows Up

Nancy Wilson has a post on young adult women in our culture that is well worth checking out.  Here's a tantalizing tidbit or two:

God does everything the opposite way of what we think. At the end of the day, it’s not prestige and a paycheck that rise up to call you blessed. Those things burn up. The things that last, the eternal things, have fat faces and messy hands.

Christian women must be counter-cultural and think like women of faith who take the Bible seriously and don’t mind who knows it. The flesh is weak, but God gives more faith.  Cultural cliches come and go, but God’s Word remains our standard and authority for life.

This means that Christian women must accept the fact that God has designed them for a set purpose. Eve was created because Adam needed a helper. He was no good without her. A man needs a woman to accomplish all God is calling him to do. She is his glory. She is his crown. There’s no need to feel apologetic about being a crown and a glory. What an absurd idea!

So, young women, get yourself an education. Learn all you can because you’re going to need it. You want to be one efficient, brilliant helper so this guy you married can get it done. He needs a home and he needs a family and you are the means God has appointed to bring this amazing thing about. What a delight and privilege our calling is.

Are there exceptions? Always. But there is also a norm. Don’t be afraid of embracing the norm of God’s design. It is good.

There's some edifying interaction in the comments, too, so the entire post deserves attention.

Pumpkin Patch Progeny

Even though we seem to be lacking pictures of the actual pumpkin patch and corn maze, a great time was had by all.  We love us some good  Peebles farm fun.

Eternal Perspective

Steve Gershom has an excellent blog post up today dealing with how we live life to the fullest:

Death is the mother of beauty: this was my mantra for years. I had to live, Live!, because one day I would be dead and what did I want it to say on my gravestone?

So I constantly questioned myself: was I living life to the fullest? Was I wringing the maximum enjoyment out of every moment? Did I embrace every experience with open arms, or did I hide from life? Was I fully awake, or did I ever let myself coast along on autopilot? Was I joyful, was I alive, was I having EXPERIENCES??

Try living that way and see if it doesn’t make you a nervous wreck. The irony is that I was doing my best to celebrate life, but there was no atmosphere of celebration about my desperate grasping after experience. That wasn’t joy, it was fear. Fear of not meeting the deadline, fear of flunking at life — in short, fear of death.

If you want proof, think back to the last time you were really happy — not just content, but happy, awed, sublimely assured of the goodness of things. Were you thinking about death? Were you glad, because the world was perishing and you were surrounded by dying flesh, which made everything more precious?

Probably not. It was eternity you were tasting. Children know that the last two weeks of summer vacation are impossible to enjoy, because you can’t forget that death/school is just around the corner.2

Live every day as if it were your last, goes the saying. That might be good advice if you’re the kind of person who pays no attention to life, who feels no stirring of guilt after days of nothing but sleep, pot, and video games. But if your natural tendency is introspection, I think a better motto is this: Live every day as if you were going to live forever.

Which is, by the way, true. But the afterlife isn’t an extended epilogue, where all the adventure is over and we get to sit on comfy sofas, reminiscing. Heaven isn’t Stevens’ stagnant paradise, where “the boughs / Hang always heavy in that perfect sky, / Unchanging.” Heaven is where the story begins.

There are too many loose ends in this life, too many unanswered questions, for it to be anything but a prologue.

There's more good stuff in the full article linked above.  I love Steve's ending for the same reason I love Lewis's Great Divorce.  Both remind us that "eyes have not seen, nor ears heard . . . all that God has prepared for those who love Him."  For my own conclusion, I'll quote Lewis again: "Further up, and further in!"

Fair Thee Well

Grandparents and grandchildren agree: a perfect day for the Arkansas State Fair.