Kerrie 的个人资料A Blog照片日志列表更多  |  工具 帮助 |
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7月28日 Hurray! You are found! :-)Just wanted to let you know that you are all back again! I tried all the great suggestions that Gerry sent me and the ones Spaces sent too, and none of them helped. Then suddenly, I tried again on Friday, and there you all were! So, expect to see me visit soon.
Hugs,
kbc 7月22日 HELP, You are all lost!Hey, can someone help me out. I can receive incoming messages and viewers to my site, but I can't get to anyone else's. Every time I try to access another spaces site, I get an "internet explorer cannot display this page" error. I have tried accessing sites from my friends list as well as by typing in the exact address into the browser. Anyone else experienced this or have any ideas? Thanks a bunch - I'm really trying to stay in touch here, but...
Kbc A Note on the CabinetWell, I finally posted the pictures of the finished project. Unfortunately the lady who ordered it didn't like the way it turned out (she had some very specific features she was looking for!), and so it was a two-week's-worth-of-work-plus-the-cost-of-materials loss for Josh. Not good, considering we were hoping to turn it into two weeks worth of food and shelter for our family! Things have been rather tight since then (to say the least), but God is getting us through. (Although I am still accepting all exciting recipies involving beans, rice and oats!
 ) Josh finally has stable work, and got his first paycheck last week. We were able to make payments for the first time on all the bills incurred when we lost Baby Job. Don't you love it when God wants to teach you to rely on Him alone for your sustenance?!I was also delinquent in updating photos because at some point during this cabinet project, Josh saw Blake walking around outside with our digital camera. Josh told him to "go give it to Mommy," and we haven't seen it since! I didn't water the lawn for days while I combed every inch of it for the camera. I'm sure it will turn up someday in some unnervingly simple yet extremely unlikely place! I have had to go back to using my old camera with its defective screen. Isn't it funny that although it is how we used to take pictures "in the old days", taking a picture without seeing how it will turn out just seems terrible (sorry, the synonym finder portion of my brain is offline right now!). We implement technology as a novelty, at first; but after a while we become completely dependent upon it. Take cell phones for instance... how many of you would turn around and drive home after discovering you had left your cell phone charging on the counter (like I always do - the leaving, not the returning - I am still a cell-phone user only under protest!)? Yes we have become dependent.
Nothing to do with cell phones, but everything to do with troubled times and reliance upon the only source of stability, here is a devotional I received recently. Enjoy!
...But God’s deliverance is a mighty deliverance! God doesn’t come quietly to rescue. God doesn’t slip quietly through the back door. David writes, “Then, the earth shook and quaked, the foundations of heavens were trembling and were shaken...God bowed the heavens and came down with thick darkness under his feet....The Lord thundered from heaven, and the Most High uttered his voice...the foundations of the world were laid bare” (2 Samuel 22:8, 10, 14, 16). God’s deliverance creates a cosmic earthquake on behalf of “the man after his own heart.” Sent from on high, God draws David out of the many waters of despair and destruction. Even though confronted by powerful forces at work against him, David affirms that “The Lord was my stay. He brought me forth also into a broad place; He rescued me, because He delighted in me” (Psalm 18:19).
If only God would shake the heavens like this in our day and return our fortunes! If only God would save in a way that shores up our financial collapses, and transforms our economic hardships! If only God would deliver us in the same way God delivered David! If this is the way we see God’s rescue, only as a return to the “way things were” or to a renewed sense of comfort and ease, then we have missed the point of the song altogether. God’s rescue shakes our foundations; it creates cosmic earthquakes overturning and upending all the things in which we place our hope apart from God. David tells us that The Lord was his stay. And David would come to need God’s earth-shaking deliverance again and again, as he lost focus and put his trust in security, and comfort, and the things of this world. Ultimately, salvation does not come from the things God does for David, or for us. Salvation comes in the Lord as our stay and our total support. While worry and anxiety choke us and narrow our focus, reliance upon God brings us to that broad and spacious place David describes as God’s deliverance and rescue. This is not to say that God brings us right back to that specific place that once was--the place of comfort, of ease, or safety. But God opens up new worlds in which we can trust no matter what we are experiencing. As one commentator notes, the psalmists’ chief concern to give thanks to God are not chiefly found in regaining “physical health, or adding more years to life, or by enhancing the life they now enjoy with greater comfort or security. That is a modern conception of life, whose emptiness is eventually disclosed. According to Israel’s way of thinking, life is missed when people do not choose it: ‘See, I have set before you life and death....Therefore, choose life.’ Moreover, the life of ‘the righteous’ is eroded in vitality when death works its power.”(1) God’s deliverance of us in times of trial and difficulty has everything to do with seeing God as the source and goal of our life. As Christoph Barth observes, “[W]hat the psalmists pray for in laments, or thank God for in thanksgiving is the restoration of life that they have lost, or its radical renewal through true life--that is the life that is given through relationship to God.”(2) In our days of very bad news, we are in need of rescue and deliverance, to be sure. We need earth-shattering simplicity, and we need tsunamis of generosity to sustain us and infuse our living during lean times, and in times of abundance. As God’s people living at times in want and in times of bad news, our lives can be renewed and restored in remarkable ways, set in a broad place when we find our stay is God. PS. Oh, just in case you were wondering - yes, the cabinet is for sale! Highest bidder takes it!  |
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