I come to you today with a weary body and spirit, but a full heart.  A major breakthrough arrived in a situation 21 years in the making, and praise God for His faithfulness and timing.

It’s not something to be gone into in a blog post, although there are many who would anyway, but I definitely want to give God the glory and thanks He is worthy of, for the answer to prayer.

On an entirely unrelated topic, I read about the eighty Christians brutally executed in North Korea this week, and can there be any doubt that God is showing the world what is coming?  The “landslide victory of Donald Trump in the recent slew of primaries, is a neon blinking sign of the full-blown delusion at work.  How do those flocking to cast their vote for Donald Trump not recognize they are doing the exact same thing Obama supporters did eight years ago?

I will unapologetically go on record and admit to you that for the first time since I excitedly registered to vote, I did not bother in this primary.  Carson is the only candidate I could even begin to consider voting for and we all know that he has a snowballs chance, as they say.  Not that I don’t believe God CAN work with those odds, (tongue in cheek, there as, obviously, “odds” are irrelevant to God) but that’s just how sure I am that this whole process has already been determined and as they say, “it’s all over but the crying”.

I would like to make an appeal.  You can think it over.  I would like to suggest that despite the recent loss of Justice Scalia, as far as power goes, the Executive Branch is a lock, the Legislative Branch is a deadlock, but the Supreme Court is an arena where a great deal is at play right now and the outcome is not yet set in stone.  Therefore, I would like to suggest folks to consider the merits of supporting legal societies like the American Center for Law and Justice, and Alliance Defending Freedom, who defend religious freedom.  I spoke about this in a recent post, and I am not normally one to “stump” for any cause.  But this is something that I have felt convicted about in recent weeks.  So I thought I would put it out there for your private consideration between you, and God and whomever else your financial affairs involve and impact.  Do your own background research into these or other charitable entities, as always.  I don’t know that it is always possible to know everything there is to know about how your donations are handled, since there are myriad ways to “report” things, but I see that the same way I see handing a dollar to someone panhandling beside the road.  Unless the Holy Spirit or even my own intuition or visible cues give me clear doubts as to the legitimacy, I feel it is okay to give in the right spirit, and let the Lord handle the judgment of whatever becomes of the money when it leaves my hands.

Over the last few days I have done three more paintings.  Small projects and only one is completely finished, but two of these are watercolors.  I like the simplicity of watercolors.  And the clean-up is certainly minimal.

The kitty cat picture is obviously unfinished, final layer and blending is all I have left.  That one is acrylic. Also unfinished is the Birds under rain clouds. Lots more to do on that, but I finger-painted those clouds!  Fun, huh?  The Impressionism one below  is the finished one.  All are 8×10’s.

 

There is a cool “God story” behind the kitty. Wanna hear it? Of course you do!

Back  when the boys were just getting to Middle School, we adopted Rascal, there, from the local SPCA.  She was a kitten, and my husband selected her from the litter by poking his finger at each one of the kittens, and the one who stood up on her hind feet and started boxing with him is the one he chose.  Isn’t that cute?  But that’s not the story.

When we got Rascal we already had a dog named Skittles Pepperoni.  She was from the local pound.  She was a pitiful-looking little thing, a Cairn Terrier mix, and the smallest one in “lock-up” that day I went to look.  She sat there just-a-trembling, but just like all the other dogs, she came out to the external side of her bay, when lookers showed up.  She stayed way back near the portal and wouldn’t come near the fence, and she didn’t bark at all, just looked at me and sat there shaking.  So when I brought the kids back to look, we brought pepperoni, to see if we could enticer her past her skittishness, into coming any closer.  We needed to see how she was with kids.  She cleaned up pretty well and fattened up too, and her coat, well, it was wiry, so it could only get so much better, but it did fill out.  She was totally tolerant with the kids but she bonded with my husband, the dog-whisperer. My husband worked on a pig farm when he was a kid.  There was a ginormous hog named Gus. Whenever my husband needed to get in the pen to clean it, he would just rub Gus behind the ear for a minute or two, and put that big old pork chop right to sleep.  He has the same effect on dogs.  There was a big Rottweiler across the street that had been allowed to roam so freely that he considered our yard a part of his own territory.  One day, my husband, who cannot function without his coffee, woke up to an empty coffee canister, an had to make a quick dash to the 7-11 to get a cup. When he got back, (it was winter and still dark at 7a.m.) he was startled by a very menacing snarl coming at him as he approached our own front steps.  I was sleeping just on the other side of the window below which this took place, so I eventually woke up to look out there.  I apparently didn’t hear the growl, what woke me was my husband talking to someone.  Somehow he succeeded in reasoning with the beast, because as he related to me afterwards, he said “well, I considered throwing the hot coffee on him, but then I would be back in the same predicament, so I just kept telling him to go home until he finally did.  He knew the dog by name, so perhaps that helped.  The same dog bit a kid on the butt, as he was diving over the fence (into our yard) when he made the unfortunate decision to walk down our street one night around midnight.  I guess he looked in and saw sixteen pounds of terrier and figured he’d take his chances being mauled by the smaller dog instead of the big one, but he wasn’t fast enough.

