Sunday Snippits: good, bad, & awesome

GOOD: This past week we ate a LOT of leftovers. There's only so much cucumber salad soaked in a mixture of apple cider vinegar, water, salt, pepper, & sugar one can handle. Thankfully it is all gone now & none of it went to waste! I love eating fresh, so really no complaints. The productivity continued this week with cleaning, some house projects, bike rides, & grocery shopping. Our fridge was stocked all week from the leftovers of last Sunday's cookout to the charades of food that always come with family visiting. You might say that eating is one of my "love languages." Really it is quality time, but often food makes time together top notch quality. Am I wrong? Thursday the reality of Fall set in with the first home football game & family rolling in for a visit. Friday was a great big adventure that we all needed to feed our souls. It's so fun to share the local area with family! Plus a trip to the island means a treat of fudge & other goodies. No, I'm not a fan of fudge, but Z is & like I said, there's other goodies!

BAD: Unnecessary lives lost. This is more than bothersome. Is prayer enough? It has to be for now.

AWESOME: Exploring the local cemetery & finding tomb stones & other things well over 100 years old. Yes, this is where I led us to on our bike ride the other night. Just until recently, on another bike ride, I realized I didn't know where the - or if there was just one - local cemetery is. This seemed strange to me to not know where this public site is. So we ventured through the uneven broken down trails & the more recently kept up roads of the local cemetery finding hidden treasures for this church nerd.

WORD: I've been returning to Romans & pondering on the theology that God has for us through Paul. Many of my fellow female colleagues often point out Paul's gender bias & so I'm chewing on that as well. Plus reading 'I am Malala' with AJO.

coming up: Maybe a bridge walk, we'll see what tomorrow morning brings. Definitely laundry will be happening & a little more of this & that!

Sunday Snippits: good, bad, & ugly

Sunday Snippits with

GOOD: Fall is here! Not only by the cooler weather, but the smells & the changing of the leaves & the fact that the calendar says so, FALL has arrived. I love Fall! This last week is a bit of a blurr. Yet again it was spent doing more networking & community building. Two things that I really enjoy, so it doesn't seem like work. Early in the week I got to connect with some of my family & congratulate my 16 y/o cousin for his 62 YARD TOUCHDOWN! He's a sophomore & gets to occasionally play on the Varsity team & a few games ago now, he had one of the best moves of his football career. This makes me excited to be able to make it to one or two of his future games before he graduates & goes off to college. We also go to take the short road-trip to Camp Michi-Lu-Ca to see the beautiful land & get to know our new colleagues & friends in ministry A,D, & I. Yesterday, in our attempts to get to know more about town, we decided to go for dinner at This Old House. While they claim to have the best pizza in town, we decided we liked Alcocks better. The motif was fun & we'll prolly go back for something else on the menu, but not the pizza.

BAD: A few weeks ago I shared about this cycling accident & added to a number of prayer lists. I only sort of knew the couple, but know several people who were quite close with them. Both of them were working in specialized ministry & had a great way of bringing joy to those around them. While Rob passed away on the scene of the accident, Hilary had been on life support until a couple of days ago when the family made the hard to decision to let her body do what it would & join the glory of God in heaven. My heart aches for their family & friends, the church that she worked at & the cycling community who had come to know them & their energy for safe cycling.

UGLY: Last week, I said to turn on the news. Well this week that proves true again! This morning before church, while I was trying to think of what to share with yall, the news was about the mall massacre in Kenya, the potential of the US government shutting down, people fighting about healthcare, & more death in Palestine.

so I turned to the WORD: & read Luke 16:1-13 (the Gospel lesson today for those who follow the Revised Common Lectionary) which then also threw me for a little confusion. Check out, focus on the last two or three sentences & tell me what God's saying to you.

COMING UP: Next weekend we get to go on a vacay back to the beautiful state of MN to not only hang out with family (from IN, MD, MN, & AZ!) but for Z's ordination as a pastor in the ELCA. I already have plans to go to Target & Caribou Coffee. I'll catch up with Sunday Snippits after all the festivities & travels are over.

Sunday Snippits: GOOD, BAD, & UGLY!

Sunday Snippits, here again! And since I forgot Friday Favorites:

Z & I started our week last Sunday evening with a game of croquet. This was a week of using several wedding gifts we had yet to use. And as I joked on FB yesterday, we are officially married because we have used up all of our wedding gift money to Target. Thankfully we have graduation gift money still, 'cause this house needs a few more changes to make it ours. The BAD part is, the closest Target is 2 hours away from where we live now. I enjoy Target so much more than Walmart or Kmart, but of course there's both of those things where we live now. First world problems!

GOOD: The good is endless. We are moved. We are getting more settled everyday. Last Monday we finally got internet hooked up in our house & then were able to FaceTime or Skype with a number of friends & family that are all over the country & world right now. While we miss them & wish we could see them face-to-face, we are working on creating a new community of friends here, as are they where they are. The other good is Z's ordination is coming together slowly, but surely. I designed, assembled, & sent out paper invites for the non-FB users mid-week & man alive, while I enjoy being artsy, I'm not always so in the crafty side of things. SO if you wanted an invite in the mail & didn't get one, message me & I'll send ya the info! Friday night fun was at the local football game. While we couldn't see good parts of the game due to the rowdy student section, it made it much more enjoyable to sit by the life of the party. Even Moses showed up!

You can see him in all white in the middle.

BAD: I'm itching for a job. Networking is a slow, but seemingly fruitful process. In the meantime it's hard to keep myself busy with things that seem worth while. Sure, I could volunteer with countless things, but that's not what I'm looking to do. Thankfully, Zumba is a good way to network that has me doing something. So yeah, I'm still trying to figure out this call to Diaconal Ministry, but I know we're in the right place.

UGLY: Our couch. Ha, this seems really silly, but as my good friend MS said, "You're sitting on an English tea cup!" This might seem perfect for a tea lover, but the English tea cup patterns belong in another generation. I'm not up to par enough on the news to talk about other ugly things with Syria & such. It doesn't take much to figure out, things are ugly in the world.

WORD: That's why I turn to the Good News. Recently, I've been using a new app called Photo-Verse. This is helping find my new norm. The "read the Bible in a year" wasn't a logical goal for me with all the changing going on in life this year.

That is my

LIFE, SPIRIT, AND SPARKLE

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