I did the flowers for church this weekend and they were a rather humble offering–Hydrangeas–not too inspiring.
C’est la vie. Meanwhile the summer is flying by.
And just when you think the Anglican Church cannot dig itself any deeper into its hole, another Archbishop says something really, really stupid. As usual, Ann comments better than I am able.
Funnily enough our sermon this Sunday was all about God as our Father, since we are still working our way through Hosea: When Israel was a child, I loved him (Hosea 11:1). As J.I. Packer wrote, “‘Father’ is the Christian word for God. Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.”
“Christians don’t always see how disbelief in one thing affects belief in another.” This article talks about the ripple effects of not believing in hell.
And thanks to Tim Challies for this great snippet from De Witt Talmage (1832-1902). “In many of the churches of Christ in our day, the music is simply a mockery.” As he says, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
The boy and his petite famille made it back safely from South Carolina and we look forward to hearing all about it soon!
It’s pretty quiet around here since the boy and his family are in Hilton Head for the week.
Before they left early Saturday morning, daughter #3 brought the wee twins over after soccer camp on Friday to have lunch and hang out with Mr. Smith.
Daughter #1 has a new chuck-it throwing toy which is great and wears Mr. Smith out with fetching.
Five stars for sure! The best part is you don’t have to pick up the slobbery ball with your hand. Of course, getting Mr. Smith to release the ball is an ongoing issue.
We had some wild weather over the weekend with a lot of downed trees and detritus everywhere.
Unfortunately, people were actually killed this time around in crushed cars and houses.
(Photos from KMOV4)
In church on Sunday we heard more from the prophet Hosea. His message, as our pastor put it, is “harrowing and brutal”–but maybe we need that.
“Do not rejoice, O Israel, with joy like other peoples, For you have played the harlot against your God.” (Hosea 9:1)
Food for thought.
Tomorrow, of course, is the 4th of July and we send happy birthday wishes to my older brother. He was always a hit with the ladies.
The little girl in the picture was a neighbor of whom my mother was particularly fond. (Her name was Katie.) Anyway, here’s hoping he does something fun tomorrow.
And here’s a song–the boy introduced me to this rendition:
*”Know that the LORD, He is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves; We are His people and the sheep of His pasture.” (Psalm 100:3)
Did you have a good weekend? Mine was fairly quiet, the highlight being going to church with the wee twins at 8:30 a.m. so they could attend the children’s worship service and then going to daughter #1’s house for bagels afterwards.
Mr. Smith was living his best life, frolicking in the backyard with the twins…
…and everyone signed Lottie’s cast.
Meanwhile back in Maryland, Katiebelle started swimming lessons…
…and Idabelle watched the passing parade with vim and vigor.
I watched some PGA golf and read another D.E. Stevenson book. I went to an estate sale in a house that had once belonged to a family I went to church with growing up and whose daughters went to my school. It had since turned into Grey Gardens and was a wreck. Kind of Quite creepy. But daughter #1 got a book and her usual discount from Lamar.
I also watched Father Goose (1964), Cary Grant’s second-to-last movie. You remember–it’s about a guy during WWII who is forced to work as an airplane spotter on a remote Pacific island and then is saddled with a prim teacher and seven little girls to look after. It won an Oscar for best screenplay written directly for the screen.
It is nice to see Cary playing against type, scruffy and annoyed. I remember my mother took my little sister and me to see it when it was originally released, probably because she thought we would enjoy the little girl element and she got to see Cary Grant. I liked it then and I enjoyed it the other night. It is a good example of the kind of movie Hollywood was very good at making in the 1960s but cannot make now to save their lives.
Well, VBS was a timely reminder that it is a good thing to get out of one’s comfort zone every now and then.
And I have to say, being with all those smart kids kind of restores my confidence in the future somewhat. For example, I had a really engaging conversation with one of the boys in my group about his first name. I asked him if was Welsh and he said Gaelic. This led him to ask if I had ever heard of Tombstone, because he is a descendant of the McLaurys and I was able to jump in and say, why yes, they were participants in the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral. (I had, of course, already been wondering about his name.) He said ‘they’ (his family) hated the movie Tombstone because of the way the McLaurys are depicted. He admitted that the McLaurys were the bad guys, but argued that the movie was not fair. I said he should tell his father to get the movie My Darling Clementine, which is an old movie made in 1946 starring Henry Fonda and is a much better telling of the story. He nodded, and being an intelligent lad, I am hopeful he will pass this information on to his father.
He went on to tell me that his father is a pastor at a downtown church. Then the boy next to him chimed in and said he also went to this church where his mother is the Music Director. We had a good conversation about animals we have seen in our yards. They were impressed that I had seen a coyote.
