In the morning, LORD, you hear my voice;
   in the morning I lay my requests before you
   and wait expectantly.

Psalm 5:3

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Have you ever tied a string around your finger to remind you of something important? I don’t know how that tradition got started, and while I’ve certainly needed help remembering things a lot these past couple of years, I’ve never tried the string method. Instead, I write myself notes and reminders on my day planner. Lots of them.

Sometimes right before dropping off to sleep at night I’ll suddenly think of something I need to do or someone I should call the next day, but I don’t want to get up and go downstairs to write it on my day planner. So I’ll reach over in the dark to turn the little cardinal figurine on my nightstand on its side, or put a piece of Kleenex on the floor in an odd way to jog my memory the next morning. So far I haven’t tried the novel idea of having a pen and paper handy on my nightstand — maybe I’ll try that next time.

But I have need of a reminder much more permanent than a string on a finger or a strategically placed tissue. Every day I need to be reminded that my life is a gift, and that my very breath comes from God. I need to remember that I belong to Him, and that I have been created and placed here for His good purposes. Too often I get up in the morning with a selfish bent toward my own vain choices, and a distressing habit of wandering away from Him.

These prayerful words from the song “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” could have been penned for me:

O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.

(words by Robert Robinson – 1758)

So each morning when I come downstairs to start my day, I am greeted by these words on our kitchen wall:

It’s a fairly large graphic, in blue and metallic silver letters, and I put it there as the most important reminder of all. The words are from Micah 6:8, which says:

He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

On any given day my day planner might read something like this:

– reconcile banking statement to ledger

– crockpot ingredients in at 10:00 a.m.

– bills in mail

– make dental appointment

– filing

– state paperwork for Fosters completed

– birthday card to Denel

– work on tests for training

– clean out master bedroom closet

– return library books

– pick up prescriptions

– wash bathroom floors

And this list would represent a fairly quiet day.

But no matter what’s on my to-do list, nothing really productive will be accomplished unless I first pay attention to the writing on the wall.

It’s pretty amazing how differently things usually go in my day, if I will just try to walk humbly with my God.

(from the archives….)

Here’s a short passage from Matthew chapter 19 about the rich young ruler and his meeting with Jesus:  That was the last thing the young man expected to hear. And so, crest-fallen, he walked away. He was holding on tight to a lot of things, and he couldn’t bear to let go.

Jesus looked straight into the heart and soul of the rich young ruler and revealed what was on the throne there — the man’s wealth. His money, his holdings, his stuff. He just couldn’t let any of it go.

Well, I’m going to let go of some more stuff.  These things just add to the hidden clutter in my house and as part of my attempt to donate 365 things in 2012, these are the next to go.

Below are two kitchen cabinet door handles that I bought online in 2007 to inspect and see if I wanted them in our kitchen remodeling project. I opted for other handles (which you can see here, among other photos of our house), and these two pictured have been in a drawer. The round one is supposed to be a lion, but at times it looked like an ape to me, and that wasn’t quite the look I was going for. (For those of you who are leaning toward the new Simian Kitchen trend, you might like the monkey pulls and I certainly don’t judge you.)

I don’t even know if we have the television connected to this remote. Why should it sit in a drawer?

I have rolled up and kept our yearly calendars in an armoire for years. I think there’s a sentimental part of me that didn’t want to throw out anything that said things like, “Kids coming overnight” or “trip up the North Shore,” or “Mr. McBoy’s 5th birthday.” These calendars have been journals of our lives, in a sense. But I’m going to throw away four of them. The oldest one is from the late 1990s. (I know. That’s a little strange. Oh well….I offer no defense.)

That’s my seven items this week. I’m letting them all go.

Have you thrown or donated anything this year yet?

It’s been said that Minnesota is the land of two seasons:

1. Winter is coming
2. Winter is here

We have -13 Fahrenheit, -25 Celsius on our front porch this morning.

God bless and warm your day, dear friends…

I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
   where does my help come from?
My help comes from the LORD,
   the Maker of heaven and earth.

Psalm 121:1-2

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In case you’re wondering what this is about, click here.

I’m bidding farewell to these next seven things. The pair of pajamas was a gift I bought for someone years ago and they didn’t fit her. So instead of returning them like any responsible person, I tucked them away on a closet shelf and they’ve been hibernating until now. Also, there’s nothing wrong with the books I’m giving away — these were good books, but just two I know I won’t read again, so I want to share them with someone else.

Did you do any donating recently? Even if they’re just small things, it feels good to pare down.

Have a wonderful week,

Hello friends — it’s Delurker Day! Yippee!

That means it’s time, just this one day of the year, for those of you who read blogs without usually leaving comments (otherwise known as “lurking”) to de-lurk yourself and leave a comment!

If you’re a blogger, you already know that bloggers love comments. We really appreciate knowing that someone out there is reading, and comments are the main way we’re encouraged to keep on blogging.

Today for Delurker Day, I humbly ask you to do one of four things. Are you ready? Are you willing? I hope so.

1. For bold delurkers:

Leave a comment, even if you have before — tell me your name and what part of the world you’re from. Tell me how you came to visit this blog. It’s so easy to do — just go to the bottom of this post and follow what the directions say, step by step. Say anything else you want, like “I’m Joyce and I raise Water Buffalos in Topeka, KS, and I happened upon your blog because I typed the word ‘muskrat’ into Google” or “My name is Herb and I live in New Zealand with my wife and six birds, and I found your blog because I was searching for Three Irish Girls yarn.” Anything at all! I love details. Details make me happy.

2. For delurkers of medium boldness:

Just leave a short comment, like “Hi, I’m Denise from Manitoba” or “My name is Fred.”

