Sunday Snippits: good, bad, & awesome!

Credit to The Telegraph

GOOD: Today is Installation day! Some have joked that all these big churchy terms like consecration, ordination, & installation should really just be regal & therefore like a coronation. While consecration made life as a Diaconal Minister that much more real, this will set our current calls in stone (the sword in the stone?!). This week we have experienced the quiet of January, so it is nice to celebrate the church with so many people today. Christmas is put away at the JZ Parsonage with a few remaining wintry decoration pieces filling the shelves. And in place of the Christmas tree now sits a bench we were gifted (by gifting others we were able to gift ourselves) that is really for our front porch. In the middle of January in northern MI it is not so much fun to put things on the front porch, so in the living room it sits for now. Though we think it'll be alright outside year round. It was a decent accomplishment simply to take the pieces out of the box & assemble the bench to start!

BAD: The other day we decided to check out our local Family Video - yes we live in a town without a Redbox & a classic video rental store instead - & it appeared that the majority of the films that were on the wall considered "New Release" were about warfare on a broad spectrum. This could be warfare in history, spiritual worlds, or made up worlds. What's the deal? We don't have enough warfare in our day to day living or world that we need to infiltrate more through media. No thanks!

AWESOME: Sharing in the joy of our friends' ordination & commissioning services happening across the country. While I sincerely wish we lived close enough to each event to be able to attend - & let's be honest, that means living somewhere in Z's part of the mid-west (Minnocentric Midwest) - that is not the case nor the need of the church. We are where we all are because we are called & set apart to live as leaders in the church.

WORD: So I've realized that I've stopped receiving a daily devotional that I often relied on to share something here. I tried to switch the e-mail address it went to & now I don't know where it's actually going. I'm working on starting something new.

coming up: Living the life in the winter wonderland of Pure Michigan!

Sunday Snippits: good, bad, & ugly

GOOD: This past week was a good week to watch movies & do some house work & catch up on a few other things. I started the week with Zumba class on Sunday afternoon & then went into recovery mode for my head cold. Let me tell ya, intense physical exertion with a severe soar throat is not a good idea! My favorite movie that Z & I watched was Miss Potter about the life of Beatrix Potter. It is one of those movies I remember seeing advertised possibly before it came out & I couldn't believe that it came out in 2006. Renting mainly from a Redbox in the last couple of years has greatly changed the availability of what we rented. Now living in a town with a Family Video & no Redbox, there's a different variety of movies to rent. There's also something nostalgic of actually going into a video store & browsing for the right movie for that day. The other exciting peace of my week is taking on more work that will use my skill sets & allow me to work out of my strengths. More about that to come later!

BAD: Feeling cooped up so much of the time. Lucky for our fur ball, it has been warm enough to take her on several walks lately. Not so lucky for her is that she usually needs rinsed off afterwords from all the mud & dirt that has flung up on her underbelly. These pictures are the state of our back patio & yard to date. This was yesterday evening. I'd been wanting to walk out into the huge snow drift for quite some time & Z hit a point that he wanted to try & shovel it. Well, as you can see it is SO solid that I'm as tall as the house standing on the drift. We may need a heat lamp at this point to use our patio any time soon.

UGLY: All the back & forth about World Vision & their hiring policy. They made a well thought & I'm assuming prayed out written decision that upset the fruit basket & quickly took it all back. Talk about whiplash! Then there was something going on with Hobby Lobby, but I'll be honest, I was so tired of all the controversy over World Vision & things going on around the world that are less than uplifting that I didn't even read up on any of the Hobby Lobby information.

WORD: Today I suggest reading The God Article

coming up: Hunkering down & figuring out the details of some my new work. Reading b/c I'm slow at reading stories that I already know & want to finish The Help before our Paris trip. And getting outside as much as possible because while it doesn't totally look like it, Spring is here!

Sunday Snippits: Good, Bad, & Ugly!

Anybody else wanna know what kinda of carnival this picture is advertising?!

I suppose it says Catholic & that should be enough. Right?

Happy Sunday Snippits!

Thanks to Google for this random image.

Here we are in 2014 with the GOOD, BAD, & UGLY!

GOOD: Lots of people I love dearly are pregnant right now & to start off this past week we celebrated my Grandma's & Dad's birthdays. YaY LIFE! This last week I officially started teaching Zumba. It's a fun adventure, but one I'm definitely still getting used to. My brain is constantly wired for new ideas for children, youth, & family ministries & Zumba was not my first plan on how to live out this wiring of my brain after graduating with my Master of Divinity. However, God works in wonderfully mysterious ways & it was SO great to see mother & daughter come to my class today. Another good thing is that we finally feel like we're recovering from the busy busy Holiday season. We took ALL day Thursday to take down, pack up, put away, & clean all the needles & dust that had settled. Plus, another fun thing of this past week was opening an account at Family Video. Yes, that's right, we live in a town with a video store & no Red Box. Gotta love small town living, it's one or the other, not both! I also hosted my first ever Pampered Chef online party & it was a GREAT experience.

BAD: I think I'm allergic to more things than I want to know. And at this point in life, I don't really feel like being tested for allergies for the first time ever. Also, it's really hard to choreograph for Zumba with a puppy who is becoming more mischievous day by day & likes to cling to your every move.

UGLY: That the above picture & the word carnival go together. Add some fake streamers or something! If this is how the church advertises for itself, then how do non-church goers view the church. Today is the day that people around the world remember the earth quake in Haiti from 4 years ago. The destruction & despair still linger today.

WORD: Currently, I'm reading Shauna Niequist's Bittersweet & it has a chapter for people at every place in life, or so it seems. Friendship & Food are important themes, which is pretty great in my book.

Coming up: More Zumba & phoning for Youth Encounter & most likely lots more ADORABLE photos of the puppy.