Anyway, I was glad to meet a boy who is interested in his genealogy and who can talk about it intelligently.
It was also a joy to see my grandchildren in the thick of things and to get hugs throughout the morning when we met in passing. They did great and I think they had a lot of fun.
Can you see them in the front? It did my heart good to hear those babes singing “It Is Well With My Soul”!
I had hoped to see them in church on Sunday singing with the rest of the kids at the beginning of the service, but Lottie broke her arm on Saturday at a pool party. She spent the afternoon in the E.R. We FaceTimed later that evening and she told me, “I’m okay, Mamu!’
She goes back to get a cast (purple with pink sparkles bien sûr) next week.
And lest we forget: we wish a belated happy Father’s Day to all the wonderful fathers out there!
We had a quiet weekend. The twins came over with their dad on Saturday after their swimming lesson and they ran around wrecking some havoc. We ate bagels before they left to go to a birthday party. I watched our local auction house online auction, but didn’t make any rescues. When I suggested to the OM that we might go to dinner at the Cracker Barrel, he literally leapt out of his chair and was in the car before I could powder my nose.
We enjoyed our homestyle meals and were home by 6:00 pm. Such oldsters. I noticed later on Not the Bee that there has been some controversy surrounding Cracker Barrel and a boycott because they are too woke. That might explain why there were so few people there! (Note the empty tables above.)
In church the sermon was about Hosea as we have been delving into this book for the last month or so. Interestingly, Anne wrote about it too. “Just to recap, in case you haven’t cracked open ye olde holy scriptures recently, (paging Rick Warren…and basically everyone), Israel, upon settling into the Land that the Lord her God had given her, decided that worshiping the gods of the people who lived there was at least as interesting as offering sacrifices and praise to the Lord. It’s not that they didn’t “worship” God, it’s just that on the way home from the place God put his Name, it was expedient and sensible to also stop at various other shrines and sacrifice a child or two along with pouring libations on the ground and depositing other kinds of offerings in the nooks and crannies of their inheritance. The all-or-nothing nature of Temple worship didn’t really suit the people whom the Lord had called out from all the nations around, to worship him alone.” God just wants your steadfast love. Is that too much to ask?
After church I helped decorate for VBS. And, thank you Jesus, I now have a teenage helper assigned to me so I do not have to go it totally alone with the 4/5th grade girls this week. 🙌🙌🙌
I thought this was very interesting, especially considering my post last week about outlawing insult. Now Monty Python is in trouble (again)…Forty-four years later we’re certainly not allowed to laugh at this nonsense because it has become the truth:
I mean who would have guessed how spot on the Pythons were back in the day!
And just in time for VBS, Matt Mitchell has a new video about…VBS!
P.S. Look at the wee pup and how his training is going: Sit, boy!
The boy and the wee laddie went to the NASCAR race over in Illinois with his other Papaw on Sunday and had quite a day.
They saw all the cool stuff up close and personal.
The bud, who is, as you know, an experienced driver, even got to drive…
It was super hot, but they had super fun–perfect male bonding time.
On another note, this is a really interesting article/lecture about the cautionary tale of Alexander Hamilton and his late-blooming Christian faith. “God be merciful to me a sinner.”
Yes, it is full-on summer here in flyover country–hot and humid–and you better not walk barefoot on your asphalt driveway, that’s for sure. Heavy sigh. Well, we had a nice long spring and it was great while it lasted.
We kept a low profile this weekend, but Katie turned three in style back in Maryland.
She celebrated appropriately. (She is wearing her favorite vintage nightie, which my mother made for daughter #1/Aunt Mary about 36 years ago.)
Aunt Mary made her a tote bag with Pete the Cat fabric she found at Joann’s!
She immediately filled it up with books–a girl after our own hearts. Love the matching bow!
And, of course, there was cake!
I stayed after church on Sunday to go to a meeting for VBS volunteers–because, yes, I am once again doing my part, even after I said never again last year. This year I am on my own with 14 4th/5th graders! Am I crazy? Yes, yes I am. I will never be able to remember their names, much less keep track of them. I am praying for a teenage helper to step up to the plate.
I got a new t-shirt, since I threw mine away last year thinking I would never need it again. Well, I have a week to psych myself up for this. Please pray for me.
Ah, three-day weekends are nice. Everyone is more relaxed. We are on the summer schedule at church now, which means that although there are still two morning services, there is no children’s chapel at the 11:00 o’clock. I missed that memo somehow and we brought the twins to the 11 o’clock. The wee bud teared up at the offertory hymn at the prospect of staying with us through the whole service, so Pappy took him out to the fellowship hall to hang out. (He was not the only parent/grandparent to do so.) But Lottie stayed with me and did a very good job of curbing her depravity and listening/keeping quiet during the 40-minute Presbyterian sermon. She went up with me to get communion (although she did not take communion.) She had a lot of questions. Is that blood? I said I’d explain later.