3. For shy delurkers:

You could leave a comment and say “I’m Suzanne and I live in Estonia but I don’t want anyone seeing my information so please don’t publish my comment.” That would be fine — tell me you don’t want your comment published and I won’t do it. It will just be between you and me. Comments on this blog just don’t appear online — I have to publish them myself, and if you don’t want me to, that’s okay.

4. For delurkers who couldn’t possibly picture themselves leaving a comment, ever:

Perhaps you could leave your initials! Go to the bottom of this post, follow the instructions, and instead of your name, you could type “RS” or “PB.” That would be fine and no one but me would see. But I would be thinking the next time I was dreaming up a blog post, “I wonder if RS or PB will stop by and read what I have to say anytime soon! I hope so.”

So there you have it — four levels of Delurking Comfort for all kinds of blog readers.

Will you consider letting me know about you today, on International Delurker Day? If you comment here often or never comment on this blog, I would be so glad to hear from you.  🙂

Thank you so much for reading, and commenting, I hope…

One of the decorating blogs I read occasionally had a fun post recently, and I liked it so much I thought I’d do a post like it here. Have you seen this website called I Used To Believe? It’s about the funny and bizarre things we used to believe as children.

Here are a few things I used to believe:

When I was a child, I believed that our bodies grew larger and taller because they literally filled up with food. I thought that if you ate something as a baby, that food would be deposited in your feet. And then all subsequent food eaten would slowly fill up the legs, the trunk, the arms and the rest of the body, and when all that accumulated food reached the top of the head and couldn’t find any more room, the body stretched and grew.

When I was a child I believed that the past tense for the word cost was costed. I think I said things like “that record costed $1.06” until I was close to 5th grade.

When I was a child I believed that when my oldest brother Larry would take me to the beach in his Corvette, if I sat up high on folded towels in the passenger seat next to him, people would think I was his girlfriend. Never mind that I was 8 and he was 23 — I was convinced that the folded towel trick would make me look like his date.

When I was a child I believed that most villains in the world looked like stooped, wizened old men carrying big burlap bags. The bags were to put kidnapped children in.

When I was a child I believed that if I swam out into the ocean as far as I could, way past the breaking waves and out into the deep water until I could barely see the people on the shore, that very point would be a mile. And during my growing up years in southern California, I did this every chance I got.

When I was a child I believed that babies came to families because the mommies and/or daddies prayed for them, and God graciously answered. When I was little my mother told me she prayed for a little girl and that God sent me. I loved that idea. I still do.

What did you used to believe when you were a child?

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse. To decide to make things better can cost you bundles of self-interest. To decide to make things worse generally feels a lot more powerful. The only problem is that the power rolls away from you like a rogue wave, as the person you slammed into finds someone else to slam into, and so on, and so on. The good news is that you can set off the same sort of chain reaction with unwarranted kindness.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, from An Altar in the World

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In the midst of a small campaign to give away one thing per day in the year 2012, I also have a few new things to show you that I will never part with.

I like water. I try to drink some every day. That means when I’m out running errands I often take a water bottle from home with me so when I’m thirsty I can keep hydrated with something good, and not impulsively decide to buy some kind of sweet coffee concoction or smoothie with 10% fruit and 749 calories. Here is what I now carry my water in, a travel cup from my dear friend Pat, who’s a fellow SAG.

I’ve never had one of these kinds of cups, and I love it. Most of all I love the thoughtfulness behind it. Pat knows the cardinal story, and in giving me this gift she is helping me hang on to hope. Do you have friends that help you hang on to hope? I really hope that you do.

It’s not that things are truly hopeless, it’s just that every so often I lose my clear view of hope, and need help getting back on the hope wagon.

Pat gave me a boost back on that wagon with this cup. Thank you Pat.

Next, I have a new B.

To be honest, I never had an old B. But that’s not the point. The point is, my niece Lauren and my sister-in-law Debbie sent me this for Christmas.

It’s the first letter of our last name, and it’s about the size of a book. The left side of the B is the spine of a dark blue Bible. Attached to the spine with a taupe ribbon (perfectly matching our living room) are three old keys, with the words “memory, life, and love” engraved on them.

The B is completely covered in scripture. You can click to enlarge the photos if you like. There are pertinent verses and passages pasted all over the letter.

When I opened the gift my eyes filled with tears, because this was such an amazingly thoughtful gift from family members who know what’s important to me, and made something to underscore those very things. I felt known, and loved.

They sent me this letter B to help me hang on to hope. Or to hang on to the Author of hope. 🙂

We put the B on the mantel and it will always be a blessing.

Thank you, Debbie and Lauren.

Right before Christmas I received a package in the mail from an old friend. Shari and I met in Junior High School in West Covina, CA, and were in a couple of classes together with this teacher we both still love.

Shari is a gifted artist and photographer and you can check out her beautiful photo blog here.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the package and received a large framed print of a photo Shari took of a cardinal.

The day it arrived was the sort of day when hope seems distant or faint. After I gazed at it through tears for a few minutes, thanking God for the timing of this stunning gift and for giving me friends who remind me to keep hoping, I went straight to our kitchen tool drawer and found a hammer and nail.

This breathtaking photo hangs on a prominent wall near our den, where we walk past it and look at it many times a day.

Thank you, Shari.

How grateful I am for friends and family who show their love and care in such personal, thoughtful ways!

I love this quote by Emily Dickenson:

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all.”

Today I can hear that wordless tune being sung, and see the brilliantly colored feathers of that thing called hope that’s perching in my soul.

And my friends and family help to make sure the tune of hope never stops at all.

What helps you hang on to hope?