Interesting Reads

Davey Ramsey fans only!!

Personalities

Autumn Inspiration

Hope all is well in your neck of the woods.

We're enjoying the beautiful scenes of fall that change every day.

Today is warm, sunny and gorgeous.

Tomorrow calls for rain.

Headed outside to smell the season.

Faith in Training

C S Lewis

Mere Christianity

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes. I know that by experience. Now that I am a Chrisitian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway. That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods 'where they get off', you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

The first step is to recognize the fact that your moods change. The next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day. That is why daily prayers and religious readings and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed. And as a matter of fact, if you examined a hundred people wha had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?

FuNnY

Sophie-"Can I have a doughnut after lunch?"

Mom- "Sure"

After lunch, "I changed my mind. I'm full!"--Sophie

A couple of hours later

Sophie-"I have my mind back. Can I have a doughnut now?"

What in the World has been Going On?

Sweet Cousins

Mr. Frog that peed on Sophie's head

Flowers against the night sky

Cool Chloe on a cool autumn evening at Lake Cooley

A little of this and a little of that.

This season of life is full.

The blog tends to get the least attention and I miss coming here.

My goal is to update once a week with pictures, quotes and the occasional story from our lives.

FROM STREAMS IN THE DESERT

Rubenstein, the great musician, once said, "If I omit practice one day, I notice it, my friends notice it: if three days, the public notices it."

It is the old doctrine, 

"Practice makes perfect."

We must continue believing, continue praying, continue doing His will.

Suppose along any line of art, one should cease practicing, we know what the result will be.

If we would only use the same quality of common sense in our religion that we use in everyday life, we should go on to perfection.

The motto of David Livingston was in these words,

"I determined  never to stop until I had come to the end and achieved my purpose."

By unfaltering persistence and faith in God he conquered.

Reading Luke 18:1-8 today.

Hoping that practice makes perfect in your life today.

Need a Laugh Today?

Quotes from Sophie:

Mom- "Sophie, you need to pick up your toys please."

After a moment, Sophie, "If I was YOUR mom, I would pick them up for YOU!"

Sophie- "Mom, can you help me put on my underwear? I can't waste time on this."

Sophie- "I know what I can get for Christmas- a GPS and and I-pad."

Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift!

 2 Corinthians 9:15

The Problem with Self.

I am suffering from self disease. 

There is only one cure.

"Some are in self-they are determined by self-interest primarily-it is the driving force of their lives. To get and to get on for self is the compelling motive. 

Some are in the herd. Before they act, they look around-they don't act: they only react to what the herd does. The roots of their motives are in, "What will people think?" Making self, or the herd, our god, is sin, the chief sin.

To be 'in Christ' means to pull up the roots of one's very life from the soil of sin and self and the herd and plant them in Christ. he becomes the source of our life, the source of our thinking, our feeling, our acting, our being.

This obviously involves self surrender. Not merely the surrender of our sins, our bad habits, our wrong thinking and our wrong motives, but the very self behind all of these. All of these are symptoms: the unsurrendered self is the DISEASE.

So the phrase, in Christ, is not only the ultimate concept, but it demands the ultimate act,

SELF SURRENDER.

We don't own our money, our property, not even the house we live in, for we will leave it all behind. The only thing we will take with us is just

OURSELVES.

It is the only thing we own-

the self-

is deliberately handed back to the Giver in an act of supreme self surrender with words something like these:

"I can't handle this self of mine. Take me as I am, and make me as I ought to be. I give myself and my sins and my problems to Thee: but myself first and foremost."

We lose ourselves, and to our astonishment, find ourselves.

We live when we live

IN HIM."

 

 

E. Stanley Jones

Missionary to India in the first half of the century

We have been educating,

celebrating

 

(Sophie turned 4!!)

and

rejoicing

this week.

Have a great Thursday.

FAITH

Hebrews 11:8

 (NIV)

By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance,
obeyed and went, 
even though 
he did not know where he was going. 

"Faith never knows where it is being led, but it loves and knows the One,who is leading. it is a life of faith, not of intellect and reason, but a life of knowing Who makes us "go." The root of faith is the knowledge of a Person and one of the biggest snares is the idea that God is sure to lead us to success.
The final stage in the life of faith is the attainment of character: when we pray we feel the blessing of God enwrapping us and for the time being we are changed, then we go back to the ordinary days and ways and the glory vanishes. The life of faith is not a life of mounting up with wings, but a life of walking and not fainting. It is not a question of sanctification but of something infinitely further on than sanctification, of faith that has been tried and proved and has stood the test. Abraham is not a type of sanctification, but a type of the life of faith, a tried faith built on a real God.
"Abraham believed God."
Oswald Chambers

Living by faith today.