Hi, all!  I have had some requests to keep in touch with a reduced posting schedule.  Some have suggested once per week.  I think that I will leave it up to the Lord’s leading, posting today and playing it by ear as to the next one.

In the past couple of weeks while not blogging, I have finished an entirely hand-sewn blanket for my younger son, thoroughly organized the former disaster zone which was my older son’s room, bless his heart, and completely re-purposed my old brass “hope chest” that my big brother gave me many years ago for my graduation from high school.  It is one of those trunks, made of pressed wood on the inside, and having a façade (brass) on the exterior, with metal strips and rivets.  My husband is a whiz at color, and all it usually takes for me to get new ideas, is a walk through the hardware store with an eye toward alternate uses of the many products, and I can come up with something unique.  We got three beautiful strips (at under two bucks a pop) of linoleum flooring made to look like old weathered oak, and by cutting and piecing, I was able to make it look like an antique wooden trunk.  Garrett chose the coordinating paint color effect of weathered copper to repaint the trim and rivets.

Our fifteen-year-old got contacts last week, and he is in that period of teen-dom when the transition into adulthood is so rapid, you can almost see it taking place moment by moment.  I enjoy seeing his big blue eyes without the glasses on.

On a slightly disturbing note, the afore-mentioned son had just left a friends house last week around 7:30 pm (dusk), when three armed men attempted to kick in that friend’s front door, and this is with everyone home, cars out front, all the lights blazing.  Criminals are getting very bold.  I thank God the door did not “give”, though it cracked.  The thieves know that if they are going to do a break-in with people at home, the first kick has to get them in and they have to act in that instant of surprise and chaos, to subdue the people inside.  We assume that since the one kick did not open the door, that is the reason the perpetrators ran off.  They were armed with serious firepower, from what I understand.

If you have a flimsy door, there are things you can do to reinforce some of them, but the best bet is a solid door, with only enough glass in and directly around it, to allow you to see out.   If you have a fairly solid door, but it has a large glass frame in the top half, paint a sturdy piece of wood, and screw it in place from the inside, leaving only enough of the glass visible for you to be able to see out, but that would not allow anyone to bust out the glass and reach in and turn the knob.  I learned when I started our Neighborhood Watch, that typically when a group is working to break into a house, they will knock at the front door, and if no one answers, they will go bang on the back.  If no one answers there, that is when they attempt to get in.

The safest thing, though, is to always pray for supernatural protection (provided by “Angel Security”) of your home and your family, your neighborhood, and church.  I don’t remember if I blogged about the police training exercise our local force did 2 days after our break-in.  At the church nearest us, they asked for volunteers, and SWAT, police, and EMS all did a drill of a live-shooter in a church service.  Pretty sobering, but I think citizens volunteering to participate in those types of drills can help foster trust and cooperation with the police.  They are in a position they can’t afford to trust anyone fully, but where criminals come in every size, shape, color and age, I hope to be recognized as one of the good guys, to avoid any mix-ups should I find myself in the wrong place when some thug decides to pull a church heist or some other crime.

Well!  After the break-in (and our computer was among the losses), I believe the Lord helped me to sort of deal with some of the emotions I’d kept at bay through the past year, the accomplishment of keeping them at bay, having been partially accomplished by the busyness of monitoring the news and blogging about it.  So I had a week or more of just the utmost of feeling yucky and spent.  But after that, I got busy.  For anyone else out there living with chronic stuff, that’s the key!  You do have to process things, but it can be done in a controlled way.  Like grieving, few people have the luxury of just withdrawing from the demands of life, to do all their grieving at once and get it over with.  I don’t intend to sound overly simplistic, and maybe some people know this instinctively, but it has been something I have had to learn; you can grieve in intervals.  My inner self has gotten to be a lot like my son’s room was.  I threw out a full “tall kitchen garbage bag” full of literal trash from his room.  It included packaging from things he’d bought or received, numerous empty water bottles, broken pencils, shoes with no wear left in them whatsoever, a belt that was disintegrating, several dilapidated binders full of school work from the last couple of years, etc.  I finally found a used dresser at a decent price, (sixty bucks) which he was in dire need of, and I cleared off some shelves so he could have his boots lined up rather than exploding out of his over-stuffed closet.