But that’s not the story either.  Where was I?  Oh yeah, so, mom had her cat, the family dog rejected the rest of the family and chose Garrett as her person, and so we thought a Shih-Tzu might round out the menagerie as the pet the kids could call their own.  Don’t ask me what temporary gush of goodwill overrode my good sense at that moment, but probably I figured finding a Shih-Tzu to adopt fairly inexpensively would be a long shot.  But alas, there was this cute little bugger that just so happened was being re-homed from another family with two boys, who had just gotten so busy with all their extra-curricular busyness, that the dog was spending cruel amounts of time in a kennel.  So we adopted him and he was comedy and entertainment on four paws, I’ll tell you.  For one thing, and maybe this is a Shih-Tzu common trait, squashed nose and all, he breathed like a freight train for a full hour and a half in his excitement when he got here. We were beginning to get concerned.  For another, he fell in love with our cat.  I mean, like, mushy, can never get enough of looking at you, (males are such suckers for aloof females) and mooning for you LOVE!  Which is funny because I have another funny love story featuring the cat.  If it comes back around in the swirl, after I finish telling you this part, maybe I will share that too. The other hilarious thing Higgins, that was his name, the Shih-Tzu did was he could teleport.  Seriously for a dog as rambunctious and uncoordinated and loud as him, we could never figure out how we could leave him in one room, walk into another room and there he would be, grinning with his tongue hanging out like “hey, what took you so long?”

About a year or so hence, Skittles was experiencing a lot of difficulty with her hip.  When she was younger she did this hilarious thing where she would bounce around the yard like a springbok or a gazelle.  I have never seen anything like it.  We figure that was the start of her hip trouble.  Anyway, she was struggling to get up and down steps to go in and out and the rambunctious youth of young Higgins was getting to be a real issue for her, which she didn’t deserve, having been the charter doggie. Another thing, and we figured it was another sign of problems between the two dogs, someone was leaving us little unpleasant surprises of the smelly kind when this had previously not been an issue we had to deal with.  So we figured it was certainly fairest for Skittles to get to age in place and die peacefully when her time came we made the decision to re-home the other two.

Now before you file a complaint with PETA, you gotta hear the rest and I’m sure you will agree that it was meant to be.  I prayed about getting them happy and safe placements, and since Rascal loves having someone to harass, and Higgins loves Rascal, I asked the Lord if he would provide one home that would welcome them both and keep them together.  I figured it would help them with the transition as well.

With an ad on Craigslist and a modest fee to wean out slackers, we began getting Shih-Tzu inquiries fast and furious, which was not surprising, considering how popular Shih-Tzu’s are and that cats are, well, they’re cats.

As the week wore on, I was beginning to think they might have to be separated after all.  Then this young girl named Kristen called. Eighteen or nineteen I think she was.

She was eager and nervous as she inquired if the dog had been adopted yet.  I laughed and said, well, I’ve had lots of inquiries, but no, he’s still available”.  She sounded very relieved and asked me lots of questions, and then she told me the story of how her father had left her, her sister, and her mom, and TOOK their beloved pet Shih-Tzu with him and it was clear to me that the Shih-Tzu was the one most missed.  After talking just a bit, I went ahead and told her that thus far,  she and her story definitely felt more right to me than anyone I had heard from so far.  So had told me that they had been begging their mom to let them get another one for a year, but she said they couldn’t afford it, and she had finally relented with a compromise.  Probably thinking about the same way I had, she had told her girls “If you can find one that needs to be adopted that  is not too expensive, I will look into it.”  I didn’t indicate the amount of the small re-homing fee in the ad so that was her next question.  When I told her, she got even more excited because she said “well, I could pay you that from my own money!”  But she asked if I could consider waiting three days for when she gets paid.  I told her definitely that I could.  Just before she hung up, she said, “oh, I almost forgot to ask you!  Is the cat still available?  My mom has always wanted a Tuxedo”.  So I proceeded to tell her about my prayer and that she had just confirmed to me that this was the right family, and I told her I would waive the fee.  I also told her that one of the issues for us was not having realized the amount of grooming a Shih-Tzu requires if he is going to have that longer coat that makes them so darn cute.  So the expense was not something we had bargained for.  Also, even though he was a purebred, we had had him neutered.  She said “oh, well my Mom is a veterinarian, so she can do the grooming herself at work for free, and she would have probably neutered him anyway”.

Is that cool or what?  That God cares about the critters and a young girl’s broken heart.

The neighbors had a cat named Walter who often wandered over into our yard even before we got Rascal.  She stayed in most of her kittenhood until she was old enough that I felt comfortable letting her outside (and of course it was sad to see her snow-white paw socks turn dingy, but can’t hold em back forever, ya know?  She would get fat in winter when she stayed in more, and turn all sleek again come spring when she did whatever cats do at night when they stay outside.

So, Walter started coming over much more when Pretty Thang Rascal showed up out there.  And every time we saw Walter, he had some new injury.  I mean, bloody stumps, scratches, tail half-hanging off, eyeball hanging out by a thread, the boy was a mess.  I didn’t grow up with pets.  So one day I voiced this observation.  I said “wow, I sure am glad Rascal doesn’t come home looking like that”.  My husband cracked up and said “I’m pretty sure the reason Walter looks like that, is so that Rascal doesn’t “.

Come again?

“Yeah, I am pretty sure Rascal is his woman”.

HARRRR!  I hooted at that.  Well, sure enough, a day or two after Rascal and Higgins went to their new home,  every time my husband or I walked out the front door, here was Walter and he was meowing at the top of his lungs, butting around our ankles persistently.  Again, being uninitiated to animal behavior, when I remarked on it to Garrett, he said, “yep, he is registering his protest”.  I said, “what”?  He said, “he is mad at us and wants to know what the tarnation has become of his woman”!

 

 

 

and for anyone who doesn’t know (Mom!)