We had the whole gang over for a Memorial Day bbq and driveway sittin’ on Sunday evening. Daughter #1’s friends Liz and Brenton came too, plus their two-year old twins. And Mr. Smith, of course.
Start ’em early!
As usual, we missed Katie and Ida and their parents, but they had fun too!
Enjoy your Monday off!
*Hosea 6:4 (wherein God gets exasperated like the rest of us parents)–press on.
How was your weekend? We had glorious spring weather here in flyover land and it was a joy to revel in it. We went to our favorite winery in Hillsboro and sat outside under the wide blue sky with other like-minded individuals and listened to the 1970s playlist of the band–so, perfect.
Earlier in the day we also went to a couple of good estate sales including one at the home of an old friend from my work days. Bettye was a sweet lady from Arkansas who was a founding member of the St. Louis Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America. In January she went to Australia to visit her daughter, went off hiking by herself and never returned. They found her body the next day. I was truly saddened by this turn of events. She had been one of my right hand lieutenants for many years. I deduced that one of the estate sales was at her house and I wanted to see her lovely century home in U. City and hopefully find a few books (which I did) so we went. Granted, it is always a little disconcerting to snoop through the home of someone you knew. Hers was just like I expected–lots of books and old furniture, good art, a lovely garden.
Daughter #1 went back to two of the estate sales the second day, when prices are 50% off, and came away with quite a haul. IYKYK how exciting this is. I know Bettye would be pleased that a few of her things are in my daughter’s home.
I must also mention the passing of Timothy Keller on Friday. He was a pillar of the PCA. I credit him with bringing me into the Presbyterian fold. Back in 2017 (or thereabouts) I used to ride my stationery bike for 30 minutes before breakfast every morning and I would listen to Tim Keller sermons. He preached the gospel and talked unironically about John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. I have a notebook full of notes…Do not put yourself in the place of God, but become godly. He talked about sin, immersing yourself in the Bible, going to church. He knew what the harm was in blending worship of our triune God with the worship of our man-made idols. He knew God has no patience with this. Keller taught me about his intellectually stimulating denomination and that it is possible to spread the Word even in Babylon.
“Expository preaching should provide the main diet of preaching for a Christian community. . . . [It] is the best method for displaying and conveying your conviction that the whole Bible is true. This approach testifies that you believe every part of the Bible to be God’s Word, not just particular themes and not just the parts you feel comfortable agreeing with.”
And I love this last word from John Piper about Keller:
Also, rest in peace Jim Brown, who died last week. We all know he was an awesome athlete, but did you know that besides being a great football player at Syracuse University, he was a sensation on the lacrosse team? (He was inducted into the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984, 13 years after he made it into the Pro Football Hall of Fame.)
As you know, Brown retired at the height of his NFL career to be a movie actor and he made some good movies. “I had a great appreciation for Harry Belafonte and Sidney [Poitier] and Sammy Davis [Jr.] They were all great in their own way,” he said in A Football Life documentary from NFL Films that premiered in November 2016. “But I was a physical actor, I was a hero … We needed that as African-Americans.” He makes a good point. I think Woody Strode felt that way as well.
I recently watched 100 Rifles (1969) when Raquel Welsh died earlier this year, so I think I’ll opt for The Dirty Dozen (1966) or Ice Station Zebra (1968) or one of his other films.
Into paradise may the angels lead thee and at thy coming may the martyrs receive thee, and bring thee into the holy city Jerusalem.
How was your weekend? Mine was very low-key and nice. I went to a few estate sales on Saturday and picked up a a couple of books and daughter #1 got a very nice vintage wastebasket. This makes us happy.
The OM and I went to church on Sunday and afterwards we went to daughter #1’s new house where she had brunch ready.
Very nice indeed–and, of course, there were mimosas. The Joanna Gaines bacon biscuits were magnifique!
Daughter #2 had even sent a bag of Compton Lady treats ahead for me. All in all, a lovely day.
And the OM was able to reunite with his special friend.
We sat out on her front porch and finished the Prosecco and had a lovely afternoon. I gather that daughter #3 wanted her petite famille to work in the yard with her so they did that, following a trip to Home Depot. I have not seen any “after” pictures.
Meanwhile DN stood in line with all the other dads in town to get donuts…
I have no doubt that Mommy enjoyed them and had a lovely day!
Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness!
dual personalities 