I think sometimes our lives can be like that.  You know it’s getting cluttered, but the easy thing is to brush things aside, where they might roll under the bed or behind the dresser, and just get done what is right in front of you, rather than cleaning up behind yourself as you go along.

By the way, in my son’s defense, whenever we switch around rooms, I have normally been involved in the process and getting things set up and organized to start out.  This time, though, we switched during that period when I was physically out of commission, and so he didn’t have a good, orderly start in there.  I told him now, though, that he should just think of me as his drill sergeant and should just strive to maintain it in the present condition.  It will be good practice, and I have no doubt the army will instill organizational habits and skills in him that I have not been able to make “stick”.

Hubby is getting settled in at work, and folks there have been very supportive and encouraging.  We are very thankful for that.

Do you know what I miss the most that got stolen?  I miss my “GoBible“.  Can you believe they stole that?  Two of them, actually, because they got my husband’s too.  I am praying they will listen to it and it will do them some good.    I enjoyed being able to listen while I work, or listen to it being narrated while I read along in my own Bible.  (Alexander Scourby was a great narrator!)

Of three guitars stolen, Garrett misses his old Fender Stratacaster he had since high school, but the two others were ones he had hand-crafted himself, so they are all really irreplaceable.  We are still waiting for the insurance check that will cover some of the loss but not all.  Would you believe that the thieves even took his extra guitar strings!  When they took the laptop, they were even careful to also take the set of ear buds.

Well, I can tell not a whole lot has changed in any drastic way since I stopped with the daily posts.  Syria is still at war.  Everyone is still pretending Palestine is a “state” and Israel is an “occupier”.  The Iranians forge ahead, Israel maintains it’s determination and plan to prevent Iran from building the first nuclear bomb, which at this juncture looks like it could happen in as little as two weeks, according to one J-Post article, and meanwhile our veterans here in America have decided to show the young whipper-snappers how it’s done, and staged their own protest.  Not that Obama or Congress were moved by it!  But I sure am.  Good old Dad and Grandpa, still taking care of business, long after they fought, and sacrificed.  Those folks Obama would like to deprive of not only their monuments, but their pensions and their healthcare, and their very right to life.   As badly as you and I hate what we are seeing happen to this nation, I cannot begin to imagine what this feels like for them.

And what about that shutdown showdown?  Is anyone fooled?  Is anyone impressed?

Things do continue to just get crazier, from the cyclone in India, to a teen who killed and dismembered a ten-year-old, to the crazy “glitch” with the EBT cards in LA, wherein the cards showed no limits for a few hours, and people with .49 cents credit rushed in to snatch up as much as nearly a thousand dollars worth of groceries, wiping out the shelves and cases, only to abandon their carts in the aisle when the announcement was made that the glitch had been corrected and the cards were now showing actual balances.  I wonder how many people made it out the door with their “windfalls” before that happened, and will the government honor the debt?  What kind of test was that?
Order continues to disintegrate, and I have come to view quirky events like this as “field tests” of the various means and methods that will be used when it comes time to pull that last leg out from under, and God allows the overall collapse to finally go forward.

Keep the faith.   Remain abiding in the secret place.  His feathers will cover you.   Psalm 91

I enjoyed listening to some Dr. J. Vernon McGee sermons while I sewed the quilt.  I tell you, if there is any preacher whose sermons are solid, comforting, and reassuring, it is his.  Not reassuring in that he is an “ear-tickler”, rather reassuring in that he preaches pure, undiluted truth.  Most preachers today have drifted so far from the truth, that a lot of Christians hearing Dr. McGee for the first time, will hear him preach things that they have certainly never heard in their own  church.  We are definitely living in that time of “famine” spoken of by the prophet Amos:

Amos 8:11  Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I
will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the LORD:

It is still being preached here and there, but very few are hearing.

I also have gotten back to my New Testament Historical Survey self-study program by missionary pastor and Bible professor Richard Hester.  I completed his program of the O.T. survey last year.

In closing,  get a load of this Fox News article.  It is a pretty potent indicator of the world’s readiness to embrace the antichrist!

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2013/10/04/mel-gibson-someone-needs-to-arise-from-ashes-and-save-government/print

By all indications, it won’t be long.

Continuing to Serve Him In the Waiting,

~S T Lloyd