Finding joy in the everyday

Rest and appreciate life.  It would be such a pity to get to the end of life and not had time to stop and watch birds fly, rosebuds open or listen to the sounds of silences.  A merry heart does good, like medicine,  But a broken spirit dries the bones.   (Proverbs 17:22) ******

In one year you will eat 1,095 meals (breakfast, lunch and dinner). With life expectancy around 80 years for a woman, you will consumer 87,600 meals in your life time. If you are married for 50 years, you will prepare 54,750 meals for your husband. That is a lot of cooking and eating!! Each of those meals you cook for your husband, you have decided on what to cook, how healthy it will be, the cost, the length of time it will take, what food you need to buy . . . . you have been one busy lady in the kitchen. As wives we all have a responsibility to cook healthy meals for our husbands and the best and cheapest way of doing this is by home cooking. It isn't hard, it doesn't take as long as you might think and it tastes 100% better than anything you buy in the shop.  My mother was a great home cook and she taught my three siblings and I how to cook and I have passed on those skills to my sons. I am forever thankful for having a mother who gave us these inval...

I often read " God is good as He allows me to be a SAHM ".  God is good all the time , even when you are not a SAHM. Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. ( Psalm 136:1) We must accept whatever situation God places us in and thank God for his goodness no matter whether you are a SAHM or not.  We must not question or doubt His decision as He always knows best. And sometimes the path we are led down doesn't make any sense until much much later and to be honest, it does not need to make sense to anyone else but God.  So the next time you say God is good for letting you be stay at home, remember if you were heading off to the office each day, likewise, you would say God is Good. So Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. (Luke 18:19) And if God has other plans for you, whether that is working outside the home, sending your children to school, unable to ...

Art Friday: Gaetano Bellei 1857 - 1922 Italian What I love most about these paintings are the smiles and joy on the faces of the children and their grandmothers. We live in a society that does not always value the elderly and see them as a burden, these paintings show quite the opposite.  *****

Lets recapture joy. Rejoice always,  pray without ceasing,  in everything give thanks;  for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18) *****

~ Beyond The Sunset ~ by Virgil Brocks Beyond the sunset, O blissful morning. When with our Saviour heaven's begun. Earth's toiling ended, O glorious dawning Beyond the sunset when day is done. Beyond the sunset, no clouds will gather. No storms will threaten, no fears annoy. O day of gladness, O day unending. Beyond the sunset eternal joy. Beyond the sunset, a hand will guide me, To God the Father whom I adore. His glorious presence, His words of welcome, Will be my portion on that fair shore. Beyond the sunset, O glad reunion, With our dear loved ones who've gone before, In that fair homeland we'll know no parting. Beyond the sunset forever more.  Virgil Brocks, a composer, wrote this hymn after his cousin Horace Burr, who had been blind from birth, had “witnessed” a magnificent sunset one evening in 1936, suddenly spoke out with excitement, saying that he had never see...

Young Australian drivers are taking part in a dangerous craze of taking "selfies" while behind the wheel, prompting harsh warnings from the police and government. There are more than 4.5 million posts on Instagram tagged with #driving, nearly 527,000 tagged with #carselfie, 20,000 with #drivingselfie and more than 78,000 for #drivinghome.  The Oxford Dictionary has named 'selfie' as its word of the year for 2013, an award given to a word or expression that has attracted a significant amount of interest in the past 12 months. Its certainly been used a lot -  an increase of 17,000% from the year before and no wonder some of us are fed up with hearing about and seeing selfies! Almost everyone has taken at least one selfie at some point. Here is one of mine.  Taking one or two occasionally is fine, however many young people are taking 100s and 100s of selfies every day, editing them (so they look better) and posting these photos on the array of s...