SPRING IS COMING!

Officially, the spring season will begin March 19. But.....signs are already popping up in gardens and field's everywhere! White dogwoods filling fields in Hernando, MS. Budding heritage snowball bushes in yards of many friends. An unfamiliar magnolia bush. A saucer magnolia, according to my horticulturist neighbor. It looked like a tree with two different color blooms to me.

How could I have missed this visual springtime treat at GAC for so many years!?

May the Lord give me eyes to see. May I lift my head and open my eyes to see the beauty He has created without losing focus of the the Creator, by whom all things were created through Him and for Him. (Colossians !;16)

CHOOSE: COMMUNITY

Recent sermons from ABC and FEC have emphasized the importance of loving God and loving our neighbors. (Mark 12:30-31)

Neighbors in the pew next to you. Neighbors across the street. Neighbors across the ocean. 

Getting to know others builds community.  Trust is built. Diversity is celebrated. Relationships are solidified in both the good times and the bad. (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)

Support is given whether in a hospice room or at a baby shower ---at least that's the way my weekend was spent.

Celebrations can be shared even when one is past childbearing age, whether it's parents of their "first" new born down the street ....

.....or the big reveal across town at the gym----a girl is on the way to join 3 brothers.

Wherever you are, get to know the ones God puts in your path and celebrate where they are in life and also be there to mourn with them when life ends. 

Summer’s End

9/5/11 After the blistering days of July and August, today’s 70ish temps are not only welcome but hopefully glimmers of fall temps to come. As Labor Day is the unofficial last day of summer, I’ve decided to celebrate with the childhood memory of blackberry cobbler and hand-cranked ice cream. Mother would use the last of the summer wild blackberries picked by us from thickets, along roadsides ----literally a “sticky” endeavor. If you’ve never picked, you haven’t experienced the joy of the stick from those thorny barbs which grow alongside those sweet berries. It makes the flavor of the cobbler all the sweeter. As S. Sifton states, “The taste is summer condensed and intensified.” (NYTimes, D7, 8/31/11)

Of course, we added homemade ice cream atop our steamy bowls of cobbler. It, too, was all the better for the cream was a family “labor.” From the going to Ellis ice plant, just a few streets east of the train depot, in the Alstheler and Payne Livestock truck (that wasn’t really a truck) to pick up our block of ice, brought out to the platform by a guy wielding those big tongs, to the chipping, with the wooden handle ice pick, of the ice for the ice-cream freezer (and a little for Mother’s iced tea, which the was best, especially with all those chips and slivers of ice) to the sitting on the steps of the latticed back porch awaiting our turn to crank, (Somehow the adults made is seem a privilege to “crank.”) it was an all day affair. But what a sweet, mouth-watering memory of a childhood Labor Day as the Adams family said good-by to summer at 2211.

To everything there is a season, 
and a time to every purpose under the heaven:… a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)